Observations after two weeks travelling the UK
I’m drafting this article on the train, as I travel up North again for a three day job as skipper on a fast CTV. I’ll be departing on the flood tide, working some transfers offshore between larger ships and a wind farm. Arrival back at port should be around midnight, at low water.
On the train, I spoke to a woman whose son is a surgeon for the NHS. He does rhinoplasty and is stressed because of complaints made by gender reassignment patients of his. Not for using the wrong pronouns – too well trained for that to be an issue now. They were complaining that their noses didn’t look feminine enough after their cosmetic surgery. She said her son was facing the dilemma of trying to please the patient but removing so much material from a male nose that it risked collapse.
The sainted NHS will chop your bits off and call you a bigot now. But they won’t treat your cancer, we noted.
I did a bunker survey in Leith yesterday, where there is a rather nice-looking cruise ship tucked away in a dreary corner of the harbour. It houses Ukrainian refugees, who are complaining to the Scottish Government that their accommodation is prison-like.
The security guards tell me to ‘watch out’ on the ship I’m visiting. They apparently had a medical evacuation the night before, a crewman with a severed finger.
The truck driver who delivered the fuel for our generators shrugs his shoulders. ‘My customers on farms are old Wifeys, coming out shivering with two cardigans on. They’re moaning about the price, but it’s our suppliers putting the price up. Our markup hasn’t changed. And I still have tae buy ma butter at four quid a packet in the supermarket, like the rest o’ ye’.
He tells me that he delivered the fuel for the portable diesel generators used to charge the electric cars at COP26 in Glasgow and even the G8 at Gleneagles.
I met a man whose father was a member of the IRA, and a prisoner in the famous H-Block prisons. A tough Belfast man, raising his son with his mother, due to an acrimonious divorce. He works at sea now because his scrap metal business dried up due to covid restrictions, leaving his autistic/ADHD teenager at home for much of the year.
The man I bought a lifejacket from went to school with the SNP politician for West Lothian who called for a curfew on ‘all men’, after the Sarah Everard killing (by an agent of the state). He fears what will happen to his business if the SNP fanatics achieve their form of separatism. To paraphrase:
‘You think we’re being punished for Brexit, but there won’t be any downside to breaking the Union? How, no? I wish I put more chewing gum in her hair back when I had the chance.’
The tory leadership crisis. The cost of living crisis. The migrant crisis. The climate crisis. The covid crisis. The covid response crisis. Brexit punishment. Scottish separatism. The NHS is on the verge of collapse (as it has been since my youth). Rail strikes. Labour shortages. Inflation at 9%. The national debt and deficit spending crises. The highest tax in my lifetime.
What is more important is reducing the speed limit in Wales to 20 mph.
It is hard to believe that our ‘leaders’ can be so out of touch. Surely this isn’t just incompetence or narcissism?
The dullards presented as alternatives to Boris Johnson don’t inspire much hope.
A day at home allowed me to catch up on a month’s worth of unread copies of The Spectator. Which is far more amusing when you read the ‘experts’ predictions three weeks after they’ve been proven wrong.
One supplement in particular, however, stood out as deeply disturbing to me. The 18th of June edition included a booklet – sponsored by ‘defence’ firm BAE – entitled ‘Levelling Up’.
The very fact that an arms manufacturer is publishing its own marketing material, defending the British Government’s agenda, is chilling. It speaks to the total incompetence of our government’s ability to justify its actions to its own people. So much so, that private firms feel the need to do it for them. It also confirms the now complete takeover of the apparatus of the state, as a means by which taxation and public debt can be used for private profiteering.
‘Defending Freedom’ is discussed as the moral cause of the defence industry. There is an ‘independent’ report which found that BAE ‘boosted GDP by £10 Bn’. You may boost GDP by spending taxpayers’ money, but you do not add to the overall net wealth of a nation.
The supplement also said that companies that have accepted the kings’ shilling due to the ‘pandemic’ are now required to take responsibility for ‘education, training and productivity’. And to ‘work with government’ to address inequality and the redistribution of wealth.
At what point do we realise that the government has no money of its own? It can only print, borrow or confiscate. When we ask for their ‘help’, no matter what the scheme, there is an unholy price to pay. But the current mode of child sacrifice in our debt and inflation-ridden society is to channel Keynes when he said ‘well, we’ll all be dead by then’.
With our national insurance contributions going straight into a black hole of debt, and not a pension fund, our government now mandates pension contributions and matching by employers. With education a complete disaster, they’re asking BAE systems to ‘level up’ the country. Not accepting any blame for the fact that political interference in education has reduced literacy and numeracy for decades. After state education from the age of 3 to the age of 16 (or even the age of 21 if you have a state-backed subsidises higher education), our system produces people so useless, that employers have to basically train them from scratch. And reprogram them not to believe that productive labour is a capitalist plot to oppress them.
I’m not worried about the working class people I meet. Neither the working poor nor the muscular middle class have any faith in the false idols of the State. They know, in a deep and profound way, that to put their happiness in the hands of government is folly.
What worries me about people in Britain these days is not so much that, but that they don’t recognise how deeply evil this stuff is. They know that a change of conservative leaders will not improve their lives.
