I saw Starmer talking about the "truth" recently as if it was something that was obvious when spoken. How do any of us really know what it is the truth? In the case of the science supporting climate change there are papers written by apparently highly qualified people that are wrong. Then we had the lies told about the effectiveness and safety of the covid vaccinations by vaccine developers and politicians. When it comes to economics and political view it is even more there seems to be no truth, just opinions. Perhaps we should stick with the belief that a politician is lying when his lips are moving.
I know lots of people in the "centrist Dad" brigade (which as far as I can make out just means leftist, really) who similarly talk with strident confidence about things being "rational" and "logical", when, if you dig into it, they don't really mean anything of the sort. Believing in the climate crisis is "rational". Being reflexively, uncritically pro mass immigration is "rational". Oh, and "evidence-based" is another favourite term. It's the smugly self-righteous James O'Brien school of rhetoric. All of their prejudices and assumptions are rational, logical, scientific, evidence-based; their opponents are irrational, superstitious, misinformed, low-information, illogical.
the 'truth' on UK energy: "...Yesterday [Jan.8] saw a blackout near miss in what turned out to be the tightest day the GB electricity market has seen since 2011. Wind power was 2.5 GW through the evening peak, solar was (obviously) zero and there were significant interconnector outages leaving expected capacity at just 5.7 GW. Had just one large power station tripped this evening, demand control would have been a real prospect [....] Friday [Jan.10] is also looking tight so it’s worth understanding what happened on 8 January..." - https://tangowithrenewables.substack.com/p/blackouts-near-miss-in-tighest-day
Will the Princely regime dare to try to shore up its position by introducing an Islamophobia law to shut down on threat of jail the plebs’ appetite to express its angry views on rape gangs?
There would be something grimly satisfying if a collapse in the Prince’s ability to control the multiculturalism myth coincides with a few days of mid winter blackouts and a simultaneous loss of control over the plebs’ use of energy to maintain the sort of comfortable lifestyle they have come to expect but the Prince wishes to curtail.
Let’s hope it is a glorious and peaceful, not bloody, revolution.
His book How They Broke Britain is, if you can stomach it, worth reading as a useful summation of the arrogant midwit despotic liberal worldview that represents the bien pensant paradigm that you so eloquently treat with the contempt it deserves. The man makes my flesh creep. I flicked through a peculiar little stocking filler in my local Waterstones before Christmas called The Centrist Dad Handbook, which (seemingly approvingly, unless I missed the satire) lumped O'Brien together with Gary Lineker, Gareth Southgate, Rory Stewart and Keir Starmer as decent sensible chaps who talk a lot of sound good sense. I despair.
I'm sorry to say that in my ignorance I paid good money for that book. I had to give up after a few pages as expletives in the margin reduce the resale value (from zero). There are some books that just beg to be burned.
Congratulations on the strength of your stomach. I take my hat off to you.
However there is an old saying: "Every country gets the government it deserves." (Apparently first said by Joseph de Maistre https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre - I really must try reading some of his work!) At first sight this seems ridiculous, but actually if you think about it more deeply, there is a truth here. Every government - whether princely or republican - arises from and is enabled by the attitudes and culture of the people.
If the people can't be bothered to take an interest in government, and expect it simply to be provided to them as a service, then that enables a prince (or princes) to take over.
Because of this, I am not sure you are right that there will be "inevitable, generalised collapse". Ultimately whether that happens will depend on the British people. I am not willing to give up hope just yet that our country can be salvaged.
It is a theme that recurs here, David... I do not know whether to hope you are right, or hope you are wrong. But my fear either way is that we are still saddled with younger generations who have been flatly disconnected from truth as a pursuit, an activity, and who have simply received the pronouncements of the Ministry of Truth and accepted them as dogma. As long as the censorship regime in Europe still stands, we are besieged.
I, for one, am sick of all the lies and dissembling we are invited to watch, read and listen to from people who either don't believe what they are saying, don't think it matters what they are saying or are so stupid and brainwashed that they do believe it all.
I've been waiting these last few years for the people to follow Shelley's advice and Rise Like Lions and it's been depressing to see how many people refuse to see the reality of the mess the politicians have made. I'm not even sure the Rape Gang Travesty is enough - I don't see anyone manning any barricades (all too busy tutting about it whilst watching Naked Dating or some such opium pumped out for the masses).
This is what he called ‘vernacular’ law, law by the common people for the common people, not law as a weapon of the ruling class to enforce societal norms to its benefit. I am thinking of writing an essay on alternative legal systems which display these characteristics, eg the water tribunals of Valencia, Breton law etc. if you’d like to collaborate then I’d be very pleased.
