Tag Archives: precariat

AfD, Alt-Right, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, daily blog, Defence, diary blog, elections, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Kemi Badenoch, Labour Friends of Israel, Matt Goodwin, MPs, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, Sophie Meaden, Spiked, Starmer, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 19 November 2025

2 Comments

Afternoon music

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Atterberg]
[Freedom of the Human Spirit statue, Birmingham, Michigan, USA]

Tweets seen

Zelensky— Jew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy#Early_life

Mindich— Jew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur_Mindich#Early_life

Was it ever likely to be anything else?

Ukraine under Zelensky’s regime is, literally, both owned and controlled by individuals born in Ukraine but who are not Ukrainian. Call them “Khazars” if you like…

[“affecting“, not “effecting“… (sliding standards everywhere)…never mind, though; the point is a good if obvious one].

Sterilization should be on the table. In fact, the very threat of that might make them take “voluntary” deportation. Worth thinking about. Worth doing, too.

[“We have a serious problem regarding severe mental illness down here in Plymouth. It is quite a poor city and there is a massive drug culture down here as well – and especially in the area this incident happened. Nothing has been the same since lockdown down here. Things drastically changed after and it has just been getting worse and worse since. I speak about how mass immigration has massively impacted Plymouth since the Boris Wave often but we also have problems with some of our own here with committing serious crimes. I have lived here for 13 years and Plymouth never used to be like this.“]

Even when I would drive to Plymouth to appear at the Plymouth County Court (between 2002 and 2007), the city was not a place where I would linger once my work there was done. It could be a great city, but is not, and for several reasons, one being the obvious uselessness of the local government there.

From late 2005 to 2008, I also took the ferry between Plymouth and Roscoff (Brittany) every week or two, because I lived half the time on the French side. I did not visit the city itself much before evening embarkation, though I would sometimes get a fish and chips in the city beforehand.

More tweets seen

Neither side in that very unfortunate war should be targeting civilians (regardless of whether that is the case here), but the Kiev regime has been targeting Russian and Ukrainian civilians since 2014, a decade before the war as such, or recognized as such, even began.

…which this blog has been highlighting for the past 9 years…

When I was subjected to my free speech trial (in late 2023, and at the instigation of the malicious pack of Jew-Zionists called “Campaign Against Antisemitism” or “CAA”), the rather poor Counsel instructed by the Crown Prosecution Service (some youngish fellow called Phillip Allman) put to me, as part of his brief (and, frankly, unskilled) cross-examination, that the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan was a “conspiracy theory“. I retorted that it was not, and that all he had to do was look around him to see that. Collapse of not very stout cross-examination…

You only have to look around you to see the flooding of the UK, especially England, especially the English cities, by the migration invasion.

[“OUR FREE-SPEECH DOCUMENTARY HAS BEEN CANCELLED THE RICH MIX CINEMA HAS BANNED OUR PREMIERE, BECAUSE OUR FILM DOES NOT ALIGN WITH ITS ‘VALUES’.

You would think that banning a documentary about free speech would be a bad look for a cultural institution. But that’s precisely what Rich Mix in east London has just done.

We were all set to hold the premiere of our documentary, Think Before You Post, about the rise of the British speech police, at Rich Mix on Tuesday 25 November. But last night, we received an email saying the venue would be ‘terminating [our] booking contract’. ‘Since confirming your booking, it has come to light that the content and speakers featured do not align with our values and mission here at Rich Mix’, reads the email. ‘Our founding objectives are to support marginalised communities (primarily communities facing racial inequity), promote intercultural understanding, eliminate racial discrimination, and foster equality of opportunity through arts and culture.’

Those of you who have watched the documentary might be wondering what this is getting at. After all, the film is about the people who have been arrested, prosecuted and even held on remand for alleged speechcrime – even though they hadn’t said anything the least bit hateful.

Rich Mix claims that the ‘nature of the event was not fully disclosed to us upon booking’. This is despite the fact the documentary was already available to watch online when we snagged the slot. And all of the speakers who were due to take part in the post-screening Q&A were in the film itself.

I wish I could say I was surprised. The cultural sector is overrun with woke scolds who wouldn’t know what free speech is if it bit them on the backside. The gentleman who emailed us about the cancellation naturally had his pronouns in his email signature, too.

This isn’t even the first time our documentary about censorship has been censored. On X, it has been slapped with age restrictions, despite having no age-inappropriate content in it, thanks to the illiberal Online Safety Act.

