I have just been listening to a rather disturbing Hard Talk interview on BBC World Service radio, in which BBC man Stephen Sackur interviewed the co-founder and (?) de facto leader of “Extinction Rebellion”, Roger Hallam.
Extinction Rebellion
I have blogged previously about Extinction Rebellion:
The Wikipedia entry is not very detailed, saying nothing about Hallam’s life before 2017 (he is, at time of writing, 53, having been born in 1966) except that:
” Hallam was previously an organic farmer in Wales; he attributes the destruction of his business to a series of extreme weather events.” [Wikipedia]
Strange. When I was about 25, I worked for a couple of weeks (unpaid) on an organic farm in West Wales. That farm, Blaencamel Farm, in 1982 a rather pathetic though beautiful 24 acres (now, I notice, 50 acres) in Ceredigion, has become (as I heard on BBC Radio 4 Farming Today a couple of years ago), a highly-successful business which is also the hub of the organic movement in that part of the world:
Apropos of nothing, I notice that the farmer at Blaencamel Farm, Peter Segger (who had previously, that is before he bought that farm in 1979, been a mainstream food industry executive, buying shiploads of Arctic fish etc), seems to have mellowed considerably and, though still recognizable, has aged considerably (haven’t we all?) in the past 37 years!
I suppose that the point is that there are numerous successful or at least sustainable organic farms in West Wales. I have no idea whether Hallam farmed 500 acres, 50, or lived on a 5-acre smallholding. I suspect nearer 5 than 500, which if so would make his farming inherently unsustainable from a strictly business viewpoint. In fact, when questioned by the Daily Mail in April 2019, Hallam said that ” ‘No-one wants to get arrested. I want to get back to my farm. I’m just a poor farmer, nothing special.” So he still has a farm? I thought that he was supposed to have lost it? Does it mean that he still owns a farm but does not farm it? We do not know.
[Update, 17 September 2020: Hallam’s Wikipedia entry now reads “Hallam was previously an organic farmer on a 10-acre (4-hectare) farm near Llandeilo in South Wales.” So it seems that my guess that Hallam’s farm was “nearer 5 acres than 500” was pretty close to the mark.]
In any event, he first came to public attention in 2017: “Between at least 2017 and early 2019 he was studying for a PhD in civil disobedience at King’s College London,[5] researching how to achieve social change through radical movements. In January 2017, in an action to urge King’s College London to divest from fossil fuels, Hallam and another person, using water-soluble chalk-based spray paint,[4] painted “Divest from oil and gas”, “Now!” and “Out of time” on the university’s Strand campus entrance.[7][5]They were arrested in February when they again spray painted the university’s Great Hall,[7] charged by the state with criminal damage and fined £500.[8] In May 2019, after a three day trial at Southwark Crown Court, they were cleared by a jury of all charges, having argued in their defence that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis.[5] In March 2017, Hallam went on hunger strike to demand the university divest from fossil fuels—the institution had millions of pounds invested in fossil fuels but no investment in renewable energy.[8] Five weeks after the first protest, the university removed £14m worth of investments from fossil fuel companies and pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025.”
Now I have no objection to older people studying, though I am surprised that King’s College London offers a Ph.D. in Civil Disobedience (is this 2019 or 1969?), but for someone in his fifties to spraypaint the interior and exterior of his college with activist graffiti seems not so much youthful as puerile.
In the Hard Talk interview, Hallam sounded fanatical and inflexible. He kept referring to “the Science” (with a capital “S”), repeating it like a religious mantra, yet he himself is not even a scientist. He referred to himself as “a sociologist” at one point. So…here we have someone who got a sociology degree from somewhere (either in recent years or perhaps in the 1980s), and is now an almost perennial student aged 53 who has taken 2 years, it seems, to get a “doctorate” in “Civil Disobedience”, and yet (in the radio interview) lectures the interviewer on the need to believe The Science (which Hallam may or may not understand and —at least judging from his rather unintelligent radio persona— probably does not). He certainly does not think that there can be any doubt about what he says that The Science tells us about “climate change” (formerly “global warming”), despite there being a degree of scientific debate on the subject.
I have to say that I found Hallam’s style disturbing. Did the Levellers of Cromwell’s time sound like that? Or the true believers in Trotsky, Lenin or Stalin, circa 1920 or 1930?
Hallam referred, in the interview, to his belief (he said “fact”) that 6 billion people would die if the UK (and the rest of the world?) did not reduce “carbon emissions” to zero by 2025. When challenged by Stephen Sackur about how that would mean that, within 6 years, the UK would have to have no (or very few) cars, planes, trains, or centrally heated (by gas) houses, Hallam just retreated into his bubble of unreality and said that it was a matter of political will! I suppose that the last country to try that was mid-1970s Cambodia, sub nom “Democratic Kampuchea”, the Year Zero society of The Killing Fields etc.
Hallam claimed that the UK produces 10% of “emissions”. That is plain wrong if he meant 10% of the world’s carbon emissions. The real figure is about 1% (he may, however, if I take the role of Devil’s advocate, have meant 10% of all EU emissions). In other words, even if the UK disappeared into a black hole tomorrow, the other 99% of “emissions” in the world would still be there. That is taking “The Science” at face value, as Hallam obviously does.
What Hallam and his fellow Extinction Rebellion types fail to see is that in fact only the removal of 90% (maybe 80%) of the world population will “save” the planet now. Man-made climate change (taking it as Extinction Rebellion believe it to be) is not caused, at root, by cars, planes etc as such, but by the billions of people in the world, as well as their farmed animals, cars, planes, central heating etc. Numbers.
I agree that there is an environmental crisis, though “global warming”/”climate change” is only part of it. I have blogged about it, as well as the need to create what would be seen as a “super-race”, i.e, evolution of the species combined with evolution of consciousness:
It is as plain as day that Hallam and many of his fellow leading Extinction Rebellion zealots are basically fanatical drop-outs and misfits, most of whom have and have had no profession or occupation (or much academic background) to speak of (see the Daily Mail report in Notes, below):
Hallam himself, ex-farmer and now a superannuated “student” aged 53: “Mr Hallam has also claimed paralysing traffic will eventually cause food shortages and trigger uprisings” [Daily Mail];
Simon Bramwell, 46-47, a former builder, now “bushcraft instructor”;
Gail Bradbrook, 47-48, a mother of two teenage children, who divorced her husband and became an “activist” after an hallucinogenic-drug trip to Costa Rica;
Tasmin Osmond, 34-35, “a veteran of ‘direct actions’ such as Occupy London, the poverty protest which set up a camp outside St Paul’s cathedral in 2011. The granddaughter of Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees, Omond [sic] went to Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read English.” [Daily Mail] (no actual profession or occupation ever, apparently; presumably a trustafarian);
George Barda, 43-44: “He is a post-graduate student at King’s College in London and the son of classical music and stage photographer Clive Barda…Mr Barda is also a dedicated revolutionary who camped outside St Paul’s cathedral in the Occupy London campaign. Today, he is a director of XR parent company Compassionate Revolution and regularly appears on Russia Today.” [Daily Mail]. So again no profession or occupation, another “eternal student”…;
The XR “strategy”
I see that none of those noted above, or the others reported on by the Daily Mail, are climate scientists or anything similar (Gail Bradbrook apparently has a Ph.D. in molecular biology).
More accurately, they have a “programme” for protest action, or how to create a kind of anarchic situation, but no programme for what to do if, in some parallel reality, they were to attain to political power. They say that they want 3.5% of the population to create a momentum for change. 3.5%? From where does that come? Popular “philosophy”? Some paperback sci-fi novel? A brainwave by someone such as Hallam? Or a vision seen by the lady noted in the Daily Mail report below, in Notes, Gail Bradbrook, while on ibogaine, ayahuasca, peyote or magic mushrooms? We are not told.
I do not mistake labelling for understanding, but what do we call Extinction Rebellion, ideologically? Perhaps the closest is “anarcho-syndicalism meets treehugging” (and I favour treehugging far more than I do anarcho-syndicalism).
Were Extinction Rebellion actually able to stop government, society and economy from operating in the UK, the result would indeed be the deaths of millions, not from “climate change” but from disruption of supplies of food, water, medicine, not to mention huge lawlessness. That in turn would certainly lead to political dictatorship if not tyranny, as the “huddled masses” start to cry out for, not freedom, and most certainly not for “zero emissions” (!) but for safety, security, food, water, heat etc.
Maybe these Extinction Rebellion cranks think that they and their “3.5%” of (?) “woke” “activists” will become that dictatorship (once they understand that popular mass meetings cannot run a society of more than a couple of hundred people). More likely, they would be among the first to be put up against a wall and shot.
As I said earlier, I am very much an environmentalist and very concerned about the state of the planet in that way and in other ways, but this silly “reduce emissions to zero” idea will get nowhere in itself (even if it were to be put somehow into effect worldwide). In six years? Fantasy politics. As for “Extinction Rebellion” leading some mass movement, that is also complete fantasy:
as in… “ALL TOGETHER NOW!— “WHAT DO WE WANT?”; “NO CARS, PLANES, TRAINS, DECENT FOOD, ELECTRICITY OR HEATING!”; “WHEN DO WE WANT [TO LIVE LIKE STONE AGE PEOPLE]?”— “NOW!”
I cannot see many begging for that. Certainly not Emma Thompson, achingly politically-correct actress and “XR” supporter. She would not want that (at least not for herself and her contrived multikulti “family”). My God, it might mean that she would not be able to fly First Class from LA to London to speak at the, er, Extinction Rebellion protests! She might even have to give up some of her half-dozen luxury homes around the world!
Roger Hallam, in interview, bravely opined that “young people” support XR, but quite a few of the XR activists are over 60 and most seem to be over 40 anyway, though I do not have statistics to support that provisional view. Hallam stood as an Independent for the London constituency, during the EU elections. His vote? 924 votes (out of 2,241,681), a vote-share of 0.04%, so not even a half of a tenth of one per cent… Seems that only 4 in 10,000voted for Mr. Hallam. Statistical zero. Eloquent testimony.
The Extinction Rebellion protesters were (belatedly) cracked down on by the Metropolitan Police. Not for several days, though. Why? Was the fix in, as with so-called “activist” on climate change, the weird 16 year old Swedish autistic, Greta Thunberg, who has had a remarkably smooth ride, meeting leading politicians, receiving respectful attention, despite her obvious mental problems and what seems to me to be scarcely-concealed malice. [I shall blog separately about her].
Previous claims that “we have x-years to save the planet”
Silly people ranging from Ed Miliband and Al Gore to Prince Charles all said, back in or around 2009, that “we have 3/5/7/etc years in which to save the planet”. Then the planet yawned and the silly people went away again. There is too much of an attempt, a repeated attempt, to panic us (white Northern Europeans) into accepting lives that are not worth living. Yes there are too many people on this Earth at present. My view is that the advanced peoples should live, procreate and evolve higher. The backward peoples and races (who are by far the more numerous) are not required.
Accusations of “terrorism”; analogy with Greenham Common
One senior policeman said, after the London protests, that XR was, or was close to being, “terrorist”. I think that he was right. Look at these people. Listen to the Stephen Sackur interview. These people are willing to do anything to achieve their ends, even though their ends (insofar as they have “ends”) are in fact unachievable, certainly via protests etc.
The Greenham Common women in the early 1980s thought that they were stopping cruise missiles being based in the UK, whereas their protests (which were hell for the local people— much the lesbians and/or feminists cared…) actually achieved nothing. The missiles were removed by reason of NATO-Warsaw Pact negotiations. The “Women’s Peace Camp” was a complete waste of time and effort.
“A series of meetings held during August and September 1986 culminated in a summit between United States President Ronald Reaganand the General Secretary of the CPSUMikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 11 October 1986. To the surprise of both men’s advisers, the two agreed in principle to removing INF systems from Europe and to equal global limits of 100 INF missile warheads.
The United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which led to the removal of all nuclear missiles from the base. The last GLCMs at RAF Greenham Common were removed in March 1991, and the 501st TMW inactivated on 4 June 1991.” [Wikipedia]
Incidentally and incredibly, even though the last missiles left Greenham Common in 1991, even though the Americans left Greenham in 1992 and even though the UK Ministry of Defence closed the base in 1993, putting it up for sale (the area being almost all designated by 1997 as public parkland), the “Greenham Women” stayed, some of them, until 2000! To me that proves that without their having “political activism” to do, some of them had nothing to do with their time or their lives. They were unable to accept that their protests (for 19 years!) had actually achieved nothing and in any case had been superseded by large-scale international events. Like the Japanese soldier in the 1970s, fighting a lone war in the jungle, 30 years after the Pacific War had ended.