What they don’t quite appreciate yet is how the most extreme evil, camouflages itself with deeply boring terms like ‘regulatory capture’, ‘inflation’, ‘net zero’ and ‘levelling up’. Even the term ‘Economics’ is a dangerously non-descriptive euphemism for ‘all of human activity.’
These narcoleptic terms disguise what has happened to fascism in the past 90 years.
The economics of fascism stood only in slight contrast to those of communism. In the latter, there is a centrally commanded ‘economy’, where the state owns all property and dictates all human behaviour. In this system, you may be executed as a subversive agent for corrupting the economic plan by simply buying a can of coke without government approval. And in their theory of economics, that was logically correct. It doesn’t work because of the price calculation problem and the high cost of enforcement leads to death and starvation on a scale unimaginable to us.
Fascism, by contrast, continues to allow private ownership of businesses and property, but the state regulates and dictates all activity. As ‘war is the health of the State’, the business model of a nation is to expand its territory and therefore its tax base. That is because a ‘nation state’ is at its foundation a corporation with a monopoly on the use of force within a specific geographic area. All governments want to take over the world because that is their business model. To occupy territory. This too is a model opposed to increasing productivity and innovation as human and physical capital is diverted towards conflict, and national debt destroys the ability of a middle class to form. No private business model says, ‘kidnap people, force them into combat and destroy everything’. There is never a net gain from war.
With the advent of nuclear weapons, the leaders of nation states could have their lives personally threatened for the first time. No longer could a leader sit back, as millions of his citizens were sent to their deaths, and the leaders risk nothing but lines on a map. Now it is different. The amount of skin in the game returned to medieval levels.
The solution? World leaders suddenly realise that ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, and that this whole idea of sovereignty is a bit old-fashioned really, so let’s just form a one-world government and bypass this nasty business. Don’t worry about democracies objecting, we’ll just bypass those by international treaty.
The problem? Like Japan departing the league of nations, and Russia today, the incentives for the first corporation to break a monopoly are too great to be resisted. The UN is a majority rules democracy, where most members are autocratic dictatorships or otherwise illiberal states.
We come now to the modern inversion of fascism. Where international regulations are the gospel and the business model. Where multinational corporations and their lobby groups petition for ‘regulation’ that is favourable to those bigger companies who can afford to comply; but, crucially, are unaffordable for smaller competitors.
Our debt-ridden, incompetent, scandalous and morally bankrupt politicians say ‘well, BAE are right. They have been levelling up for far longer than the British Government has, so they really know what they’re doing’. And the ‘laptop-classes’ nod sagely and say, ‘yes, we don’t want any of that chaotic and dangerous de-regulation now, because the Guardian says that is scary’. And the catastrophic plundering of wealth that is ‘too big to fail’ and ‘public-private partnership´ continues to shackle our grandchildren’s grandchildren to a monstrous future of destitution and peasantry, while private individuals profit from the public purse.
Our current system is fascist in the economic sense, but the State is so debt-ridden and compromised that it is no longer sovereign. Those who have ‘captured our regulation’ are the ones in charge. And the only scrutiny they seem to face at the moment is from citizen journalists. If that doesn’t terrify you, it should.
Our governments are failing internationally; at the same time, they are failing domestically.
And when we consider that modern nation-states present themselves as ‘service providers’ to their people (national security, welfare, education, etc), at what point do we change our service provider?
One philosophical idea shared by the Jewish diaspora and the early Christians was the idea that your ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’ could be scattered to the four corners of the world but remain a tribe in its’ culture. Your ‘nationhood’ was not geographically defined or owned by a defence corporation.
When a shipping company like Cunard faces business ruining regulation from its’ flag state, they change their flag. This ‘flagging out’, or ‘flag of convenience’ system has faced much ire and criticism from socialists who cannot accept such treachery to the economic plan. But I love this aspect of shipping. It is the only way I can think of, where nation states are forced to act as a business might. That is – offer some service or function that your competitors do not.
I believe that the technology exists today, for each individual to choose which defence provider, health care provider and education provider can best suit their needs. The citizen should be able to flag out of their nation’s policies, as easily as a shipping company. If the government is a service provider, and we are one-world citizens, then we need to divorce the state from its geographic monopoly and treat it like any other corporation. One that caters to the needs of its customers, as much as its creditors.
The reason the media coverage is so intense whenever there is a leadership contest is because we know deep down that when we discuss politics, we are discussing the use of force. That nervousness you feel in the pit of your stomach is the stress of fight or flight, recognising that a new tyrant will soon wield the sword of state. And where will it come down? On your side, or against your side.
For an increasing number of people I meet, they know that nothing good is coming to them, any time soon. They know that covid passports have already been used to silence protestors who disagree with the state, that censorship is everywhere, and that what the Dutch Farmers are doing is important, but it is going to hurt.
I sailed with a Yorkshireman once in the RNR, who was only ever happy in a storm. He explained to me once that this was because ‘in a storm, every action I take is life-or-death important. And it is the only time I can be sure that a storm isn’t coming. That soon the weather will be fine. Because when times are good, a storm is always coming’.