I suppose we should be happy to have been proven right. But vindication is cold comfort when it comes at the cost of a great evening of screening the film and discussing it with our contributors, friends and – most importantly – supporters.

If you have bought tickets, please bear with us. We are working flat-out to find a new venue for the same night. But if we fail to do so, we will of course refund everyone in full, and postpone for a later date. (If you’d like a refund now anyway, just get in touch and we’ll process it.)

In any case, we are determined not to be silenced. Clearly, the core message of Think Before You Post – for free speech and against censorship – is more important than ever. Even if it doesn’t jive with the sacred ‘values’ of Rich Mix.“]

[Spiked magazine]

Late tweets seen

That Jew is lying. Quelle surprise...

So more Jewish/Zionist influence at the heart of Reform UK…

That one is a co-founder, and executive director, of the NWO/ZOG pressure group, the Henry Jackson Society.

For me, Reform is good for one thing only— to smash the long-running System “two main parties” scam. Once that happens, it can fall away and burn, like the booster rockets at space launches.

I wrote on the blog, about 3-4 years ago, that Keir Starmer, “slightly to my surprise“, was turning out to be “utterly clueless“. Was I right or wrong? I think, right…

That msm talking head, Goodall, though, should take into account the sea-change in UK society over the past half-century. I have discussed this on the blog a number of times over the years.

The “industrial proletariat” no longer exists except in small scattered places, like an endangered species. What does exist is the Welfare State’s version of a modern lumpenproletariat, whether white “chavscum” or the equally cultureless, value-less, and raceless, black/brown hordes.

Then we have the associated but slightly different “precariat” of people sometimes employed, sometimes self-employed, sometimes unemployed. People without much job security or life security. Very widespread. Regular readers of the blog may have seen a few of my own experiences in that regard.

What does misnamed (now) “Labour” have to say to all of those? Not much, certainly not since 1989, and even less since Starmer-stein, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper took over..

Those demographic elements also suggest considerable political volatility.

Starmer-Labour is a nullity. Stands for nothing. Achieves nothing. Its MPs are little nothings. Starmer-stein himself is spiritually empty, a political and personal nothing, in the pocket of the Israel lobby, and motivated only by careerism and money-grasping.

[“I’ve been getting a lot of messages recently from people thanking me for speaking up about everything going on. I never spoke up to get money, notoriety or a career from this. I was just absolutely sick to death with what our country has become and the South West of England in particular. I was in a far better position than most to speak out too as I didn’t have much to financially lose in doing so and no children who would be affected if that was to happen. But getting these messages has been nice and especially when I’m having a bad day and questioning if I should have done this face out in the first place. I don’t regret my decision overall, I think my message has spread far more being face out, but it has become quite isolating at times due to a lot of people in my personal life still under the Marxism spell. Things are definitely changing though. A lot more people are getting just as sick as me from it all and I’m seeing a lot more people now adopt a more ethnonationalism approach to our country’s situation. May it continue. Liberate England.”]

Chris Curtis MP: an unpleasant little (bum?) boy, and with little real experience of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Curtis_(politician).

I doubt that the said Curtis will be in Parliament after the next general election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes_North#Elections_in_the_2020s.

[“No! Wait! I voted Labour!”…]

It can only be a matter of time before the people of Britain take matters into their own hands.

Late music

Alison Chabloz, Alt-Right, animal welfare, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, Conservative Friends of Israel, daily blog, Deadhead MPs, Defence, diary blog, environment, ethnostate, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Ian Millard, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Jez Turner, Labour Friends of Israel, Liz Truss, MPs, Party Politics, Russia and Russian relations, society, The Great Replacement, the Great Reset, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 18 February 2023

5 Comments

Morning music

On this day a year ago

Diary Blog, 18 February 2022

Saturday quiz

Well, a poor result this week, both for me and for political journalist John Rentoul— we both scored only 3/10. I did get the answers to questions 3, 4, and 9, arguably the easiest ones. John Rentoul got the same questions right that I got right.

I thought that I had question 1 nailed with “boudin“, but (I think) it turns out that that is a different kind of sausage. Not sure. If “boudin“ is the right answer, then I scored 4/10. [update: just saw the official answers, and the right answer for that question is not boudin, so a mere 3/10 it is, one of my worst results on this weekly quiz].