Extinction Rebellion protesters are obviously not entirely peaceful. Some are willing to use violence or force to achieve their immediate aims, eg to shut down London. Hallam has, it seems, mooted the shutting down of Heathrow Airport using drones. This is not Gandhi’s “non-violence”. If 10,000 protesters are willing to shut down London by obstruction or inertia, if 1,000 are willing to be even more disruptive, then it may be that 100 are willing to use drones or other means to attack airports, electrical supplies etc. Is it not at least possible that, out of the 10,000, 10 might be willing to use violence of a directly and unambiguously terroristic kind “to save the planet”? I would not bet against it.
We shall soon know. The big “XR” protests are scheduled for October 2019.
"A petition being submitted by hundreds of independent climate scientists and professionals from numerous countries to heads of the European Council, Commission and Parliament declares "There is No Climate Emergency."" https://t.co/NELzaEpm09
“The Metropolitan Police have described the protests as “unprecedented” in their scale and length and warned that they will arrest those breaking the law.
However, Extinction Rebellion has told its protesters not to co-operate with so that they have to hold them in the cells and cannot arrest another activist.
The group wrote on their website: “There are roughly 1,000 jail cells in London – we filled many of them in April.
“Police could often only arrest 100-200 people a day because the cells were full. If we fill them every day – the streets will remain ours. That it is why we refuse bail, to fill up the cells and to show our open defiance of the system that is killing us.”” [Daily Telegraph]
My solution? If the arrested refuse bail, then stuff them ten to a cell like they do in Egypt. And if that is not enough, stuff them twenty to a cell. This is war.
For once, I agree with Boris-Idiot…and while we are on the subject of idiots, what about the one featured in the report below? Pathetic does not even start to cover it. He must have mental problems.
She has elected Crown Court trial (jury trial) despite the risk of a heavier sentence on conviction. She obviously hopes for a sympathetic jury. I see that the Daily Mail, itself ever-sympathetic to the middle classes, calls her a “molecular biologist” because she has a degree in the subject (though I doubt whether she has ever worked in that field or any other).
Update, 20 January 2020
Hallam now wants “a World War 2 mobilization of society”, with rationing and “confiscation of private property”. He says that “Nuremberg” trials should be set up for anyone “guilty” re. climate change, and that some people should “get a bullet in the head”.
What about people who just own a car, or central heating? Do they get a bullet too, or just deportation to re-education camps? In short, this Hallam character is not only an idiot, he is a dangerous idiot.
“What are the dangerous and shadowy links between the UK Government’s Rwanda flights and a heartbreaking war over resources in Africa that is also fuelling the climate crisis and destroying vital ecosystems? Today Extinction Rebellion activists answered that complex question. The group staged a protest in the House of Commons pretending to hold guns to their heads and unfurling a banner saying: ‘STOP FUNDING RWANDA WAR IN D.R. CONGO’.”
“Police have arrested six Just Stop Oil activists at a supposed soup night in London this evening.
Hackney Police has detained a number of key organisers for the group who had allegedly been plotting to cause mayhem for thousands of holidaymakers this summer by disrupting airports across the UK.“
[Daily Mail]
Just Stop Oil, connected to Extinction Rebellion.
It is clear that MI5 has people in there, and reporting.
What struck me, apart from the violent and cowardly attack on the girl victim and a friend of hers, was how useless every public service was proven to be. I leave aside my surprise (and disapproval) that a girl of 18 is in a Manchester nightclub at 0330 and leaves on foot to walk home.
Read the report above.
Initially, the victim and her friend (apparently a teenage boy who was also a victim), were helped by some civilian volunteers who offered to call an ambulance. The victims refused because they were told that there would be a 2 hour wait. Two hours! The victim(s) then went to hospital by taxi. The hospital simply dispensed eye drops and told the girl to go home. When she returned to hospital a day or so later, she was told that she has a blood clot on one eye. The police were informed of the attack, but no police officer has spoken to the victim. The victim utilized social media, as a result of which a witness has come forward. The police have made no comment to the newspapers. The local council has offered to check cctv for film of the attack or suspects.
In case anyone knows anything and, by some statistical miracle, reads this blog, the main suspect is white, about 5 feet 8 inches in height, and was wearing a pink T-shirt. I am no detective, but I should have thought that the starting point would be the nightclub interior cctv…
My point in writing about this is not just because the behaviour of the criminals outrages me (and makes me wonder whether flogging should be reintroduced as suitably condign punishment in such cases) and not just because I feel sorry for the girl (and her friend). My point is that this case shows that, all too often, things are just not working in our society.
In the case displayed here, the girl was let down by general public safety (police, primarily), by the ambulance service, by the NHS hospital A & E service, by the police. Had the perpetrators been caught, if they are caught now, the CPS and magistrates will no doubt also let her down.
As Napoleon is supposed to have said, “there are many reasons for failure, but never an excuse.” Funding for public services has been cut drastically in the past decade. That is obviously a factor. How, though, does that explain (still less excuse) the “polyclinic” approach apparently adopted by the hospital, or its failure to make a proper diagnosis? I concede that my knowledge of clinical-medical matters is limited, but even so…
Is lack of funding of police personnel really the only reason why the victim has not been interviewed? Yes, she was knocked unconscious, but still might recall identifying details from before that. Also, it would reassure her that she is not alone in a jungle.
Is the police force doing what it can (eg checking nightclub cctv) to track down the suspects? Why was the social media appeal left to the victim to do?
One sees everywhere, now, “things not working right”, from the NHS and police, through rail and road maintenance, every aspect of the justice system (from CPS and police to sentencing, probation and prisons), the postal service (still mostly OK), the planning system, education at every level, the DWP and its post-2005 “torture the unemployed and disabled” ethos, the armed forces, Parliament. Everything, pretty much; and it is unlikely that a government headed by Boris-Idiot will be able (or even try) to improve matters.
My feeling is that the UK is still in many respects in that state of which a 1960s senior civil servant said (I think, to Anthony Sampson) that his job was “the management of decline”, but more so. Further down the steepening slide. The migration-invasion of the blacks and browns, the destruction of culture in the msm etc, have accelerated that process.
Only a truly focussed social national government can fix this country.
Afterthought
I should not like it thought that my criticisms devolve mainly on individuals working in public service. No doubt most of those who work in the police, NHS etc do their best most of the time. I criticize, primarily, the system(s), the decisions taken, and the management.
I do not know Manchester well, in fact scarcely at all. I have been there a few times, many years ago now, driving straight to the Manchester County Court (there being a massive open-air car park nearby, close to an overhead rail line) and then driving away as quickly as possible. Apart from that, my only visit was to the Manchester Royal Infirmary in or about 1985, accompanying a member of the Georgian State Dance ensemble from the Soviet Union.
The dancer (who spoke only Russian and Georgian) had cut several fingers to the bone while practising, pre-performance, with his razor-sharp Georgian sword (the swords have to be that sharp in order to create showers of sparks during the mock fights that are part of the dance performance).
Even back then, some 34 years ago, we had to wait for about 30 mins or more to be seen, though the nurses tried to expedite it for me and were very pleasant (and very pretty, though perhaps my memory is sugar-coating things for me…).
We come soon to the culmination of the farcical Conservative Party leadership election, the result of which will be decided by a simple majority of the supposed 140,000 (possibly only 100,000, though a few say 160,000) members of that party. About 1 in every 300 or 400 UK adults is a Conservative Party member. If two-thirds vote in the leadership election, that means that not only the Conservative Party leader but also the Prime Minister –by default– is about to be elected by perhaps 50,000 or 60,000 people, in other words by about 1 in every 900 adults in the UK. There is something bizarre and even sick about this.
At time of writing (5 July 2019) it looks as if Boris Johnson (for me, Boris-Idiot is the right label…) will win easily. Others say that the race may be closer than most have thought. Either way, very few if any are predicting a win for Jeremy Hunt.
I have blogged before about the contest and also about a few of the main protagonists. Most relevant now would be these:
Returning to my first paragraph, I happened recently to hear some Radio 4 Today Programme interviewer, perhaps Nick Robinson, asking Conservative Party members in Wales their views on what I see as the tragi-comic “leadership” contest. There were about half a dozen or so, all from one local Conservative Association.
Only one in that group was thinking of voting for Hunt; the rest all preferred Boris-Idiot. Only one struck me as in any way thoughtful, a young man (the only one, in fact, who seemed to be of under pensionable age) who was not much taken with either candidate.
What interested me most about that group was the incredible level of both political ignorance and socio-political unreality. One old bird, who sounded around 80, opined (re. Brexit) “we got through two world wars, we can get through this, and I think that Boris is the man to bring the country together.”
Where does one even start to unpack nonsense of that sort? First of all, it implies that Britain somehow endured two massive wars and came out OK (if not “victorious”), whereas in fact the two main open conflicts of the 20th Century crippled the UK and mortally-wounded the British Empire (qua empire), a fact concealed by the very great overall improvement in British living standards since 1914.
Then there is that bit about “Boris” being the politician (surely even the aforesaid old bird cannot regard the idiot as a “statesman”?) who can “bring the country together”. What country is that? Can people really be that blind? There is no “country” to speak of any more. What there is is a geographic space, inhabited by a motley collection of races, ethnicities, social groups, “tribes” (both social and ethnic), lifestyles etc. I do not think that even the old descriptive term “classes” really fits any more. Society has fallen apart to the extent that the idea of a “working class”, a “middle class” or “middle classes”, let alone an “upper class” or “aristocracy”, is not just lacking in credibility but is actually pathetic. That is even if we leave aside the race question.
What is the “working class” now? Anyone who receives less than a designated income? The bottle-throwers of the EDL? “White van man” with his artisan trade and his purchased council house or tract home, complete with Sky TV and an above-ground pool in the back garden? The “chavs” or “chavscum”, with their sub-American “culture” of baseball caps, untaxed cars and drug use? The officially-bullied and taunted unemployed or disabled? The blacks and browns?
Faux-revolutionary scribbler and metro-gay propagandist Owen Jones was unable to shoehorn these new types into the traditional Marxist categories, so conflated proletariat and lumpenproletariat in his book “Chavs: the demonization of the working class“. Unable to find enough steel workers, miners and trawlermen to constitute a viable “working class”, Jones ropes in whatever he can from the poorly-incomed “precariat”: call centre workers, unemployed, retail staff, low-paid office bods etc.
Then we have the “middle class”, or as used to be said, “the middle classes”. Prior to World War Two, these strata were fairly well defined: the “upper” middle-classes (fringing on the gentry and even aristocracy), with their successful, long-established business firms (The Forsyte Saga), Oxford/Cambridge education (Brideshead Revisited, Zuleika Dobson etc), careeerism in the Diplomatic Service, the Bar, the higher ranks of the medical profession, the armed services. Then there were the “middle middles” in management, small business ownership etc. The “lower middle class”, meaning the lower ranks of management etc, were a vast throng, sometimes only distinguishable from “the workers” by the wearing of a tie.
In America, these terms are (certainly now) either not used, or used differently.
Then we have the “aristocracy” and “gentry”, the latter sometimes termed (as late as the 1950s, in novels by the likes of Agatha Christie) as “the County” (the older, more significant, or wealthy landed families in any particular county). This stratum was already being infiltrated by foreign or alien elements as early as the 19th Century.
Winston Churchill was famously half-American. He was not alone. Many ancient or at least old houses admitted an American admixture, usually for reasons of money. Even some Jewish and part-Jewish women married into the English and Scottish nobility. One well-known example was the 6th Duke of Carnarvon, whose ancestral home, Highclere Castle, is today used as the fictional Downton Abbey on TV. His mother’s biological father was a Rothschild: “Rothschild provided a marriage settlement of £500,000 and paid off all Lord Carnarvon’s existing debts.” [Wikipedia] Tens of millions in the money of today.
The 2nd Duke of Westminster was incensed by the way in which Jews were infiltrating the British aristocracy, and (according to his third wife, Loelia) was writing a book on the subject, which book has, regrettably, never been published.
The society which now exists in Britain, especially in England and Wales, is a mixture of the old pre-1939 society, that which developed between 1939 and —arguably— 1979 or 1989, and that which has since emerged.
I think that we have to be quite clear here. At present, we do not have a functioning or sustainable society in the UK. The appearance of one owes much to the older, pre-1989, way of doing things, to institutions which still exist, though badly-wounded: the monarchy, the police, the armed services, the NHS, the Civil Service, local government. The people who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and even 1960s are carrying on as if Britain is a unified country. It is not. It is a mass of contradictions and absurdities.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s (officially, 1991), huge numbers of people in factories, on farms, attending country rail stations, driving trams, carried on working even though in many cases they were not being paid. The society carried on under its own momentum for a while. Britain is like that socially, politically. More and more parts of British society are either not working properly or are not working at all, but many have not fully woken up to that fact.
If the working classes and to a large extent the middle classes have been replaced by the “chavscum” and “precariat”, the short-term contract people, the here-today-gone-tomorrow little businesses etc, then the former “gentry”, “aristocracy” (insofar as the term has meaning in Britain) and even royals have just become functions of the cosmopolitan wealth-soaked “celebrity” culture, in which it is hard to distinguish between a film star, a pop star, a TV talking head, a Premier League footballer and his WAG, Gary Lineker, Prince Harry or the Royal Mulatta.