I think the commons movement is also very interesting, for example the construction of giant wind farms is essentially an expropriation of the visual commons. But in any case keep up the good work.
That is fascinating! I'd never heard of this before, but it would make an excellent exploration of alternatives to common law. In Ireland Brehon law persisted up to the 16th century, and there was a brief attempt at the foundation of the Irish state to revive it, as an alternative legal system.
In Ireland there are equal signs of State over reach, for instance there has been talk about getting rid of turbary rights, ie the right to cut turf, often justified on 'climate change' grounds. This is rich coming from the Dublin urban classes who drive around in SUVs and go on skiing trips....They appeared to have forgotten that the whole move to independence was to reclaim the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland....
Ireland is, I’ve been told, ground zero for a lot of the problems that we see around us - originating from the early modern English attempt to turn it into a compliant colony.
Yes, Ireland was the first colony, the first to be environmentally decimated, the first to have psych-ops of racial slurs, and even the landscape maligned (the word 'bog' for toilet originated in this). The first to have English common law applied outside England (beyond the Pale was the areas outside of English influence) and one of the first to suffer widespread population decline as a direct result of colonisation. We were the Petri dish of colonisation. Shame that in recent years we've become cheerleaders for the new global oligarchy....almost like this generation has forgotten the past.
I don't know if you have heard of Kevin Cahill and his books Who Owns the World, but his thesis that the British Crown owns all the land in the UK and that everyone effectively leases it from the Crown (even freeholds), this is different to the US for example. Surely this is at the root of the over mighty State and its over reaching laws? The Oxbridge elites who are the current occupants of Government are only totemic surrogates for the Crown. Other countries, like France, got rid of this notion a long time ago, but others like Ireland simply substituted the British Crown with a home grown elite who seem to think that they can do the same thing as the Crown used to do?
I’m 80, widowed, a pensioner. I have no escape route. I’m kept sane by people like you and hope to survive long enough to witness the well-deserved collapse and ruin of the monsters currently in charge. Sorry I can’t be a paying subscriber but I thirst for your wise posts. Thankyou.
Things do seem to be moving apace. The closer we come to Trump as POTUS, the faster we go.
Good article by Allister Heath in the DT, noting that the "free" (for lack of a better word) world is moving fast in a direction 180 degrees opposed to Commissar Starmer. And that does not bode well for him.
One can but hope. Loving Musk stirring it, must confess.
I expect the Western World is in transition. I believe Trump really means to Make America Great Again but rather than by old school military might, or more recent global liberal ideals might, he is intending to magnify America's economic might. If you look at his recent statements like 'drill baby drill' or securing trade routes and resources by 'owning' the Panama Canal (again) or 'buying Greenland', or using the threat of tariffs to reduce illegal immigration, you can see the tilt towards economic might.
The disgraced Conservatives, and now Labour, are still working to the global liberal ideals might idea of multiculturalism, environmentalism, and climate change activity, whether it makes sense or not. Labour are now finding that even with the 'law' on their side the rest of the country is no longer so supine.
If Trump is pursuing a new world order (note the lower case) of Make America Great Again, Starmer is doubling down on the old world order - Make UK Rubbish Again.
MUKRA will end in tears, probably sooner than any current politician expects. It won't be a smooth ride.
Yes, it's a despotic regime that relies on the law and regulations for EVERYTHING.
Take for example 'Freebie-gate' the trousering, by Starmer, Rayner and Lord knows how many others, of vast amounts of free stuff and advantages, in exchange for definite, but nebulous benefits for the likes of this Lord Alli character.
Starmer's defence is that 'no rules were broken'.........never mind what is morally right and wrong, there is absolutely zero acknowledgement of the 'spirit of the regulations', the law or indeed of political probity........as long as 'no rules were broken', Starmer & co. believe they are untouchable.
Never mind that the rules are so loosely drafted, and interpreted by the official 'gatekeeper', that's how they govern.
However, when it comes to interpreting the law as regards anyone who protests/complains the rules are interpreted as tight as narrowly as a country lane.
Thanks for this article. My belief is that Britain has been run by amoral lawyers using progressive politics as a cover story since at least 1997, when Blair reorganised the state. His supporters were shocked and appalled when Blair dragged the UK into the second Gulf War, something that no progressive humanitarian would have endorsed. So, the mask has been off for over twenty years, and Starmer is merely the next generation. In his 2007 article for Socialist Lawyer magazine, Starmer described defending terrorists in legal actions. Labour has been both the provocateur of massive instability in the Middle East and also the handmaiden of domestic terror, including the grooming gangs.