“Prevent”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11764775/Yes-Minister-flagged-beleaguered-counter-terror-Prevent-scheme.html

No-one who has seen the tweets posted on Twitter by some of the semi-educated cretins identifying themselves as belonging to “Prevent”, or its associated bodies, will have been surprised at the recent storm of criticism around it. Indeed, I myself blogged about the nonsense several years ago: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/05/30/one-mans-extremism-is-another-mans-struggle-for-liberty-and-justice/.

Now it turns out that the kind of tendentious idiots they employ have compiled a list of books, films, and TV series which “might interest the [so-called] “far-right”:

“Some of Britain’s most popular sitcoms and greatest works of literature were flagged as potential signs of far-Right extremism by a counter-terror programme.

The flagship Prevent scheme, recently the subject of a scathing audit, singled out comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters, and even The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare as possible red flags of extremism.

The taxpayer-funded document included references to The Lord Of The Rings by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1984 by George Orwell and the poems of GK Chesterton. It also referenced films including The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Great Escape and Zulu.

Works by some of the world’s greatest writers were included as examples of warning signs of potential extremism, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Kipling and Edmund Burke. 

It almost seems like a joke.

The report even highlighted the BBC’s 1990s political thriller House Of Cards, John le Carre’s seminal spy trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Sharpe, the ITV drama set in the Napoleonic wars.

Inexplicably, it said the BBC’s Great British Railway Journeys, presented by former Conservative minister Michael Portillo, was of interest to the far-Right.

Historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts said: ‘This is truly extraordinary. This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilised, liberal, cultured education.

Author Douglas Murray obtained the full list and discovered that one of his books had been given a red flag by Prevent.

Mr Murray wrote in The Spectator magazine: ‘A number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation… It seems that RICU is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem.’ He concluded that RICU’s work was ‘pathetic’ and called for ‘accountability’ for its errors and ‘sackings by the score’.

The list has emerged following a major review into the Prevent scheme by William Shawcross.

His report, published earlier this month, exposed serious failings in Prevent, warning that it applies a ‘double standard’ to Islamist and far-Right threats. The £49million-a-year scheme had prioritised countering far-Right activity above tackling the prime Islamist threat, it added.

The report said Prevent had scrutinised Right-wing material which ‘falls well short of the extremism threshold altogether’.“

[Daily Mail]

I should be prepared to bet that the mix of staff at “Prevent” includes dim types harvested from police and military “intelligence” rejects or retirees, probably quite a few embittered Asians or half-castes of the Neil Basu type and, very likely, Jews.

In fact, I should also be surprised were the Jew-Zionist element not very prominent or influential in all this, whether directly employed by “Prevent” or not. The notorious Jew-Zionist snoop organizations etc.

My blog post about this “Prevent” nonsense was written almost 5 years ago. Looks like I have been proven right again, if I say so myself…

A few cartoons which cover parts of the problem(s).

More from the newspapers

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11764867/GUY-ADAMS-reveals-Emerald-Isles-open-door-policy-refugees-hammering-tourist-industry.html

“Earlier this month, a migrant from Moldova who had arrived in Ireland in September was charged with sexually assaulting a girl in Ballymun, another working-class area of Dublin. At his bail hearing, the court heard he had suffered head injuries after being confronted by up to 40 ‘vigilantes’ before police arrived to arrest him.”

[Daily Mail]

In the immortal line of Windsor Davies, “oh dear…how sad…never mind...”

“Last month, there were two ugly incidents in Finglas, a working-class district of the city, after rumours spread on social media that a local girl had been raped by a man who had recently arrived in the country.

An angry mob of about 200 surrounded a police station where the suspect was allegedly being held, with a ringleader telling the crowd: ‘The only way to f*****g deal with these c***s is burn them out of the f*****g place.‘”

[Daily Mail]

“Byzantine planning laws mean that only about 25,000 homes are being built each year, and around 11,500 Irish people are classified as homeless.

One of them, George Sturdy, whom I met on a protest march in Dublin this week, told how he was living in a shared hotel room rented by the government, having been evicted from a static caravan.

‘I’ve been on a waiting list for a council home for six years, and know people who have been waiting for almost 20 years. There’s a crisis with homes for Irish people, and you see them throwing open doors. What do you expect people like me to think?’“

[Daily Mail]

The conspiracy is transnational, and operates in Ireland, in the UK, in Germany, and all over Europe. The Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan. Google it.