As far as the Royal Family are concerned, it is noticeable how there is an almost-complete gulf between the older royals, such as the Queen and Prince Philip and the present generation, with Prince Charles and the others a kind of halfway house. The older royals are recognizably “royal”. One might or might not be “royalist”; that is another question, but no-one could mistake the Queen and consort (whether one “likes” them or not) for “ordinary citizens”.
By the time you get to Prince William and “Kate”, or Harry and the “Royal Mulatta”, there is very little that marks them out as “royal” at all, unless it is ingrained public acceptance (propped up by the msm) and their own huge sense of entitlement, brought home most recently by the endless boring soap opera of Harry, the £2.5 million refurbishment of his new house (work paid for, in effect, by the people) , and the various rumours and tabloid interest around “the Royal Mulatta” (a mixed-race woman, formerly a Hollywood TV actress, and formerly married to an American Jew).
The present generation of “royals” are scarcely “royal” at all: they are educated in ordinary (if expensive) schools and universities, live lives which are carefully crafted to at least seem “ordinary” most of the time, and seem to feel that they can do largely as they please in terms of marriages, children etc.
In fact, it could well be said that the only thing linking the attitudes of the present three generations of royals is their sense of entitlement.
When we look at the more “ordinary” people of the UK, do we see there a “country” which is “united” or which might be “unified” (leaving aside the question of whether a clown like Boris Johnson could “unify” anything)? I think not.
The racial question is also hugely-important. Can a multikulti society survive and thrive? I think not; not for long. People used to point at the USA. Well, look now. Falling to pieces. Britain is about 87% “white” (mainly English), but even that figure is doubtful. If you take out Scotland, and Wales, and Northern Ireland, that figure, now for England alone, shrinks alarmingly. Huge cities and large towns in England now have a minority of inhabitants who are really English.
Looking again at Boris-Idiot:
“The Balliol College Register for 1983 contains an entry that begins: “JOHNSON Alexander Boris de Pfeffel: JOHNSON, Boris – b. 19 June 1964. New York. American. Generally known while at Balliol as Boris Johnson. Eton; Balliol 1983–7.” [Daily Telegraph]
Note that. “American”. At that time, Johnson was considered to be an American, born in the USA, with an American passport, and brought up in the USA and Belgium as well as the UK.
“In reference to his varied ancestry, Johnson has described himself as a “one-man melting pot” – with a combination of Muslims, Jews, and Christians as great-grandparents.”
[Wikipedia]
We see, time and again, and reflective of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [usually called a “forgery” but better described as “literary fantasy reflecting facts and real events”], that those assigned leading political positions by the New World Order [NWO] and ZOG [“Zionist Occupation Government”] are not Jewish as such but part-Jew. Boris Johnson is one example. David Cameron [Cameron-Levita] was another. Theresa May another. Sarkozy too. This all fits in with the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan, which underpins the EU.
“In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism), written in 1925, [Coudenhove-Kalergi] describes the future of Jews in Europe and of European racial composition with the following words:
The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian–Negroidrace of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals. […]
Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe’s feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.”
[Wikipedia]
There you have it: a black-brown-white mulatto dustbin race, ruled over by Jews and part-Jews, and/or by freemasons. That is their vision of EU Europe, including the UK. Now you see how it is that the 2016 Referendum result has led to delay, vacillation, huge fear propaganda, plans to hold a second referendum, blah blah blah. All because this goes beyond trade, beyond co-operation. It is a massive international and cosmopolitan conspiracy.
“Hitler did not share the ideas of his Austrian compatriot. He argued in his 1928 Secret Book that they are unfit for the future defence of Europe against America. As America fills its North American lebensraum, “the natural activist urge that is peculiar to young nations will turn outward.” But then “a pacifist-democratic pan-European hodgepodge state” would not be able to oppose the United States, as it is “according to the conception of that commonplace bastard, Coudenhove-Kalergi…”“
[Wikipedia]
As so often, Hitler has been proven to be right. The EU, that “pacifist-democratic pan-European hodgepodge state” is indeed unable to oppose the American expansionism which is in fact better termed NWO/ZOG expansion. It was planned to be like that, secretly. The EU does not stand in opposition to the USA (meaning the NWO) but is at the higher levels tied in with it.
The EU has already begun “the Great Replacement”, the replacement of decent, progressive, evolving European peoples with the backward black and brown peoples who will make suitable slaves for the planned robotic and AI-oriented superstate or “European space” of the near or medium-term future. Below, one aspect of that:
The “Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor” will run from Sweden and Finland, through Denmark, Germany, Austria and Italy to Malta in the south https://t.co/RkhECaQTEw
decide to break EU law and to “invite” untold millions of blacks and browns etc to invade EU territory. This is all part of the plan.
This continues, though now not much publicized. Meanwhile, EU “leaders” [NWO puppets such as Macron] recently met in Marrakesh, where they “decided” to funnel millions more migrants “legally” into the EU, thus not so much disturbing the invaded European peoples. At the same time, they decided to make any criticism of it illegal. The real decisions are of course taken earlier, behind closed doors.
Returning to the UK, to the Conservative leadership farce etc, there seem to be various possibilities when Johnson wins and, however briefly, becomes Prime Minister. The first thing to understand is that Boris-Idiot is no strong character, but a weak and vacillating one. I cannot be sure, but I think that he will probably agree to something with the EU, then try to sell it to the British people as a huge improvement on Theresa May’s “deal”. I doubt that he will, in any real sense, take the UK out of the EU in October 2019. If he does, it will almost certainly be a con-trick. Brexit In Name Only.
One has to ask oneself why the msm have been promoting Boris-Idiot as “Prime Minister in Waiting” for years and years, despite his obvious unfitness for any kind of high office.
Should Boris Johnson really try to take the UK out of the EU on WTO terms, his time as Prime Minister will be measured in weeks not months. It only takes 3 or 4 Conservative MPs to abstain in a confidence vote to effectively remove Boris Johnson as PM. Or for 2 or 3 Conservatives to vote against their own government.
If that were to happen, there would be a general election and one of the first seats to fall would be that of Boris Johnson himself, at Uxbridge. It will be recalled how Johnson at first signed up to the Theresa May “deal” (he wanted to stay in the Cabinet…). How much more will Johnson want to cling on as Prime Minister! He has no honour, no real ideas (beyond schoolboy ones such as garden bridges, cablecars over the Thames, water-cannon, Boris Island etc). He has no ideals, no real ideology. He is also administratively incompetent. He is very likely going to be the worst prime minister the UK has ever had, certainly for the past century or more.
Boris Johnson is looking to be not only one of the least-worthy and least-fitted persons ever to hold that great office of Prime Minister of the UK, but also one of the weakest. Johnson will be a prisoner of Remain-favouring MPs. He has no real desire to Remain or Leave. All that matters to him is being Prime Minister for as long as possible, not to accomplish anything, but just to be there (and to get the perks etc). Money in terms of salary etc is not the main thing, in fact he might lose out, though only temporarily. Memoirs can be penned later and millions paid…
Will Johnson last as PM (assuming that he even gets that far)? Probably not. He is being pulled in various directions, by the DUP whose votes he will need, by the pro-Remain MPs, by the EU. He is as weak as weak could be, politically.
The likelihood must be a 2019 general election.
Beyond that, there is a crying necessity for a serious social-national movement in the UK.
Having watched the above clip, either Boris Johnson is on cocaine, which would be worrying, or he is not, which would be even more worrying. What more can one say? This is somehow an area beyond ideology. It was once said that the Soviet Union was divided into the drinkers and the non-drinkers. Now Britain, whatever its other divisions, divides into, on the one side, those who see that an idiotic, uncontrolled, madly-ambitious, conscienceless incompetent, without ideas or ideals, is about to become, incredibly, Prime Minister of this country, and on the other side, those who either do not see, are too stupid to understand what Boris-Idiot is, or are totally deluded (or both, or all).
If anyone wanted to be convinced of the complete decadence of “democracy” in the UK, I should think that the Boris-Idiot/Jeremy Hunt “debate” (schoolboy level spout-fest) would be enough, judging from –admittedly– the bits that I myself have now seen. As for the audience, they seemed to love Boris-Idiot, I suppose because they, like mobs and crowds of plebs down the ages, from the days of the Roman Empire and even Republic, want to be entertained, want to be pandered to, and above all do not want to have to think seriously.
A small selection of Twitter vox pop
WOW! Just got to the #ITVDebate question on taxes. What a f*cking embarrassment that was all round! @BorisJohnson answering & one-upping a shambles, @Jeremy_Hunt calling people on £51k “rich” and that’s without the pathetic playground squabbling and talking over each other 😤🤦🏼♂️.
— Charlie George Woodgate (@CG_Woodgate) July 9, 2019
"Nonsense" does not give justice to the utter rubbish coming out of their mouths, especially the blonde bi-polar's one. #ITVDebatehttps://t.co/DvJz8k3IP1
— 🕷Francesco Carollo 🇪🇺🇬🇧🇮🇹 3.5% (@Innovandiamo) July 9, 2019
The lady below sets the bar low! What a stupid woman!
Would appear the only votes that count in the Hunt/Johnson circus are the votes of a small minority of the British people: the Conservative Party. How close to dictatorship is this? #ITVDebate
That #ITVDebate was not normal. The Johnson march to Downing Street is not normal. The complete lack of accountability and transparency is not normal. Surely we should be discussing that rather than who scored more debating points?
The Isle of Man isn’t in the UK or the EU. Why are we all so fucking stupid we let this airbed full of porridge say whatever the fuck he likes without question. https://t.co/mugbJVYDKt
Boris-Idiot won by about 92,000 votes to about 48,000. Clear but not overwhelming. “Boris” will therefore become PM today or tomorrow, unless some public-spirited chauffeur runs over him in a ministerial limousine.
92,000 elderly Conservative members have decided that they want Boris-Idiot as Prime Minister. The other 65 million UK residents have no say. All that UK voters can do, in any future Westminster election, starting today, is vote any way exceptConservative.
The reaction has been sharp and is not confined to those who want to Remain in the EU.
Foreign or near-abroad reaction?
'Johnson is a profoundly unserious man wildly unsuited to high office… In normal times, his ineptitude… would hold his country back. In these times of crisis, his character flaws could prove catastrophic' – @IrishTimes view https://t.co/FdivRhdRit via @IrishTimesOpEd
On the face of it, a clear case, with no doubt about the immediately-relevant facts. The defendant admitted to the crime and was sentenced to a year in prison. There are some nuances, however.
Obviously, criminal damage cannot be tolerated, and it is certainly not very nice and certainly not very polite to daub words on the door of a neighbouring dwelling; but to my mind the sentence was harsh.
The defendant was sentenced to a year in prison and will therefore be released in 6 months’ time, possibly earlier. The chances are that he will lose his local authority home. I have no idea what possessions or companion animals he may have, but unless he has friends or family somewhere to look after them, they too will be lost. He will come out of prison with nowhere to go, and may not be rehoused if some local penpusher decrees that he made himself homeless by his own actions.
That is part of the background. Then we have the point that the defendant had no previous convictions save for a silly one, 27 years previously, involving a “sick-note”.
In view of the fact that the local authority would probably take the crime to be a breach of lease terms or conditions, and so would take away the defendant’s home anyway, would it not have been more just simply to have given this defendant a suspended sentence?
This looks like kicking a man when he is down. At the same time, we see the courts daily giving thugs, thieves etc non-sentences. Of course, this was a “racial” crime…the courts have obviously been told to treat any offence having a “racial” element more seriously (harshly), in an attempt to keep the doomed multikulti society from falling to pieces.
I noticed, also, that the victims were from the Congo. Again, I do not know the full facts, but it is odds-on that what we have here are either “refugees” or economic migrants who have left Africa in order to settle in the UK. Odds-on, again, that the British people (including the defendant) are paying for the victims to live here and breed.
The case above reminds me of one about 25 years ago in Hammersmith, in which a man was driven half-mad by the incessant noise of blacks and their “music”, parties etc in the flat above his dwelling; so much so that he burned them out, killing several. He got a sentence, I think, of about 10 years for manslaughter and arson. Again, the act can scarcely be “justified”, perhaps, but it can be understood. Legally, provocation does not exist and provides no defence in such a case. In real-life terms, though, I think that many will feel a little sorry for such a defendant.
There is a further point: the defendant in the immediate case in question felt the need to say that he is not “racist” (perhaps after consultation with solicitors or Counsel). So even he himself felt the need to “virtue-signal”! If he or his advisers thought that a display of “contrition” and “I’m not racist” protesting would mitigate the sentence, they seem to have been mistaken.