The only thing I would say in response to this is that the roots of the problem go back beyond 1997 and also that the New Labour reorganisation of the state was probably more a Brown project than a Blair one. Blair wasn’t actually all that interested in the constitutional issues. Most of that came from Brown. But you’re hitting on the right subject.
Thanks for the reply. Charlotte Gill has published articles on how the Blair/Brown government set up many unelected external organisations to influence government.
Very good analysis. Some comfort if we are in the fin de siecle stage, but I worry about the fallout. We have a crumbling discredited state that cannot be replaced for at least four years. Will the regime just collapse like East Germany or Romania when the Wall came down? Or cling on with ever increasing ineptitude, coercion and dissimulation until there is nothing left? A Banana Kingdom without any bananas.
Yes, it may be that Musk is being somewhat cynical and opportunistic in weaponising what is hardly a new scandal. But does that matter? If it gives these disgraceful crimes the attention they deserve then I think we can take that as A Good Thing. (It took a television drama to get people riled up about the Post Office Horizon scandal. Trivial, but the outcome was to be applauded. We live in the society of the spectacle.)
BBC Verify published a typical piece of bad faith "fact checking" today, seeking to discredit Musk by focussing on his reference to a seemingly apocryphal Home Office memo. Yes, maybe this one detail wasn't fully accurate. But so what? It's the overall picture that matters. Typical Jesuitical misdirection by the Ministry of Truth.
What a remarkably clear and perspicacious observation of where we are right now.
It seems extremely likely that we will go through a period of massive disturbance and pain whichever way things go.
When every Empire falls, the little guys are the ones who feel the pain first and hardest.
I saw Starmer talking about the "truth" recently as if it was something that was obvious when spoken. How do any of us really know what it is the truth? In the case of the science supporting climate change there are papers written by apparently highly qualified people that are wrong. Then we had the lies told about the effectiveness and safety of the covid vaccinations by vaccine developers and politicians. When it comes to economics and political view it is even more there seems to be no truth, just opinions. Perhaps we should stick with the belief that a politician is lying when his lips are moving.
I know lots of people in the "centrist Dad" brigade (which as far as I can make out just means leftist, really) who similarly talk with strident confidence about things being "rational" and "logical", when, if you dig into it, they don't really mean anything of the sort. Believing in the climate crisis is "rational". Being reflexively, uncritically pro mass immigration is "rational". Oh, and "evidence-based" is another favourite term. It's the smugly self-righteous James O'Brien school of rhetoric. All of their prejudices and assumptions are rational, logical, scientific, evidence-based; their opponents are irrational, superstitious, misinformed, low-information, illogical.
Reason. Has its place, of course. But only takes us so far, and no further. We are not a rational species, that we do know.
Ergo...
the 'truth' on UK energy: "...Yesterday [Jan.8] saw a blackout near miss in what turned out to be the tightest day the GB electricity market has seen since 2011. Wind power was 2.5 GW through the evening peak, solar was (obviously) zero and there were significant interconnector outages leaving expected capacity at just 5.7 GW. Had just one large power station tripped this evening, demand control would have been a real prospect [....] Friday [Jan.10] is also looking tight so it’s worth understanding what happened on 8 January..." - https://tangowithrenewables.substack.com/p/blackouts-near-miss-in-tighest-day
Will the Princely regime dare to try to shore up its position by introducing an Islamophobia law to shut down on threat of jail the plebs’ appetite to express its angry views on rape gangs?
There would be something grimly satisfying if a collapse in the Prince’s ability to control the multiculturalism myth coincides with a few days of mid winter blackouts and a simultaneous loss of control over the plebs’ use of energy to maintain the sort of comfortable lifestyle they have come to expect but the Prince wishes to curtail.
Let’s hope it is a glorious and peaceful, not bloody, revolution.
That youtube link was bizarre beyond belief. Has James o'Brien always been this much of an idiot?
Tought to say as I don't pay a great deal of attention to him. As far as I can tell he's basically, as I said, a regime cheerleader.
His book How They Broke Britain is, if you can stomach it, worth reading as a useful summation of the arrogant midwit despotic liberal worldview that represents the bien pensant paradigm that you so eloquently treat with the contempt it deserves. The man makes my flesh creep. I flicked through a peculiar little stocking filler in my local Waterstones before Christmas called The Centrist Dad Handbook, which (seemingly approvingly, unless I missed the satire) lumped O'Brien together with Gary Lineker, Gareth Southgate, Rory Stewart and Keir Starmer as decent sensible chaps who talk a lot of sound good sense. I despair.
Centrist Dadism is a serious affliction - it ought to be its own category in the DSM-5.