In Ireland, a major conspirator was the (thankfully now deceased) bastard called Peter Sutherland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland.

“Sutherland strongly advocated unrestricted immigration into the EU… multiculturalism is both inevitable and desirable…”the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine” any “sense of our homogeneity and difference from others...”

“Sutherland was the chairman of Allied Irish Banks (AIB) from 1989 until 1993.[15][3]“

“He was non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International“

“Sutherland was the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration until March 2017.[1][2] Appointed in January 2006, he was responsible for the creation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD).[1] He also served as President of the International Catholic Migration Commission, as well as a member of the Migration Advisory Board of the International Organization for Migration. He was a board member of Wallenberg-owned ABB and the Wallenbergs’ conglomerate holding company, Investor AB.”

“He served on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group until May 2014,[16] and was Honorary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission (from 2010), formerly Chairman of the Trilateral Commission (Europe) (2001–2010.”

[Wikipedia]

As I said, a truly major conspirator and enemy of Europe’s future.

Sutherland, totally tied-in with the transnational conspiracy (UN, WEF, GATT, WTO, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission etc), tweeted a couple of times against me when I still had a Twitter account (a pack of Jews had me expelled in 2018), but he died not long after that.

I usually say “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum” (“Of the dead, [say] nothing if not good“), but in his case, and the case of any like him, good riddance.

[“Get down there where you wanted to send me, you unclean spirit!“]

Tweets seen

Seems to confirm the general tenor of what I blogged a few days ago: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2023/02/15/diary-blog-15-february-2023/.

Part of the reason is simply that there are relatively few “working-class” jobs now. As blogged previously, in the UK, the old “proletariat” has been replaced —to a large extent— by both the “precariat” (people in unstable, shifting employment, and with periods of unemployment), and/or by a contemporary form of “lumpenproletariat” (the raceless, cultureless masses whose world revolves around trash TV, trash “music”, “selfies”, drugs, drink, cars, and State benefits).

https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1626879716371177472?s=20

Some of what Monbiot sometimes says is sometimes right, but here we see his ingrained, genetically-determined (?) Jewish urbanism outweigh his learned environmentalism, arguably.

Monbiot is in fact only half-Jewish.

Not that I (as supposed “far right” “extremist”) am on the side of farmers at all times, right or wrong. Far too many (in the UK) are just greedy grabbers and/or freeloaders (taking endless subsidies or other State payments).

However, there is (as in the Netherlands) a push now by sinister forces to destroy the countryside for entirely spurious environmental reasons; in reality, just another aspect of the attack by alien forces on the white Northern European people (yet another aspect being the push to get blacks and browns visiting the countryside and/or relocating from cities to rural areas).

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2016/11/17/social-nationalism-and-green-politics/.

More tweets seen

https://twitter.com/rhobson805/status/1626858271528353793?s=20

An enemy of humanity. Totally degenerate.

https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1626904667539005443?s=20

Very true.

Reading that, though, and seeing the reference to Arsene Wenger (a football manager), it once again strikes me how odd it is that (soccer) football has become the sine qua non for the UK middle classes.

It started in the 1990s, I think, maybe in the Blair years of the late 1990s. Now it is ubiquitous. Every politician has to at least pretend to “support” a football team, and you see both men and women, even professional men and women, not only “supporting” some team or other, but (apparently) genuinely and indeed passionately so.

It makes me wonder whether it is a substitute for ideas, ideology, or political partisanship, now that all the System parties are almost identical in policy terms and personnel, and now that any other ideological position apart from “mainstream” LibLabCon is deemed “extreme” (and probably “antisemitic”).

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/alarm-at-keir-starmers-selection-stitch-ups-has-spread-beyond-the-left_uk_63ea7625e4b07f036b9e842e

It makes me laugh that scribblers and MPs write much about the almost meaningless “right/left” labels, and occasionally about “antisemitism” (always from the viewpoint that it is, supposedly, “bad”), but rarely directly about the Jewish influence that now more than influences (put shortly, controls) the two main System parties.

I know what I would like to do to most of the MPs of both main System parties, and it would not be to vote for them.

Well, there it is. In this case political power certainly does come out of the barrel of a gun…

Not that the matter will ever be put to the actual Ukrainian people (beyond opinion polling). The regime of the Jew dictator Zelensky has shut down opposition parties, arrested the leaders and supporters of the same, and also banned trade unions and other organizations. His government may be, and is, a shambolic, kleptocratic mess, but when it comes to repressing political dissent it is efficient enough.