There is also the point that, as hundreds of thousands of blacks and browns etc flood into the UK every year, and as politicians bleat about the “need” to destroy what is left of the countryside in order to build little boxes for migrants on agricultural land and forested land, very many fully-entitled British people are homeless (after today’s sentence, add another one, 6 months down the line).
I am at present also preparing a blog post about Peter Hitchens, who thinks that the UK is doomed in terms of its present society. I suppose that most of us hope that he is wrong. I also suppose that he is probably right.
[above, Rory Stewart, many years ago in Afghanistan, consciously reprising Lawrence of Arabia; he was sometimes called both “Florence of Arabia” (in Iraq) and “Florence of Belgravia” (because of his well-connected and wealthy background)]
Introduction
My attention was caught by the BBC Politics tweet below.
Rory Stewart MP [Con, Penrith and Borders], who until yesterday was Minister of State for Prisons, a political dead-end, now can be said, appropriately enough, to have jumped free with one bound, and is now Secretary of State for International Development, a position again not quite in the front rank but a Cabinet post all the same. From his new elevation, Stewart has wasted no time in declaring his candidature for Conservative Party leadership.
I have been interested in Stewart and his political career for several years. I was puzzled as to why someone who appeared to have so many advantages (wealth, family influence, expensive education, pre-political career moves, a degree of public prominence etc) seemed to have run into the sand as an MP. However, it may be that he was playing a long game which will yet bring him to the highest office.
I do blog about MPs individually, but mostly those I term “deadhead MPs”. Stewart is certainly not one of those. However, his CV is almost too obviously brilliant. He seems to have almost too many talents, qualifications and virtues to be true. I do, perhaps unfairly, harbour a suspicion that the sum of his many parts may not quite add up to the same amount.
“After graduating, Stewart joined the Foreign Office.[11] He served in the British Embassy in Indonesia from 1997 to 1999, working on issues related to East Timor independence, and was appointed at the age of 26 as the British Representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign.” [Wikipedia]
Stewart is believed to have been, like his father, an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS], a fact alluded to by David Dimbleby on BBC Question Time. Stewart neither agreed nor demurred. Still, a touch of the James Bonds impresses the common herd, I suppose…
[above, Brian Stewart, the father of Rory Stewart, wearing the badge of a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), the 4th-highest order of chivalry in the UK (if excluding two now-dormant orders, the Order of St. Patrick and the Order of The Star of India)]
“After the coalition invasion of Iraq, he became the Coalition Provisional Authority Deputy Governorate Co-Ordinator in Maysan and Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator/Senior Advisor in Dhi Qar in 2003, both of which are provinces in southern Iraq.[9] He was posted initially to the KOSB Battlegroup then to the Light Infantry.[12] His responsibilities included holding elections, resolving tribal disputes, and implementing development projects.[12] He faced growing unrest and an incipient civil war from his base in a Civil-Military Co-operation(CIMIC) compound in Al Amarah, and in May 2004 was in command of his compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadrist militia.[9] He was awarded an OBE for his services during this period. While Stewart initially supported the Iraq War, the International Coalition’s inability to achieve a more humane, prosperous state led him in retrospect to believe the invasion had been a mistake.” [Wikipedia]
Full marks for honesty, but not for perspicacity. Let’s look at the above again: Stewart joined the FCO (and/or SIS) in 1995-96 and by 1999, at age 26, he is British Representative in Montenegro, at that time emerging from nearly a decade of ex-Yugoslav conflict.
This is rather remarkable. Why was a 26-y-o appointed to this rather important strategic post? Even more remarkably, perhaps, Stewart was then posted to Iraq in the immediate post-invasion era, and was rather famously deputy-governor of an Iraqi province at the age of 28. As noted above, he even “saw action” to some extent when his compound was besieged by militia fighters.
“From 2000 to 2002 he travelled on foot through rural districts of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey totalling around 6000 miles, during which time he stayed in five hundred different village houses. He had previously walked across West Papua in 1998,[115] and has since made a number of long walks through Cumbria and Britain. He also travelled into Libya a day after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi.” [Wikipedia]
“In late 2005, at the request of the Prince of Wales and Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan,[15] he established, as Executive Chairman, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a human development NGO, in Afghanistan, and relocated to Kabul where he lived for the next three years restoring historic buildings in the old city of Kabul, managing its finances, installing water supply, electricity, and establishing a clinic, a school and an institute for traditional crafts.[4] Stewart was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society‘s Livingstone medal in 2009 “in recognition of his work in Afghanistan and his travel writing, and for his distinguished contribution to geography”.[16] Stewart stepped down as Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in May 2010.” [Wikipedia]
By any standards, Stewart’s life up to age 33 at least (he is now 46) was packed with achievements and adventures. Not many UK MPs could lay claim to anything even a tenth as interesting and varied (note my blogs about “deadhead MPs”). Indeed, it seems that, in 2008, a Hollywood studio (Studio Canal/Brad Pitt) actually bought the film rights to do a biopic of Stewart, starring, it was envisaged, Orlando Bloom as Stewart! No film has been made (yet).
This is not the British politics we know! This is somewhere in the realm of John Buchan and Sidney Reilly, a post-imperial Great Game pastiche.
Stewart’s second book, The Prince of the Marshes: and other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, also published as Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq, describes his experiences as a Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator in Iraq.[4] The New York Timescritic William Grimes commented that Stewart “seems to be living one of the more extraordinary lives on record”, but for him the “real value of the new book is Mr. Stewart’s sobering picture of the difficulties involved in creating a coherent Iraqi state based on the rule of law”.[126] Stewart’s books have been translated into multiple languages.
Stewart’s reflections on the circumstances under which outside military and political intervention in countries’ internal affairs may or may not hope to achieve positive results were distilled in a 2011 book, Can Intervention Work?, co-authored with Gerald Knaus and part of the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series. He has also written about theory and practice of travel writings in prefaces to Wilfred Thesiger‘s Arabian Sands,[127]Charles Doughty‘s Arabia Deserta[128] and Robert Byron‘s The Road to Oxiana.[129]
In 2016, he published The Marches, a travelogue about a 1,000-mile walk in the borderlands separating England and Scotland, known as the Scottish Marches, and an extended essay on his Father, Brian Stewart.[130] The Marches was long listed for the Orwell Prize, won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year,[131] was a Waterstones Book of the Month,[132] and became a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.” [Wikipedia]
I suppose that many would be well satisfied to have done even one or two or three of the things noted above. Stewart has dozens of accomplishments and successes to his name. A few more are:
“His 2008 cover article in Time magazine, where he debated presidential candidates Obama and McCain, arguing against a troop surge in Afghanistan, has been shortlisted for an American Journalism Association Award
Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart, a documentary in two parts that tells the story of foreign intervention by Britain, Russia and the United States in Afghanistan from the 19th century to the present day,which aired on BBC2 and which won a Scottish BAFTA (2012).[139]
Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland, which investigates the rift created by Hadrian’s Wall, and the issues of identity and culture in a region divided by the fabricated border, which was singled out for praise by David Attenborough.”
“Stewart speaks some French, Persian (Dari), and Indonesian. He has also studied at school, in the Foreign Office, and on his Asian travels, Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Serbo-Croat, Urdu, and Nepali languages. He acknowledges that the latter three languages are “very rusty“;
He has lectured at Harvard and even advised Hillary Clinton…;
He is a karate expert (level unknown) and belongs to the Special Forces Club in London, some of whose members were in WW2 secret work, some were in the military and naval special forces, some ex-intelligence personnel —and there are also some who are rumoured to be just gold-plated fakes and fantasists;
“His speech about hedgehogs in Parliament in 2015[39] was named by The Times and The Telegraph as the best parliamentary speech of 2015 and described by the Deputy Speaker as “one of the best speeches she had ever heard in Parliament” [Wikipedia]
Stewart is married to an American woman who had previously been married to a fellow NGO worker. One of the children of the Stewarts was delivered by Stewart himself without medical assistance.
Stewart once tweeted to me about something, several years ago, and was very polite, something that I value. I do not attribute that entirely to the influence of the Dragon School or, indeed, Eton. He seems to know how to behave (though not all agree, I have heard).
Thoughts
Stewart’s stellar career stalled after he became an MP in 2010. Having said that, he has chaired Commons committees, been promoted slowly but surely, and Wikipedia notes that he attended the Bilderberg cabal along with George Osborne. Not that being a Bilderberg attendee is a guarantee of lasting political success (cf. Nick Boles MP) but it does indicate that the primary powers behind the Western throne consider that a person is of interest.
This is Rory Stewart’s moment of opportunity. He has seized it. Once Theresa May leaves office, the Conservative Party will elect a new leader. Stewart is the international System candidate nonpareil. I should not be surprised were he to win a first ballot outright, bearing in mind the collection of fools, knaves, deadheads and frauds likely to oppose him in the contest:
Penny Mordaunt, best known for diving in a swimsuit (she looked good, so be it…) and for being a reserve naval sub-lieutenant;
Michael Gove, pro-Jew, pro-Israel fraud and expenses cheat (I tweeted that once and it was one of 5 tweets that had me disbarred at the instigation of the Jew lobby, so it pleases me to repeat it!);
Boris Johnson (aka Boris Idiot), who proved as Foreign Secretary that he cannot hold down high office;
Andrea Leadsom, a nonentity;
Jeremy Hunt, smarmy clever snake and tipped to take May’s purple;
Amber Rudd, yet another dimwit, though she thinks herself terribly clever. Pro-Israel, pro-EU, pro-immigration. Was involved personally with Kwasi Kwarteng, the “African at Eton” (well, one of them), who has now married, or is about to marry, a younger Amber Rudd lookalike. Amber Rudd’s own seat may well be lost next time;
Philip Hammond, careful calculating Remainer;
Dominic Raab, part-Jew, pro-Brexit, hardfaced and careerist.
There may be others. There would have been Gavin Williamson (who has the self-confidence of the stupid) and Stephen Crabb (sex pest, expenses cheat and so pro-Israel that he could be termed “an agent of influence”) but both of those have ruled themselves out by their egregiously poor behaviour. Deadheads.
It scarcely needs to be said that, as social nationalist and thinker into the future, I am not on the same page as Rory Stewart, so obviously NWO/ZOG in orientation is he, and whose MP voting record etc is far from entirely to my liking. He also wanted the UK to remain in the EU and now seems to want to “leave” but not really leave: Brexit in name only (BRINO). However, there is no doubt that he is the standout candidate now to replace Theresa May, which means that he could be Prime Minister by the Autumn.
Still don’t understand the hard-on people have for Rory Stewart. Guess Brits can’t get over their worship for the military or posh men addicted to lying about statistics.
Military? Does 5 months as an instant 2nd lieutenant count? Or is that a reference to Stewart’s “secret war” posts?
A few more thoughts, 4 April 2019:
It seems that Stewart favours immigration:
“One farmer told Stewart, “All illegal immigrants should be rounded up and on the first ship out.” Some voters might expect their Conservative candidate at least to nod, but Stewart said, “Hmm,” and changed the subject. After leaving that house, he said quietly, “Actually, I’m rather in favor of immigration.” [The New Yorker]
So he favours (mass?) immigration. That would chime with those Bilderberg/Davos linkages. Also, it is all very well for a spoiled son of the “British Establishment” (father was a high-ranking SIS officer; Stewart lives in a country house surrounded by a small estate of a hundred acres or so) and who has always had access to effectively any money or anything he wanted without struggle or effort, to be OK about the mass of British people being replaced by blacks, browns, Chinese etc; and having to live with those basically backward peoples, share limited housing, road/rail space etc. Not to mention the effect on rates of pay, and the huge strain on public services, education, NHS, “welfare” etc.
Stewart is quite consciously remote from the concerns of the British people. He has put in huge effort on his adventures and career, but has never had to. Big difference.
I seriously wonder now, looking at or studying Stewart, whether he is right for the office of Prime Minister. Yes, it is very impressive to have run an Iraqi province (effectively or not, though?…) or part of Kabul (ditto) when only 28 or 30-ish, it is impressive to have walked across Afghanistan etc. It is impressive to have all those literary and other medals. However, how far does that get you in terms of being a British Prime Minister?
As a matter of fact, is it really that impressive to have been deputy governor of an Iraqi province when you were (some say) no bloody good, accomplished almost nothing and got a transfer a few months later to a more congenial post elsewhere in Iraq? I do not know the truth of it all, and I may be unfair or simply mistaken here, but I wonder whether Stewart’s other great accomplishments have a rather thin layer of reality under the surface glitter?
Impressive though those career highlights are, I am unsure as to whether Stewart really does have what it takes to be Prime Minister of this country in 2019 or 2020, as distinguished from being in that high office in a John Buchan political landscape circa 1912, and as a kind of Richard Hannay, a Hannay who is playing the role of an earlier and English/Scottish type of “Jack Ryan”, the American adventurer-patriot who eventually becomes President in the bestselling books of Tom Clancy.