I'm sorry to say that in my ignorance I paid good money for that book. I had to give up after a few pages as expletives in the margin reduce the resale value (from zero). There are some books that just beg to be burned.
Congratulations on the strength of your stomach. I take my hat off to you.
Yeah, the title was enough for me!
I avoid the man like the plague.
Definitely insightful, David.
However there is an old saying: "Every country gets the government it deserves." (Apparently first said by Joseph de Maistre https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre - I really must try reading some of his work!) At first sight this seems ridiculous, but actually if you think about it more deeply, there is a truth here. Every government - whether princely or republican - arises from and is enabled by the attitudes and culture of the people.
If the people can't be bothered to take an interest in government, and expect it simply to be provided to them as a service, then that enables a prince (or princes) to take over.
Because of this, I am not sure you are right that there will be "inevitable, generalised collapse". Ultimately whether that happens will depend on the British people. I am not willing to give up hope just yet that our country can be salvaged.
I don’t think we disagree. I just think a collapse is a necessary condition for a course correction.
It is a theme that recurs here, David... I do not know whether to hope you are right, or hope you are wrong. But my fear either way is that we are still saddled with younger generations who have been flatly disconnected from truth as a pursuit, an activity, and who have simply received the pronouncements of the Ministry of Truth and accepted them as dogma. As long as the censorship regime in Europe still stands, we are besieged.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
Bring it on!
I, for one, am sick of all the lies and dissembling we are invited to watch, read and listen to from people who either don't believe what they are saying, don't think it matters what they are saying or are so stupid and brainwashed that they do believe it all.
I've been waiting these last few years for the people to follow Shelley's advice and Rise Like Lions and it's been depressing to see how many people refuse to see the reality of the mess the politicians have made. I'm not even sure the Rape Gang Travesty is enough - I don't see anyone manning any barricades (all too busy tutting about it whilst watching Naked Dating or some such opium pumped out for the masses).
Well said.
Wonderful essay. But the law as represented here is not the only manifestation of it. Ivan Illich described another model of the law here:https://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1251&context=facschol
This is what he called ‘vernacular’ law, law by the common people for the common people, not law as a weapon of the ruling class to enforce societal norms to its benefit. I am thinking of writing an essay on alternative legal systems which display these characteristics, eg the water tribunals of Valencia, Breton law etc. if you’d like to collaborate then I’d be very pleased.
I think the commons movement is also very interesting, for example the construction of giant wind farms is essentially an expropriation of the visual commons. But in any case keep up the good work.
That sort of thing was once pretty common in the medieval period and is the basis for what later evolved into the Lex Mercatoria.
That is fascinating! I'd never heard of this before, but it would make an excellent exploration of alternatives to common law. In Ireland Brehon law persisted up to the 16th century, and there was a brief attempt at the foundation of the Irish state to revive it, as an alternative legal system.
In Ireland there are equal signs of State over reach, for instance there has been talk about getting rid of turbary rights, ie the right to cut turf, often justified on 'climate change' grounds. This is rich coming from the Dublin urban classes who drive around in SUVs and go on skiing trips....They appeared to have forgotten that the whole move to independence was to reclaim the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland....
Ireland is, I’ve been told, ground zero for a lot of the problems that we see around us - originating from the early modern English attempt to turn it into a compliant colony.
Yes, Ireland was the first colony, the first to be environmentally decimated, the first to have psych-ops of racial slurs, and even the landscape maligned (the word 'bog' for toilet originated in this). The first to have English common law applied outside England (beyond the Pale was the areas outside of English influence) and one of the first to suffer widespread population decline as a direct result of colonisation. We were the Petri dish of colonisation. Shame that in recent years we've become cheerleaders for the new global oligarchy....almost like this generation has forgotten the past.
I don't know if you have heard of Kevin Cahill and his books Who Owns the World, but his thesis that the British Crown owns all the land in the UK and that everyone effectively leases it from the Crown (even freeholds), this is different to the US for example. Surely this is at the root of the over mighty State and its over reaching laws? The Oxbridge elites who are the current occupants of Government are only totemic surrogates for the Crown. Other countries, like France, got rid of this notion a long time ago, but others like Ireland simply substituted the British Crown with a home grown elite who seem to think that they can do the same thing as the Crown used to do?
Excellent once again, David? How does this play out, Uniparty collapse or wider societal collapse?
Start thinking about an escape route. It's important to have an insurance option.
I’m 80, widowed, a pensioner. I have no escape route. I’m kept sane by people like you and hope to survive long enough to witness the well-deserved collapse and ruin of the monsters currently in charge. Sorry I can’t be a paying subscriber but I thirst for your wise posts. Thankyou.