That of course is the problem faced by political leaders of any kind. They cannot be expert in all the fields over which their imprimatur is decisive, so it comes down to which “experts” or “specialists” they trust, unless their decisions are to be completely arbitrary in nature.

A political leader must inevitably always be a generalist, though he (or she) may be expert in one or two fields (eg Margaret Thatcher, a chemist who was also a tax barrister). However, what about all the other areas of policy, such as education, railways, military hardware, grand strategy, waste disposal and the general environment, intelligence and security etc?

You see all of that in the decisions of Adolf Hitler, among many others.

Hitler was, or became, fairly expert in some areas of military policy and strategy, and also knew much about art, architecture, and more academic fields such as history, religion and philosophy. In some other areas of policy or knowledge, he knew not much, yet had to decide upon them, a problem made worse by the structural constraints of the National Socialist state, meaning fuhrerprinzip or autocracy. The leader had to decide.

These factors affect the UK as well, for example at present. We have people who are pretty ignorant at the top (e.g. the recent Prime Ministers), and yet they have to decide high policy affecting diverse matters such as foreign policy, military and NHS procurement, law and order, freedom of expression, intelligence and security, transport etc.

There is no one answer, but having MPs, ministers, and prime ministers who are not such stupid deadheads as “Boris”-idiot, Liz Truss, Woollyhead Trussbanger (Kwasi Kwarteng), Therese Coffey etc would help.

Late tweets

https://twitter.com/RedSisterr/status/1627068299115892736?s=20

Incredible, even in an age of lazy and/or ignorant journalism. Has Guardian scribbler Gaby Hinsliff thought to examine the sheer volume of mendacious invention built into the “Jack Monroe” “backstory” and fundraising? Evidently not, even though numerous really poverty-stricken people have been fleeced by the so-called “Bootstrap Cook”.

Which continues. As of today, 502 utter mugs each continue to send “Jack Monroe” between £3.50 and £44 a month, every month, via the Patreon website…

“and your point is, Monsieur Vetter?“…

I wonder when “climate journo” Vetter last took a European city break trip, or perchance even a long-haul holiday to Africa or East Asia? In the world of “climate change” activism, as with the “refugees welcome” types, hypocrisy usually rules supreme.

https://twitter.com/AlbionRisingXXI/status/1626941315358261248?s=20

Society would be better off if every one of those interviewees ceased to exist.

The Jews have been screeching about Roald Dahl for years, mainly because he recognized what Jews are like even while (in my view wrongly) saying also that Adolf Hitler was “a stinker” (Dahl also said that he was right about the Jews and their behaviour).

I doubt, though, that Toby Young’s “Free Speech Union” will mention the fact that the Jews are behind the attack on Roald Dahl. The “FSU” has never said a word to protest expressly against the Jew-Zionist attacks on free speech in the UK and elsewhere; neither has it said a word in defence of those persecuted by Jew-Zionist orgs which have persistently made false accusations to Twitter, Facebook, employers, professional and regulatory organizations, police etc; see my own experience (of several), dating back about 18 months: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2022/01/15/diary-blog-15-january-2022-including-an-outline-of-the-failure-of-the-latest-jew-zionist-attempt-to-prosecute-me/.

https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1626965946001764352?s=20
https://twitter.com/RealBlackIrish/status/1626955448283717634?s=20

As blogged above, I was on this 5 years ago: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/05/30/one-mans-extremism-is-another-mans-struggle-for-liberty-and-justice/

Late music

daily blog, diary blog, free speech, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, the Great Reset, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 25 August 2022, with a few thoughts about poverty and living through hard times

20 Comments

Morning music

[Marianske Lazne, former Marienbad, Czech Republic]

On this day a year ago

Diary Blog, 25 August 2021, with more about Extinction Rebellion

Greta Nut

A commentator on the blog reminded me of the clip below, not seen for a long time:

[when not accepted as a “world leader”…]

I still think that the most telling thing about Greta Thunberg is how the decadent mainstream media, politicians etc at least pretend to take this uneducated and afflicted girl (now 19) as some kind of sage, when actually she has nothing to offer. It says something about the world we are in today.

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/09/29/greta-thunberg-system-approved-wunderkind/.