I have spent some time (by my standards anyway) in preparing and writing and rethinking this picture of Rory Stewart. He disturbs me more than he reassures me: he seems rather fixated on himself, his own psychology, his motivations, his own (enormous and not denied by the man himself) ambition.
It worries me that, in the interviews and profiles I have read, Stewart says much about himself, his achievements, his accomplishments (or allows them to be known…), but little about the needs of the world, of Europe, of the European peoples, of the British people. I see little or nothing in terms of policy, or wider ideas, just a self-view that he is the right sort of chap to run the UK. That sounds like a more impressive sort of David Cameron-Levita-Schlumberger to me, and that worries the hell out of me.
Parris is not only remote from the concerns of the British people (though in his case the remoteness comes not from ancestral hauteur but is the self-consciously created la-di-da-ness of the fastidious metropolitan gay), but is also a pro-immigration Remainer who thinks that ruling the UK should be left to people like him and his affluent, cosmopolitan, pro-multikulti friends. Trouble is, it has been, and look at the result! (Parris himself, elected in 1979, was reprimanded by Mrs Thatcher for having replied to a constituent that she should count herself lucky to have a council house, whatever its flaws…), though he stayed on as an MP until 1986.
I started off thinking that Rory Stewart was, judging objectively, far and away the best candidate to replace Theresa May. I still think that he is by far the most accomplished candidate, but I the more I read about him, the more doubts and suspicions I have. I am also disturbed that some of the Jewish lobby on Twitter seem to favour him.
In the end, no System party or candidate has the right to rule the UK. Social nationalism must triumph.
A few recent tweets seen about Rory Stewart
I’ve a horrid feeling it means they are going to do a deal soon. She will announce she is going, the contest will start with Rory Stewart being lined up as her successor. Democracy is dead in this country, I just worry they will do us out of voting for MEPs too.
Rory Stewart abnormal. Who ignores pleas fr help when a quadriplegic prisoner lying on back 24/7 with bedsore so badly neglected & tissue deteriorated that pelvic bone is exposed ? Stewart as Prisons Minister downright cruel.
I thought I’d heard it all from Diane Abacus until this bloke Rory Stewart springs up. Where do political parties find these lying conniving self indulgent corrupt fuckwits? https://t.co/6cbEnUKXnY
Here is a surprise. The MI6 house journal, the Guardian, shills for ex MI6 officer Rory Stewart (whose dad was also deputy head of MI6). The Guardian views his role in the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan as making him "highly qualified" in International Development. https://t.co/2NrZXzC9tE
The first day of his promotion to Cabinet is an opportune time to recall a classic from Rory Stewart's back catalogue. As Floods Minister he said the flood defences had worked well but the water had come over the top of them. #r4today#BBCNews#Reshufflepic.twitter.com/1N2iHIkvpP
Oh, dear…(see below): I am thinking now that Stewart is rapidly using up his credit with at least some of the public, though in the end the ones who will vote for a new Conservative Party leader will be, initially, the Con MPs in the Commons, not Joe Public. It may be that Stewart will be seen as the ideal “Stop Boris” candidate, someone to rally to. I do not know what level of MP support he now has. I presume some, or why would he risk being humiliated? On the other hand, he does strike me as a very ambitious gambler and chancer.
Am I alone in thinking Rory Stewart comes across as a complete prat. I’ve never seen less leadership qualities from an officer in the armed forces.
The tweeter above is yet another who seems to think that Stewart’s 5 months as a gap-year “officer” on probation is something real, rather than a kind of adventure holiday for the gentry. Unless the tweeter, like others, takes the term SIS “officer” at face value, rather than as a conventional designation (cf. police “officer”, council “officer” etc).
Update, 25 May 2019
Well, here we are after Theresa May’s announcement of departure, and Rory Stewart is on all msm outlets. He has put the knife into Boris-Idiot and may have damaged the latter’s campaign. Opinion on Stewart himself is divided, half seeing his accomplishments and character, half seeing his gaffes. The tweet below is more favourable than not to him
On the other hand, I saw Stewart on TV, saying that “we” must build 2 MILLION (!) houses. My reaction? “Only because the UK has imported millions of unwanted immigrants, who are breeding fast; and Britain CONTINUES to import huge numbers, even in 2019!”
I see no willingness in Bilderberg/Davos Stewart to take on mass immigration. In fact, he seems to support it. The negative effects will scarcely impact him or his family, after all, in his listed Borders country house…
Ah…another tweeter who raises points against Stewart:
and, below, the sort of statement that comes easier to those who have never been poor, hungry, desperate etc…Almost clownish coming from someone who has been an MP and whose votes, with those of other Conservatives and LibDems, enabled the attacks on the unemployed and disabled since 2010…
The country can be a much better and much happier place if we learn again to focus on the small things that make a real difference to people. pic.twitter.com/KfYxEi6E6e
Stewart seems to be an engaging fellow, at least on the surface, but the more I see of him, and the more that I read about his voting record and views, the less I like him ideologically or politically.
Update, 1 June 2019
Ah, I see that I am not alone in thinking that Stewart’s accomplishments and achievements are perhaps not quite all that they seem on paper:
“Though few would speak on the record, there is a broad critique of Stewart that his biography is a little overegged and certainly self-regarding – leading to a nickname, a member of his wider social circle confides, of “Florence of Belgravia”.” [The Guardian]
“Though Stewart has claimed to know “what it feels like to be in the army”, for instance, he spent only a gap year stint in the Black Watch and did not see active service. He can often give the impression his role in Iraq was rather more important than the reality, according to someone who witnessed his work there (“He was regarded as a pretty competent mid-ranking Foreign Office official … He wasn’t a nonentity and I think the view in Iraq was that he was conscientious, but he wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia.”).” [The Guardian]
“Several well-placed observers of Stewart’s time in Afghanistan point out that his much-discussed Afghan walk, the origin of his reputation as an expert on the region, was a month spent crossing a comparatively safe part of the country (“Other people would call it a walking holiday,” notes one).” [The Guardian]
“In general, he has done a lot and it’s all very impressive,” says someone who observed Stewart at close quarters in Kabul. “But it’s not quite as impressive and remarkable as he allows people to think. This is not necessarily all his doing, but the willingness of others to project things on to him … All sorts of journalists wrote up the Turquoise Mountain Foundation [Stewart’s Afghan NGO, which aimed to preserve local crafts] as the most amazing project in Afghanistan, when it was actually a rather low impact thing that affected the lives of a small number of people.” [The Guardian]
“…to his credit he does not dissemble when asked directly about his experience (“It was unbelievably brief,” he told the New Yorker of his time in the Black Watch.)” [The New Yorker; The Guardian]. So not even 5 months? Sounds as though it was somewhere between the 5 months previously claimed and, er, what? A week? A month? A few months?
“Claims this week to have “negotiated in Iraq, negotiated in Afghanistan” provoked “snorts of derision”, the former Afghanistan correspondent Jon Boone tweeted. “Who with, the Kabul guild of potters and calligraphers?” [The Guardian]
Maybe Stewart should not have exposed his gilding to the very harsh light of scrutiny.
A few more thoughts
Since I penned the main blog post, much has happened. Stewart has come under more scrutiny, but also has travelled the country (the UK, not Afghanistan) doing Twitter vox pop chats with random passers-by. At least he is not afraid to do that. He is becoming better-known to the public and apparently now has a few Conservative MPs supporting him; but not many. As to the bookmakers, some have him as 66/1 for “next Conservative leader”, though Betfair betting exchange has him at 12/1, which strikes me as more realistic (making that 66/1 a value bet if you can get it)
“Speaking in her personal capacity – and not in her current role as chief executive of the Jo Cox Foundation – Catherine Anderson told The Courier she was drawn to Rory’s internationalism.” [The Courier]
A few more endorsements like that and it’s Goodnight Vienna to Stewart!
Ah…seems that Catherine Anderson is “an aspiring Conservative MP” who used to be “Chief of Staff” and Campaign Manager for (drum roll…) Rory Stewart! In fact she worked for Rory Stewart for nearly 9 years!
Well, the first ballot has been held and Rory Stewart is still standing. Just. 4th from bottom. All below him (McVey, Leadsom, Harper) eliminated (though only from the contest, sadly…). So far, only 19 MPs voted for Stewart. His immediate prospects look bleak, inasmuch as Boris-Idiot, someone with no real vision, ability, ideas, ideals, nor even basic decency, is the frontrunner still. Boris has 114 craven MPs backing him, so far.
Our analysis of the results of the first ballot of the Conservative leadership contest… three candidates have been eliminated – Leadsom, Harper and McVey. pic.twitter.com/GUlcsa900q
What does it say about the Conservative Party and, to a lesser extent, the UK (England, mainly) that a blot like Boris Johnson may soon be Prime Minister? I am not talking about his character alone, but also his actual ability to be effective. Still, there it is…
Update, 17 June 2019
Well, as I guessed a couple of days ago, Rory Stewart has gained ground, at least in the betting, though the betting exchanges’ and bookmakers’ odds are often not a reliable guide to political results (see the EU Referendum, the Trump election, the recent Peterborough by-election etc).
Stewart is now at 2nd place in the betting to be next Conservative leader, though only at 16/1. Boris Johnson is favourite at around 1/5 odds-on (Hunt 20/1, Gove 46/1, Raab 85/1, Javid 120/1).
By all accounts, Stewart did well in the TV debate (Johnson the sole absentee, obviously afraid of being exposed as an idiot and incompetent, as well as wanting to seem to be the “presidential” figure above the fray).
Having said that, Stewart will have to pull off a considerable coup even to be one of the final two, though that now seems a 50-50 possibility.
Update, 19 June 2019
Well, Rory Stewart is out of the race, which means that, until or unless Boris Johnson leaves frontline politics, his career is stalled again. He pledged not to serve in a Johnson Cabinet, and, as I blogged previously, it is doubtful that Johnson will appoint him to anything significant anyway.
That leaves Johnson, Hunt, Gove, Javid.
Looks as though arguably the worst candidate is about to win…
Talked to a Tory MP last night who was backing Johnson "Do you think he'd be any good as PM" "No" "What on earth will he do about Brexit"? "No one knows" "Why do you want him, then?" "He's the best hope we've got" "By 'we" you don't mean Britain do you?" "No the party, of course"
Having said that, Stewart has staked his claim to be taken more seriously somewhere down the line. System politicians, like revolutionary ones, are all seeking to catch the right wave, like surfers.
Update, 20 June 2019
Just saw this tweet, posted 2 days ago. Worth reading; one has to take its veracity on trust, not ever having heard of the tweeter, and the emailer mentioned remaining unnamed.
So Rory Stewart is standing down as MP for Penrith and Borders at next election. He has also resigned from the Conservative Party. Reasons not given. Maybe, in the end, he just was not hungry enough, which would explain why he did not want further ministerial preferment, or to seek the role of PM, but does not explain why he has also decided not to continue as MP; neither does it explain why he has also resigned from the Conservative Party. Perhaps the situation will be clarified in due course.
Update, 5 October 2019
Ah…mystery solved. Stewart is intending to stand for the post of Mayor of London.
He has obviously seen how Boris-Idiot used the position to keep his profile high until he was ready to re-enter the Westminster fray.
The other main candidates are already known: Sadiq Khan, the present Mayor, for Labour, and Shaun Bailey, the West Indian who will be the Conservative candidate. Sadiq Khan has the support of the msm, the Jewish lobby etc, as a Labour mayor who is rather anti-Corbyn. Shaun Bailey may be seen by the blacks as rather an “Uncle Tom”, and there are still questions around missing or misapplied funds of a “social enterprise” he set up in 2006: the monies missing were never accounted for; other monies, amounting to the bulk of spending by the organization, went on “travel and subsistence”, probably for Bailey himself. No criminal charges or civil claims were ever brought, though.
Despite Khan’s poor record as Mayor, he is probably well-placed vis-a-vis Bailey. Now that Rory Stewart has entered the fray, Bailey is holed below the waterline and his candidature will inevitably sink. Whether Rory Stewart can beat Khan and the other candidates (the LibDem being the main also-ran) is an open question.
London is a mainly non-white city now, and an English candidate (well, Anglo-Scottish) like Stewart may find this an uphill slog. On the other hand, Khan is not a popular figure, Stewart is a fresh and now politically non-aligned contender who, however, has high public recognition and profile. I do not think that he can be written off here, and if that is so, his wider ambition, to be Prime Minister, may survive the presently wintry conditions.
Update and addendum, 10 October 2019
Thank to an alert and well-informed blog reader, I can now add a significant addendum to my study of Rory Stewart:
So it turns out that, notwithstanding the listed country house in the Scottish Borders, notwithstanding the almost caricature “country gentry” persona, Stewart is part-Jew! It now is clear that he is what the Reich called a “Mischling”, in his case one-quarter, his maternal grandfather having been “a Jewish doctor from Wimbledon”, whose own parents were Jews from Romania who arrived in London after having lived in New York City for a while.