Thanks, Susan!
No. We must stay. We must get the work done. The country is too precious to abandon after 2000 years of civilisation.
Things do seem to be moving apace. The closer we come to Trump as POTUS, the faster we go.
Good article by Allister Heath in the DT, noting that the "free" (for lack of a better word) world is moving fast in a direction 180 degrees opposed to Commissar Starmer. And that does not bode well for him.
One can but hope. Loving Musk stirring it, must confess.
Musk is acting like a court jester, really - speaking truth to power in an outrageous way.
Yes. And he and Trump ace trollers
I expect the Western World is in transition. I believe Trump really means to Make America Great Again but rather than by old school military might, or more recent global liberal ideals might, he is intending to magnify America's economic might. If you look at his recent statements like 'drill baby drill' or securing trade routes and resources by 'owning' the Panama Canal (again) or 'buying Greenland', or using the threat of tariffs to reduce illegal immigration, you can see the tilt towards economic might.
The disgraced Conservatives, and now Labour, are still working to the global liberal ideals might idea of multiculturalism, environmentalism, and climate change activity, whether it makes sense or not. Labour are now finding that even with the 'law' on their side the rest of the country is no longer so supine.
If Trump is pursuing a new world order (note the lower case) of Make America Great Again, Starmer is doubling down on the old world order - Make UK Rubbish Again.
MUKRA will end in tears, probably sooner than any current politician expects. It won't be a smooth ride.
Yes, it's a despotic regime that relies on the law and regulations for EVERYTHING.
Take for example 'Freebie-gate' the trousering, by Starmer, Rayner and Lord knows how many others, of vast amounts of free stuff and advantages, in exchange for definite, but nebulous benefits for the likes of this Lord Alli character.
Starmer's defence is that 'no rules were broken'.........never mind what is morally right and wrong, there is absolutely zero acknowledgement of the 'spirit of the regulations', the law or indeed of political probity........as long as 'no rules were broken', Starmer & co. believe they are untouchable.
Never mind that the rules are so loosely drafted, and interpreted by the official 'gatekeeper', that's how they govern.
However, when it comes to interpreting the law as regards anyone who protests/complains the rules are interpreted as tight as narrowly as a country lane.
They are tyrants.
In this respect Starmer is an archetypal barrister, actually. He sees rules purely as tools to be used, discarded, repurposed.
Thanks for this article. My belief is that Britain has been run by amoral lawyers using progressive politics as a cover story since at least 1997, when Blair reorganised the state. His supporters were shocked and appalled when Blair dragged the UK into the second Gulf War, something that no progressive humanitarian would have endorsed. So, the mask has been off for over twenty years, and Starmer is merely the next generation. In his 2007 article for Socialist Lawyer magazine, Starmer described defending terrorists in legal actions. Labour has been both the provocateur of massive instability in the Middle East and also the handmaiden of domestic terror, including the grooming gangs.
The only thing I would say in response to this is that the roots of the problem go back beyond 1997 and also that the New Labour reorganisation of the state was probably more a Brown project than a Blair one. Blair wasn’t actually all that interested in the constitutional issues. Most of that came from Brown. But you’re hitting on the right subject.
Thanks for the reply. Charlotte Gill has published articles on how the Blair/Brown government set up many unelected external organisations to influence government.
Very good analysis. Some comfort if we are in the fin de siecle stage, but I worry about the fallout. We have a crumbling discredited state that cannot be replaced for at least four years. Will the regime just collapse like East Germany or Romania when the Wall came down? Or cling on with ever increasing ineptitude, coercion and dissimulation until there is nothing left? A Banana Kingdom without any bananas.
All I can say is that there's everything to play for. The throne of France is lying in the gutter waiting to be picked up on somebody's sword.
Good analysis. But what might Musk's intention be in getting in his two-bob's worth?
It might just be possible that he's heard about the rape gang thing for the first time and is genuinely appalled by it.
Yes, it may be that Musk is being somewhat cynical and opportunistic in weaponising what is hardly a new scandal. But does that matter? If it gives these disgraceful crimes the attention they deserve then I think we can take that as A Good Thing. (It took a television drama to get people riled up about the Post Office Horizon scandal. Trivial, but the outcome was to be applauded. We live in the society of the spectacle.)
BBC Verify published a typical piece of bad faith "fact checking" today, seeking to discredit Musk by focussing on his reference to a seemingly apocryphal Home Office memo. Yes, maybe this one detail wasn't fully accurate. But so what? It's the overall picture that matters. Typical Jesuitical misdirection by the Ministry of Truth.
attention