Brave New World? My Arse...

 

I am, to say the very least, pissed off. Everything, and I mean everything, seems now to be broken. From the basics of trying to access eBay to simply return something purchased in error, to the NHS, to the economy, politics and the environment: all are essentially,  fucked. And most people seem to be standing around going wha?, must be the way of things, I guess; got to be the fault of International Communism, militant unions and the Hard Left trying to ride roughshod over our freedoms(!).

Wake up call! The bugle's sounding reveille: arise from your slumbers and just get moving, people. Stop consuming the soma-bullshit that the self-interested right-wing press keep punting out, Stalin or Goebbels-like, day after day; spitting in the face of the actuality - actual reality: the reality totally and utterly divorced from their twisted and malign Weltanschauung. They are not on the side of the Angels, folks.

The current, bonkers regime here in the UK has succeeded in effectively screwing up the world's financial markets and with it global politics, in just about a fortnight: impressive, if you like chaos. Creative chaos can be a force for good, but randomly applied, it just fucks things up. Period. There are certain things that we know to be good: not randomly killing people, or screwing them over by taking away their livelihoods by legislation or just plain theft. The current regime seems to believe that the only way to govern is by doing all three, to enable the rich to prosper at the expense of the rest of us: and that includes what was once the Tories' natural constituency, the Middle Classes: Middle England.

The myth of modern Toryism is that, in opposition to an equally mythical Hard Left, it represents that also mythical comfortable Middle Class majority. The Grand Lie that underpins this fantasy was created by Margaret Thatcher, the now deified and equally-mythical chimera, whose shadow - and influence - seems malignly cast over the current administration, and the PM in particular. But her supposed achievements need to be viewed through a magnifying glass rather than rose-tinted goggles.

As Simon Kuper points out in this weekend's FT Magazine, 'She was a rare politician who completed her project. Once she'd gone, there wasn't much room for more privatization or tax-cutting if Britain were to remain a recognizable developed country.' You can only sell off the family silver once, and she sold the lot. The irony being that - Kuper again - '... even though Britain's total tax burden rose under her rule.'

Just about everything you can name is suffering from this intolerable neoliberal, Adam Smith hands-off, supply-side market economy thinking (if that in itself were actually true: there's no such thing as a 'free' market with these people). A truly radical (from radix, meaning root) rethink is desperately needed: not within a generation; not within a century or a decade, a month or a week; but immediately: now. We are on the brink of Armageddon; economically, environmentally and socially. We are all in this mess together and the government, after twelve - oh, so long - years in power, is still defining itself by its own failures; each new PM seeking to sweep away the wrongdoings of its own past.

If this were a newly elected government, they might have some leverage in this manner of debate, but they're simply moaning about themselves and their own total performance vacuum. This lack of self-awareness is staggering enough in itself, but the reality is that they have no policies, cogent strategies or any answers to the problems they themselves have created, decade upon decade, over the centuries. The 'natural party of government' simply has run out of road and relevance in this country, and needs to be retired to its dotage as the spent and useless force it really is.