Well, now it becomes clearer: the self-publicizing (shades of Boris Johnson…), the liking for “fancy dress”, eg tribal costume and being photographed posing in it, the pro-immigration stance, the Davos and Bilderberg linkages.
More than that: Stewart’s wife, Shoshana Stewart, is half-Jewish. In fact, the “half” in question is the maternal half, which means that, according to the way that Jews themselves calculate ancestry, his wife is “Jewish”, simpliciter; that also means that, according to Jewish custom, Stewart’s children are Jewish (though of course we non-Jews decide such designations according to genetic science, meaning that his children are in fact three-eighths Jewish, if my mathematical calculation is right, which often is not the case; anyway, no matter if the right answer is three-eighths or something else, the exact proportion changes nothing). According to the Jewish Chronicle report, above, Stewart and his wife and children celebrate Jewish religious holidays as well as the main Christian ones.
I smelt a rat about Stewart when I saw that the vocal Jew cabal on Twitter all seemed to favour him during the Conservative leadership contest, but it did not occur to me that he himself was part-Jew. I thought that his odd and dark looks came from Western Scottish origins (as they presumably do, in part). I thought that the Jews were supporting Stewart because of his “liberal” Conservatism…
How do these facts, concealed or at least not publicized until now, affect Stewart’s London Mayor election bid? Damaging, I think. While the Jews of North London will probably support him now, the far greater number of Muslims and others who commonly disfavour Jews will probably not vote for him (despite the fact that the present Mayor of London and Labour Party candidate, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim by origin, has been a complete doormat for the Jewish lobby for years).
Fair comment, surely, if one looks at Rory Stewart’s voting record as an MP (2010-2019).
Without taking away from his interesting and accomplished background, as detailed in my lengthy blog hereinabove, my feeling at the moment is that Rory Stewart is basically an oleaginous, dissembling, part-Jew shit.
Update, 6 April 2020
Stewart is no longer standing as candidate for Mayor of London:
There must be a reason; I do not know that reason.
feels entirely absurd that one year ago this month Rory Stewart became the new DfID secretary in Theresa May's cabinet, and since then he's resigned from that post, run for the Tory leadership, left the Tories, and run for London mayor as an independent
So once again Rory Stewart is the nearly man: nearly something important in SIS or FCO, nearly Conservative Party leader, nearly Mayor of London. Sometimes a candidate has to stick in there and await Fate. Had Stewart not huffed off and resigned as MP after losing out to, ultimately, Boris Johnson, his time might have come, after Johnson messes up even more, which is inevitable.
I always recall being in the USA during the 1992 US Presidential Election campaign. At one point, Clinton was placed third of the three major candidates in the opinion polls. A poor third, at that. He stuck it out (admittedly, what else could he do?) and, after Ross Perot dropped out, beat George Bush snr. for the Presidency, being inaugurated in 1993.
[addendum, 31 October 2021: my point about Clinton sticking to it applies more forcefully to Ross Perot, which I should have explained better. Had Perot shown more resilience, and stuck to it, he might easily have become President and thus, as a non-Republican/Democrat candidate, made history. As it was, he dropped out, later claiming that sinister forces had threatened him and his family. Who were they? NWO/ZOG?].
Years earlier, Clinton, who at 31 had been a very young Governor of Arkansas, was defeated there after one 4-year term. Undeterred, he tried the next time and was re-elected. A stayer.
I should think that this spells the end of Rory Stewart as a potential political leader. What does it mean for the London race? I have not followed it closely, but it must give the Conservatives a better chance, despite their candidate being a West Indian with a very dodgy background in terms of near-fraud (though he has never been charged with anything).
Sadiq Khan was running at 8/1 on (1/8) with the bookmakers. Rory Stewart was at 11/8. Shaun Bailey, for Conservative Party, at 20/1. Now that Stewart is gone, I imagine that Sadiq Khan will go out to about 1/6, and Shaun Bailey go in to about 10/1 or so. Despite his poor record, Sadiq Khan is unlikely to lose to Shaun Bailey.
In a John Buchan story, the Stewart or “Hannay” character would no doubt “retire” from public life only because he would be secretly saving the Empire from imperial Russia, or imperial Germany, or would be thwarting a dastardly plot involving transnational conspirators. In fiction, he would save the Empire, then either be knighted or (and/or) be appointed Chief of the Imperial Secret Service. In real life? I have no idea. Stewart is now, or was until recently, teaching at Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart#Post-political_career.
Update, 22 January 2022
Boris Johnson is a symptom of a much broader problem in British politics – which can only be fixed with new policies, and – almost certainly – new parties and a new electoral system https://t.co/4XUQ8YGAZ8
Had Stewart retained his MP-status, he might now be in again with a real chance of leading his former party. Having decided not to continue as MP, he is necessarily out in the cold.
Update, 9 July 2022
Just read an appreciation of Stewart from the Tatler (2016, expanded and updated 2019). Don’t think I saw it before today. Written by Quentin Letts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Letts].
Frankly, nowhere as complete, or as good, as my own assessment, if I say so myself. As for it containing “everything you need to know about Rory Stewart“, I think not! For one thing, no mention of the part-Jewish background, and no mention of the fact that his wife is half-Jewish.
Update, 2 April 2023
Well, in the end, the London Mayoral Election was held in 2021. There were 20 candidates, both Independents and those from political parties. In the run-off, Sadiq Khan (40%), beat Shaun Bailey (35.3%) in what turned out to be a close-run thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_London_mayoral_election.
As for Rory Stewart, now 50, he has pottered around doing podcasts in the past couple of years. He also moved to Jordan in 2021 with his wife and children, apparently to do work connected with his Turquoise Mountain charity.
That article mentions that Stewart is (or was, in September 2021, when the article was written) thinking of possibly standing again as a London mayoral candidate in 2024. I doubt that he will. The 2024 election will be run on FPTP lines, giving an outsider (in his case, as a non-party candidate) fewer chances.
Overall, it seems to me that Rory Stewart’s political career is finished, in all likelihood.
“Anyone with the slightest interest in politics should get a copy of Rory Stewart’s political memoir.
Not because he had a particularly long or even influential career: just nine years in Parliament and only months in the Cabinet. But you will learn more about the nature of Westminster machinations and how government actually works (or doesn’t) from this volume than from those of many more illustrious politicians. In terms of the quality of writing, there has been nothing to approach it since the diaries of Alan Clark (who never made it to the Cabinet at all).
But whereas Clark was a genuinely bad person — part of the attraction, perhaps — Stewart is a fundamentally good man, even if his self-belief, touching on the messianic, occasionally made him appear preposterous.”
[Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail].
Interesting that Stewart was apparently in SIS/MI6 for several years, and that Dominic Lawson was said to have been a long-term SIS/MI6 source: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Lawson. Lawson is 17 years older than Stewart, in fact born the same year as me— 1956.
However, the allegations about Lawson do refer mainly to the 1990s and focus partly on the Balkans, particularly (ex-) Yugoslavia. Stewart joined FCO/SIS in the mid-1990s, and was posted to Montenegro in, I think, 1999. Tenuous link, perhaps nothing…
“This silly little man has delusions of grandeur“, “I cant wait to see the back of Khan, but Rory Stewart god help us“, “Gottle of Gear“, “Nay ,nay ,thrice times nay.“, “The guy’s a joke, and not a funny one“, “Please no, he’s a right weirdo” and “Oh no! Not this opportunist” are among some of the more polite.
Rory Stewart has now written his latest book. His profile is high enough even in 2023 to ensure msm interest and comment (not all favourable, though):
Behind a paywall, but I include it for the sake of completeness.
[Rory Stewart, 2023]
I expect that I shall buy the book secondhand off Amazon, once it reduces to about £5 or £2. The price for the new and unreleased (until 14 September) book has already declined from the original £22 to £16 or so.
I am not now in the new-book-buying classes (and prefer hardbacks) so the Amazon website is a great boon for me.
Not long ago, I bought the memoirs of Gorbachev, a heavy tome; great value at about £5 including postage from a used-book company on Amazon.
I have now bought another book: £2.80 only, and also including the postage. Hard to believe. One wonders how they make a profit, but then (to coin a phrase) I never was much of a businessman!
I met the author a few times in the 1980s. Frankly, a rather pompous man whom I (even more frankly) found rather unpleasant in a minor way, but his book might be interesting. As for the author, he is now deceased.
(about how Stewart is now angling for both a peerage and a ministerial portfolio from Starmer…).
Stewart’s ambition and careerism are both relentless, if inconsistent.
Actually, in terms of individual jobs or posts, I should say that Stewart (despite his many accomplishments) is a “quitter”, but behind that is his already-noted enormous ambition, “looming like a thundercloud over the scene“…
An old friend of mine used to quote her deceased husband (ex-Guards officer, ex-Royal Flying Corps, WW1, d. circa 1970): “if you throw a Jew out of the door, the Jew will sneak back through a window“… Of course, Stewart is only part-Jew.
If Starmer can indeed give Rory Stewart a job and put him out of his often expressed misery of not being a politician with a brief anymore then that really would be great for everyone including those who are tired of hearing him pine pic.twitter.com/83Q6CfN6Lz
Stewart will fight Vance over 'ordo amoris' but stands idly by while mothers kill their own children in their wombs and HMG arrests those who pray silently against it!
Emasculated phoney who actually cares nothing for the most vulnerable and marginalized.
USAID: British politician complaining that his wife was supposed to get $1M in USAID grants before Trump cancelled the contract. Rory Stewart's wife runs Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which exposes modern art to puzzled Afghan women.
USAID: The NGO which Rory Stewart’s wife works for just has its USAID funding cancelled, The Turquiose Mountain Foundation, teaches ‘liberated’ Afghan women about modern art like Duchamp’s urinal. pic.twitter.com/0IJdoF2Rwn
Oh this has absolutely made my day. Rory Wrong About Everything Stewart whingeing about his wife having her $1 million contract from USAID cancelled with immediate effect by DOGE. Priceless, absolutely priceless🤣🤣
I have blogged previously about the need for Basic Income (see Notes, below).
One important point is that the nexus connecting work and pay is loosening in the more developed countries. Already, computers, automation and modern business streamlining have led to the situation whereby, apart from actual unemployment, there is huge underemployment. In the UK, we see, in big picture terms, that the poorer half of the workforce is still being paid less in real terms (the latest statistics suggest about 7% less) than was paid in 2007 for equivalent work.
Now, there is a headlong rush into greater automation and, crucially, to Artificial Intelligence [AI].
Working Tax Credits as Government Subsidy to Poor-Paying Employers
Even before the financial upheaval of 2007-2008, it is clear that the “market”, as “hidden hand” mechanism, delivering adequate pay for required work, was not working properly or as old-thinking economic theory suggested that it should. Employers were unwilling or in some cases unable to offer pay high enough for employees to subsist on, let alone live decently on.
The answer of the Blair-Brown governments was to offer employees “working tax credits”, i.e. a form of “welfare”/”social security” for those in employment, the purpose of which was (and at time of writing still is) to top-up inadequate pay to a determined level. A more limited measure, Family Credit, claimable only by families, was in operation from 1986-1999.
The most obvious drawback of Working Tax Credit [WTC], i.e. that it in effect subsidizes poor and poor-paying employers out of general taxation, was either not foreseen by self-styled financial genius Gordon Brown, or was ignored by him and/or Tony Blair. Adding insult to injury was and is the fact that some of the worst-paying employing companies are also those most adept at avoiding tax liability: transnational enterprises such as Amazon in particular.
In other words, an employee is forced (by circumstances) to work for pay which is not enough for that employee to live on, even at a very basic level. That pay is then topped-up to a minimum subsistence level by Working Tax Credit, which is paid for not directly by the exploitative employer but by government, and so by general taxation. Low-paid employees pay little or no income tax now, but still pay so-called National Insurance, which is today just another or extra income tax in all but name. Put simply, the low-paid worker is paying out for his or her own Working Tax Credit, at least to some extent.
The poor-paying employer has no incentive to pay decently, because the government will stump up enough to keep the employee in place.
Real-terms pay now, for very many people, is inferior to what was paid in the 1980s and 1970s. Conditions of employment are also worse in reality (though that aspect is not part of this blog post).
At present, 5 million people in the UK receive WTC, while another 2 million are entitled to receive it but, for whatever reason, do not apply for it.
Other Government Top-Ups to Pay
In addition to basic Working Tax Credit, people in low-paying jobs and who have children can get extra money via WTC , as can disabled workers.
Persons who are disabled or unwell (including employed persons) can receive Disability Living Allowance, which is not means-tested.
Persons who have children are also entitled to Child Benefit, regardless of capital or income (up to £50,000-£60,000, tapering).
Persons of the age(s) specified can receive State Pension regardless of whether they work or not; moreover, whether or not they have ever worked.
Limited Elements of Basic Income Already Embedded in the Existing System
State Pension, paid whatever the individual’s capital or income, and whether or not the individual is working (employed or self-employed) or not and (if you include Pension Guarantee Credit), payable regardless of how much the pensioner has paid in via National Insurance;
Child Benefit, paid regardless of income (under £50,000 p.a.);
Disability Living Allowance (and its successor, “Personal Independence Payment” or PIP), paid regardless of capital or income to qualifying persons (and this is not the place in which to examine why politicians and Department of Work and Pensions [DWP] civil servants often choose vulgar names for State benefits and programmes: cf. “Jobseeker’s Allowance” etc).
Advantages of Basic Income
Simplicity. A Basic Income would mean that most of the existing DWP structure could be dispensed with: the vast edifice of “Jobcentres” (office buildings), filled with DWP staff engaged in adminstration, and the snooping upon, monitoring, “assessing” of claimants etc. The absurdity of it is that many claimants are only getting about £75 a week anyway. The present Kafka-esque set-up really should be and can be junked. Probably 90% of the present 85,000 DWP employees can be made redundant. The financial savings from that, decommissioning of buildings, running costs etc would be in the tens of billions annually; the untold billions paid by the State to useless and dishonest private contractors, such as ATOS and Capita, would also be saved;
Security of Citizens. It has been shown in overseas pilot studies (eg recently in Finland) that having a Basic Income, even if small, gives people a sense of security only available until now to those with an inherited private income. Yes, some people will decide to loaf all day, maybe even drink all day, but others will do paid work, start small businesses, improve their cultural level, volunteer locally or far away etc. The idle and/or useless are like that under the present system anyway and are costing the State money even now, both directly and indirectly (eg via the costs of policing, NHS, prisons etc);
Doubts Often Expressed about Basic Income
“People will not want to work if they get money for nothing”: well, most wealthy inheritors of capital, most of those living off trust incomes etc do seem to want to work in some way, or to set up businesses, or at least to write, paint, or other similar activity. Don’t disparage writing or other artistic activity. After all, Harry Potter, which snowballed into a huge industry employing, altogether, many thousands and even tens of thousands, came out of the mind of one lady, a single mother on State benefits; J.K. Rowling herself has said that, under the punitive present benefits regime, she would have been messed around so much that it would have been impossible for her to sit in cafes with her baby writing Harry Potter. True, some people will simply loaf. They do that under the present system. Don’t think that there are no costs to the State and society now (even if actual benefits are cut off): police costs, court and legal costs, NHS costs, too;
“The cost to the taxpayer”: the cost of Basic Income would be little more than the present “welfare” (social security) system, once you take into account the huge savings on DWP and HMRC bureaucracy, savings by not using useless/dishonest outsourcing organizations, the economic benefit of people spending more, stimulating the economy, setting up new small businesses;
“People getting Basic Income money that they do not even need”: firstly, what people “need” is, beyond the basic level, something subjective. Apart from that, there is no problem with clawing back monies paid to those above a certain income. All that need happen is that a maximum level of income (all income) for recipients be set. All persons above that income level to be taxed or super-taxed to the same level as Basic Income received. The level might be a total (including Basic Income) of £30,000, assuming Basic Income of perhaps £15,000 per year. In that case, the person would be taxed the £15,000, leaving £15,000. Yes, there would be apparent unfairness at lower income levels, whereby it might be questioned why work, when you could simply receive the (in the example given) £15,000 and not work. However, even then the recipient does gain, via extra security in case of job loss or illness; alternatively, the threshold could be set higher, say at £50,000 p.a.
Variations on the Basic Income Theme
Instead of money alone, Basic Income could include benefits paid to certain persons, such as free housing for persons receiving less than a certain income. The danger here is in the complexity and cost, as under the existing system, as well as monies wasted going to landlords charging excessive rents. It may be that the way forward is to add to the existing (in the UK) more or less “free” (at point of use) health service, free education at primary and secondary level etc. Examples:
free public transport, whether local or regional;
free car insurance;
free domestic utilities;
free NHS or similar;
free education.
Basic Income as Necessity
It is clear that, in the UK, relatively few people at present are purely living off what they can earn by work or by investments and/or trust income. 7 million are eligible for Working Tax Credits, millions more are children, retired people, disabled and not working, unemployed etc. For many, working for pay does not cover the basic necessities of life, let alone provide a decent human existence. The State already recognizes these facts.
The explosion in artificial intelligence and robotics will turn the screw. For example, there are at present356,300 taxi drivers and private hire drivers in the UK. The technology already exists to replace them. It is unlikely that more than a small percentage will still be doing such work in, say, 2030. That’s just one group affected. Groups as diverse as farmers, lawyers, surgeons, pilots, security guards will all be made, as groups, largely redundant.
Basic Income is not just the right thing, but the necessary thing.
The necessity for Basic Income is spreading, but not yet to enough people. Many still think that it is “expensive” (probably the same people who believe that the answer to a recession is to “cut spending”…). There is, however, dissent…
I have been interested for several, indeed many, years in the socio-political effects of the AI/robot/computer revolution, which effects started to be felt as long ago as the 1960s, accelerated in the 1980s, but which still mushroom, and may be considered to be still in the youthful stage of development.
I happened to see an online article which was about 25 types of human work likely to be largely replaced by robots. Some were unsurprising, such as Data Entry Clerks and Bookkeepers, others less so (as a former barrister, I noticed “Lawyers” with interest!). I did not expect to see “Farmers” on the list, though in fact much agricultural work has already moved from human and animal labour to robotic or at least automated: sophisticated machines now already sow, harvest and process agricultural produce. Some of the most delicate tasks can still not be effectively automated without loss of quality, but that will probably change. The picking of grapes is done today as it has been since the dawn of recorded history– by hand. The best tea is also still picked by hand, though experiments have been made with automation: the Soviet tea industry tried it back in the 1970s (“on Georgia’s sun-dappled hills”, as Lermontov had it).
Looking ahead, one can see that many more jobs will be automated. Even now, that is leaving many either with no jobs, or with “McJobs”, minimum-wage bottom-of-barrel jobs. Increasingly, there will be discontent as those who have either no job or a job which does not cover even basic necessities become more numerous. At present, in the UK, those who have existed on poor pay have had that pay topped up via “tax credits” etc (and/or, now, the cretinous “Universal Credit” pipedream of Iain Dunce Duncan Smith), administered by a shambolic and punitive bureaucratic regime. That can and will be taken over by a Basic Income, paid without reference to whether the individual is trying to find work or better work.
The essence of the plan in respect of AI etc is that automation creates economic surplus. That surplus, at present, is today then distributed mostly to shareholders and higher executives, by means of dividends, pay and capital gains (eg via share options). That surplus or benefit should be shared out with the employees of the enterprise and with the people in general, via the mediation of the State. Not forgetting the need for an economic enterprise to have reserve funding for R&D etc.
Basic Income will give to all citizens at least a measure of the financial and life security currently enjoyed by only the wealthy, the “trustafarians” etc. It will enable those who want more than the basic minimum to work for that extra money, those who want to volunteer or do charitable work to do so and yet still subsist, those who want to think or write to create. As for those who only want to loaf, they do that under any system (including the present one) and at least Basic Income makes society quiescent.
The cost of Basic Income is high, but the cost of administering and paying out the present “welfare” system is hugely high too! Admin, snooping, interrogating, complex payment structures etc.
Taken to absurdity, one could envisage a society entirely dystopian, where no human workers are needed at all. The machines (etc) then produce goods and services which cannot be bought and paid for, because the humans have no work and therefore no pay and therefore no disposable income.
In such a scenario, either goods and services have to be given away free of charge to the humans unable to pay for them, or the humans need to be given money-value for which they have not directly worked. Basic Income.
The present society is already exhibiting a trend to work which pays little or nothing and a connected trend to an amelioration of the effects of that first trend (via State welfare, pensions, tax credits etc).
In the end, Basic Income is essential, because the robotics/AI revolution is loosening the nexus between work and pay.
It has been proven that to take away the familiar and known from an individual is to disorientate that person. It is a well-practised method of breaking down a prisoner for interrogation, for example (sensory deprivation etc). A less harsh form, usually, is recruit training in armies and similar organizations. However, the same is true in societies generally. When the familiar is taken away, society suffers something akin to a nervous breakdown. The singer Morrissey has commented recently that England now is little more than a memory.
In the UK, we have seen how society was already struggling with the importation of millions of immigrants even before 1997, when the Tony Blair Zionist government (ZOG puppet government) took power. It is now a matter of record that a deliberate decision was taken by the Tony Blair government to import further millions of immigrants, mostly non-Europeans, in order to destroy Britain as it has been and to a limited extent still is; to destroy the racial and cultural roots and foundations of our country. White genocide.
That policy, spearheaded by two corrupt Jews, Phil Woolas and Barbara Roche (both now removed from Parliament), has been successful. Britain is now, at least in part, an ethno-social dustbin. The millions imported have been breeding, prolifically. Recent reports and studies estimate that the UK will become majority non-white by 2050. If one takes England alone, the date can probably be reduced to around 2040. Already, some English cities are English in name and history only or are getting that way: London is already majority non-white (native-born population: 44%), Birmingham and Manchester are rapidly following (57% and 66%), while smaller cities such as Leicester and Bradford are already, like London, mainly non-white.
The above ethno-cultural changes have destabilized the national mental landscape. The change has been accompanied by a propaganda campaign stealthily making use of “soaps” and TV advertizing. The mixed-race family is presented as the norm. Even Midsomer Murders, the archetypal Middle England comedy-drama detective series, was forced, after criticism, to put blacks and browns into the cast lists. This is (as with TV ads) not really reflective of reality but the creation of a new “reality”. Social engineering.
The wrenching apart of the accepted “mental landscape” does not end with the racial-cultural question. It is far wider. It includes the gratuitous renaming of commercial and trade union organizations. Thus the old trade unions, with their easy to understand names and functions, have become amorphous huge conglomerations with names that mean little, such as “Unison”, “Unite” etc, and have abandoned their members’ interests to pursue a politically-correct agenda involving “anti-racism”, “anti-sexism”, promotion of mass immigration etc.
In the same way that the trade unions have been corrupted, so commercial enterprises have been renamed and somehow displaced. Norwich Union insurance becomes “Aviva”, and so on.
The result of this dislocation of the mental landscape on the large scale has been the rupturing of the connection between the people as a whole and the mainstream political parties. The Conservative Party, which once had a membership in the millions, now numbers only a few tens of thousands and is still sliding. Labour, which was going the same way, has recovered under Corbyn to about 450,000, but its popular vote has not recovered. The Liberal Democrats are a very small party in terms of both members and votes. UKIP too has fallen back, in its case to almost nothing, but the fact that it briefly mushroomed into a threat to the older parties indicates that the voters are no longer anchored to System parties. However, a non-System party credible enough to come to the fore has not yet emerged.
Another symptom of the mental-landscape dislocation is seen in the notionally “nationalist” direct-action operations carried out by the “lone wolf” dissidents. The highest profile case is probably that of Thomas Mair, who killed Jo Cox MP a few years ago. In his case, the sheer dislocation suffered by society seems to have triggered a determination to make a point through forceful action.
More significantly, the lack of secure anchorings in society may lead to a volatile political milieu in which a social-national party could be formed, become popular and then move to attain power within a relatively few years.
I am not an economist; neither am I, at least in terms of occupation and/or formal training, an historian. I say that from the outset simply because it may be objected that, especially in terms of economics, I have no intellectual locus standi, despite the fact that most predictions made by economists turn out to be inaccurate. Also, “two economists, three opinions”…
Bitcoin
So, Bitcoin. Bitcoin was invented in 2008, possibly in Japan, by someone (or a group) whose provenance and even real name or names remain unknown:
Money is an almost metaphysical thing. Different societies have used seashells, precious metals etc as money, the key characteristic being the relative rarity of the commodity used. In China (in the 7th Century under the Tang dynasty), paper currency was invented, and later more widely introduced in the 11th Century (Song Dynasty), where it was encountered by Marco Polo and others, who introduced the idea to Europe.
Paper currency was, at first and for a long time, backed or notionally backed by precious metals, notably gold. Paper money only became generally acceptable in Europe a thousand years after its invention in China. The natural scepticism of the people was overcome both by its convenience and by its credibility, that credibility not only bolstered by its supposed convertability into gold or silver but also by the draconian penalties visited upon those who counterfeited the notes.
These factors underpin all money, credibility or popular belief in its value being the core.
Speculative Bubbles
One could go wider and say that credibility and belief underpin all valuation of assets, whether money assets, real property or other property in which the population is impelled to invest. Time and again there have been speculative bubbles: in currencies, in shares, in housing, in undeveloped land, in metals and even in such things as tulip bulbs (17thC Holland).
A good history of these bubbles and other mass events of the sort was penned in 1841 after the South Sea Bubble and was reprinted after the Wall Street Crash of 1929: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (and reprinted since, eg in the early 1980s)..
Since that book came out, since its 1930s reprinting, other bubbles have come and gone. Among the more noteworthy was the “Silver Bears” bubble of the 1970s
and also many and various real property bubbles across the world.
Bitcoin Goes Viral
At first, back in 2008, Bitcoin was valueless, worth nothing at all. It was just electrical impulses on a machine, effectively. It was still of small value three years later:
“The price of bitcoins has gone through various cycles of appreciation and depreciation referred to by some as bubbles and busts.[129][130] In 2011, the value of one bitcoin rapidly rose from about US$0.30 to US$32 before returning to US$2.[131] In the latter half of 2012 and during the 2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis, the bitcoin price began to rise,[132]reaching a high of US$266 on 10 April 2013, before crashing to around US$50.[133] On 29 November 2013, the cost of one bitcoin rose to a peak of US$1,242.[134] In 2014, the price fell sharply, and as of April remained depressed at little more than half 2013 prices. As of August 2014 it was under US$600.” [Wikipedia]
Wikipedia continues:
“Ponzi scheme and pyramid scheme concerns
Various journalists,[79][144] economists,[145][146] and the central bank of Estonia[147] have voiced concerns that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. In 2013, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, stated that “a real Ponzi scheme takes fraud; bitcoin, by contrast, seems more like a collective delusion.”[148] A 2014 report by the World Bank concluded that bitcoin was not a ‘deliberate’ Ponzi scheme, but that it did thus far meet the “standard definition of a speculative bubble”.[149]:7 The Swiss Federal Council[150]:21 examined the concerns that bitcoin might be a pyramid scheme; it concluded that “Since in the case of bitcoin the typical promises of profits are lacking, it cannot be assumed that bitcoin is a pyramid scheme.” In July 2017, billionaire Howard Marks referred to bitcoin as a pyramid scheme.[151]
On 12 September 2017, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, called bitcoin a “fraud” and said he would fire anyone in his firm caught trading it. Zero Hedge claimed that the same day Dimon made his statement, JP Morgan also purchased a large amount of bitcoins for its clients.[152]
Speculative bubble dispute
Bitcoin has been labelled a speculative bubble by many including former Fed ChairmanAlan Greenspan[153] and economist John Quiggin.[154]Nobel Memorial Prize laureate Robert Shiller said that bitcoin “exhibited many of the characteristics of a speculative bubble”.[155] Journalist Matthew Boesler in 2013 rejected the speculative bubble label and saw bitcoin’s quick rise in price as nothing more than normal economic forces at work.[156] Timothy B. Lee, in a 2013 piece for The Washington Post pointed out that the observed cycles of appreciation and depreciation don’t correspond to the definition of speculative bubble.[131] On 14 March 2014, the American business magnate Warren Buffett said, “Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically.”[157]
Two lead software developers of bitcoin, Gavin Andresen[158] and Mike Hearn,[159] have warned that bubbles may occur. David Andolfatto, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, stated, “Is bitcoin a bubble? Yes, if bubble is defined as a liquidity premium.” According to Andolfatto, the price of bitcoin “consists purely of a bubble,” but he concedes that many assets “have bubble component to their price”.[53]:21 Speculation in bitcoin has been compared to the tulip mania of seventeenth-century Holland. Comparisons have been made by the vice-president of the European Central Bank, Vítor Constâncio, by JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon,[160] by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin of Citadel,[161] and by former president of the Dutch Central Bank, Nout Wellink.[162] In 2013, Wellink remarked, “This is worse than the tulip mania […] At least then you got a tulip [at the end], now you get nothing.”[163] On 13 September 2017, Jamie Dimon compared bitcoin to a bubble, saying it was only useful for drug dealers and countries like North Korea.[164] On 22 September 2017, a hedge fund named Blockswater subsequently accused JP Morgan of market manipulation and filed a market abuse complaint with Financial Supervisory Authority (Sweden).[165]
Bitcoin started to reach escape velocity in late 2016, going from hundreds of U.S. dollars to thousands. At time of writing (December 2017), a single Bitcoin is valued at over $14,000 [USD], or £10,500 [Pounds Sterling]. People who “invested” less than £100 several years ago have seen their stock suddenly rise to be “worth” as much as £100,000. Those who have risked more (in some cases a million pounds or more) now find themselves in theory able to buy small or even medium-size nation-states lock, stock and barrel.
What Do We Know About Bitcoin?
Bitcoin’s origins are obscure, to the extent that journalists and others have researched, investigated and written about the names of possible founders and organizers without having come to a definite conclusion;
Bitcoin is almost useless as a popular currency: its explosion in “value” has made it unusable for any transaction not involving, at the least, tens of thousands of pounds;
Bitcoin, though supposedly limited in overall amount or number, has seen security breaches which, at the push of a button (putting it simply), have at least briefly increased the supply of Bitcoin.
Conclusion
Bitcoin is a classic speculative bubble or, alternatively and perhaps even better put, pyramid scheme. The people who got in early and stayed in are sitting on mirage-fortunes; those who have “invested” more recently will probably lose everything they put in. At the moment of writing, Bitcoin is probably nearing its peak. When it starts to fall rapidly, the panic will probably wipe it out entirely.
The surely inevitable collapse of Bitcoin will take down more than just Bitcoin itself. It may affect the stability of the economy more generally. Beyond that, if (as Bitcoin proponents and/or “investors” say–and their anger at any criticism is perhaps born of subconscious desperation), Bitcoin is as “credible” as any “ordinary” currency (and that is Bitcoin’s strongest point), then the upcoming crash of Bitcoin could take with it much public confidence in the value of the world’s major currencies too. Our major currencies are no longer backed by gold or silver and have only the value we put upon them. We exchange stones for bread. Our currencies are themselves castles in the air and “such things as dreams are made on”.
We recall the hyperinflation of early 1920s Germany, and I myself saw, on several visits to 1980s Poland, how the slide of the zloty affected that country politically and socially. The fate of Bitcoin is not just about Bitcoin.
At the time of writing of my own 2017 blog article, a single Bitcoin was “worth”, i.e, valued at, about £10,500 pounds sterling. At time of writing today, 1 Bitcoin is worth just over £2,853 pounds sterling, somewhat above a quarter of the former figure, and only about a sixth of the 2017 peak.
Update, 19 November 2020
I update my post purely because, in the uncertain conditions of 2020, I see that the article is receiving more hits. Sign of the times?
I have nothing to add to the article itself, but as of today, Bitcoin is trading at just under £13,398 (pound sterling) and at USD $17,730.
Radio 4 Today interviewed an expert in cryptocurrencies, who himself has made tens of millions of pounds from them. He expects a crash. I expected one three years ago. Never happened, though the value did plummet before recovering and climbing further.
As of today, 20th February 2021, 1 Bitcoin is valued at not far short of £40,000!
I notice that Alison Chabloz accepts Bitcoin donations; I hope that she got some before the price rocketed, and still has them. If so, she may have a windfall. https://alisonchabloz.com/how-to-donate/
Today, Bitcoin recovered from USD $44,000 to USD $46,000 after having fallen from USD $52,500. An indication of the underlying volatility.
All the same, I am wondering whether, so far from being somehow “anti” the international money system, Bitcoin might not in reality be controlled by it…
Certainly, the genesis of Bitcoin has the feeling of “legend” (in either sense) about it (supposedly created by a Japanese whose identity has never been confirmed. Perhaps…).
Well, I have to admit that my 2017 prediction of a Bitcoin collapse was, though accurate-seeming in 2019 (when the price dropped to a mere sixth of its 2017 peak) wrong in terms of its later rise.
Incredibly, as of today, the price of 1 Bitcoin is £49,700 (Pound Sterling) or USD $64,627!
I can only suppose that the surge in “value” (rather, in price) of Bitcoin reflects the world situation, the instability of the world economy, and therefore the instability of world traditional currencies.
Gold is also at a record high at present.
All the same, if there were a major war, a world war (a fortiori, a nuclear war), and assuming that any human society and economy were to survive, Bitcoin would probably disappear in a flash (literally), as the Internet is destroyed, taking Bitcoin with it.
Human paper currencies would also disappear, at least for a while, in that scenario, but gold would still hold at least some value, presumably. At least you can hold a lump of gold in your hand, or put it in your rucksack…
Recent events have sharpened my already-keen interest in freedom of expression. On Twitter, the premier socio-political short-comment website, those regarded in the USA as “alt-right” have had their “blue ticks” removed, signalling that they are not very approved of by whomever decides policy at Twitter. In the UK, several people are currently about to be put on trial for saying or singing things of which the Jewish Zionists disapprove. Also in the UK, David Icke has just (17 November 2017) had his event at the Old Trafford facility owned by Manchester United (itself owned by a clan of American Jew-Zionists) cancelled. In the EU, the already considerable online censorship in Germany, France, Scandinavia has been intensified and new EU rules control online platforms as never before (and behind such restrictions, once again, “them”…).
Many reading this will be aware that, by reason of the activities of a pack of Jew-Zionists, I was disbarred in 2016. I have blogged about that and may do so again. Even before those events, I was prevented, I think in 2011 or 2012, from posting book reviews on Amazon (UK and US) because one (at first only one) obsessed Jew complained to the Jewish Chronicle about me. Other Jews joined in, the original one trolling anyone who liked my reviews (enough liked them to propel me to the top 40 reviewers), leaving stupid and unpleasant comments, many both defamatory and untrue). Once the Jewish Chronicle and other Jew-Zionist organizations piled in, Amazon caved in…
In fact, this censorship, largely exercized by the Jewish-Zionist element, predates the Internet era. I recall trying to advertize a small organization in The Spectator, around 1978. I was advised that I had to supply a precis of its political view. I did that, only to be told that my advertisement would not be printed. Same at that bastion of well-heeled and hypocritical Home Counties free-speech-ism, Private Eye. This at a time when these publications carried both “Conservative” and “socialist”, even Communist adverts!
The Internet opened up a window of freedom of expression, but “they” are rapidly moving to close it. Free speech is being shut down.
USA
The free speech provisions of the US Constitution are as outdated and superseded as those governing arms in private hands and other matters. At present, with certain exceptions, the State (meaning government) will not (there are exceptions) criminalize something said by an individual in the street, on a placard, in print, but that does not prevent that individual losing his job (if an employer dislikes what he has said or written, or where the employer has been pressured by external forces, such as the Jewish Lobby, with its campaigns of boycott etc). The US Constitution, in other words, cannot save the individual from losing his job, home, family, if his employer decides to penalize him because of his “free expression”.
Likewise, the writer who writes that which is disliked by the Jewish lobby will not be arrested in the USA, but may find that he cannot get books published by mainstream publishing houses. The academic who tries to expand the boundaries may find that tenure is denied, or employment terminated.
Now, in the Internet age of social media, we find that the major platforms for freedom of expression are not properly public, but private organizations, private enterprises, which can decide on almost any basis to prohibit any named individual from posting. Amazon, ebay (which e.g. allows Soviet but not German Third Reich memorabilia), Facebook, Twitter. These organizations are either owned or largely owned or strongly influenced (and staffed) by Jewish Zionists.
I spoke in February 2017 at the London Forum about, inter alia, the “privatization of public space” in this regard. Now, the “alt-right” personality Richard Spencer has echoed me from the United States, talking about how the fora of the past were public, but the (online) “fora” of the present age private, thus able to exclude those whose views are not approved by the owners of the websites (or the commercial advertizers thereon).
UK and EU
The above “privatization of the forum” (or fora) applies not only in the USA, but in the UK and other EU states. The EU has already (in most states) criminalized “holocaust” “denial” (examination and/or revision of that historical narrative). It has also forged ahead (under Jewish-Zionist control or influence) with plans to penalize Twitter, Facebook etc if the “wrong” symbols, cartoons, views are hosted.
In the UK, several people are now facing trial at the instigation of Jewish-Zionists: Alison Chabloz, Jez Turner, others. Whatever happens to them will be of significance for freedom of expression.
We now hear that Twitter is planning further purges, this month (November 2017), and on or about 22 December. Those changes may well mean the end of Twitter as a useful place online on which to exchange ideas. We shall see. I myself am half-expecting to be removed.
In the end, the consolation must be to remember that no revolution or takeover of any state has ever happened via social media, though online propaganda has helped one or two offline campaigns to achieve success. Boots on the ground are what count.
Update, 23 December 2018
I was expelled from Twitter in mid-2018. No reason given (beyond weasel words), no appeal, no clarification. Many others have gone the same way. The only consolation has been the realization of how totally pointless and self-defeating tweeting is!
Update, 13 January 2021
Since my last update, over 2 years ago, the war on freedom of expresson has intensified. See my later blog posts.
Ian Robert Millard 