Latvia

https://twitter.com/SGMWorldnews/status/1562374332885925888?s=20&t=-gCM0twK9EUe5l3VMWsWVA

Levits— a half-Jew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egils_Levits.

“Jack” Monroe, the “Bootstrap Cook”; some thoughts about “poverty”

https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1562532759741927424?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg
https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1562534361656086528?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg
https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1562536693621698562?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg
https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1562538365458989056?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg
https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1562544656868868098?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg

I thought that it was worth reposting those tweets, which refer to the Twitter storm around “Jack” Monroe, aka “Bootstrap Cook” (mentioned in yesterday’s blog).

I have no particular animus against “Bootstrap Cook”, and I should imagine that many find her recipes and other advice very useful [see https://cookingonabootstrap.com/category/recipes-food/], but it is clear that she herself is not (now) in what most people would regard as poverty.

As to my own experiences of “poverty”, I have had some pretty low moments from time to time over the years, for example after I returned to the UK in Spring 1998, after a few months living in Egypt [https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/03/07/when-i-was-not-arrested-in-egypt/].

Was I myself “in poverty” when I returned to London? It certainly seemed so!

Think living in a single room in a flat (provided by a friend of a friend— eventually, and very belatedly, months later, paid for by Housing Benefit). Think living largely off tiny State benefit for 3-4 months (monies also delayed for weeks). Think having to be a little bit “creative” in finding ways to travel around London, and equally “creative” in finding out how to increase supply of food and reading material (mainly books).

Yet only a few years before, I had quite often been paid, as Counsel, £1,000 or more for often quite brief (less than half a day) appearances in the High Court or elsewhere.

Later, living in the former Soviet Union in 1996-97, my home was a kind of large penthouse with a very wide wraparound balcony, I had a former MVD car and driver to ferry me to my office etc, a Rolex Seadweller on my wrist, and I rarely carried less than USD $5,000 on my person.

Incidentally, barristers reading this might sneer at the modesty of those High Court fees (perhaps a tenth or a twentieth of the fees some now get and even back then received), but this was 1993-95, nearly 30 years ago, and I was only just out of pupillage (on-the-job training). Anyway, it seemed good at the time to me.

What those born into wealth usually fail to know, having never experienced it, is how quickly a comfortable lifestyle can disappear, without personal capital or family money as a safety net.

When I was living on pennies —and my wits— in the London of March-June 1998, I often walked past Julie’s restaurant in Notting Hill, a restaurant patronized by film stars and other “celebrities”, and a place which I had previously visited several times, only 2-3 years before, and arriving in a large white Mercedes (a girlfriend’s car).

Maybe 3 years later, in 1998, I would have been unable to buy a coffee in the same restaurant, and I wondered whether those staring out of the windows could perceive somehow just how poor I was (maybe a subjective and resentful thought: after all, the Rolex may have gone, but I was still clad in an Austin Reed overcoat and Dents leather gloves etc).

There is no need for me to say more about that very pinched time in my life. Adolf Hitler had it worse, in the Vienna of 1909-1912. Eventually, my several months of poverty came to an end and then, less than a year after I had returned penniless to London, I was spending time living in a villa in the Caribbean, with a private beach (in effect), though those sometimes pleasant months sadly did not become sybaritic years (though I did spend much of 1999 in and around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico— several Caribbean islands, and the Gulf Coast of Florida).

I later had more ups and downs, but that is enough for today.

I do not know a great deal in detail about “Jack” Monroe, the Bootstrap Cook, but I would guess that she knows a lot about “precarious” life in the Britain of today. Occasional poverty, occasional plenty, but not much security either way.

Many many people in Britain in 2022 are part of that “precariat”. This has political implications. Labour was the party of the industrial “proletariat”, mainly, a class which is now all but non-existent. “Bootstrap Cook”, leaving aside her personal predilections, is in that sense far more typical of the masses than would be the Soviet-style miner, rail worker, or other member of the organized labour force, insofar as such people still exist in the UK.

If there were a credible social-national movement in the UK, the “Bootstrap Cook” would probably not support it, but the “precariat” in general would, especially as inflation, low pay, and low State benefits all start to bite.

More tweets seen

https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1555712937037373443?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg

Well, £600 is not a fortune for a watch these days (any of my one-time Rolex Seadwellers would be £10,000-£15,000 in 2022), but I take her point.

https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1555719796230062080?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg
https://twitter.com/Interloper369/status/1555723439079555074?s=20&t=vcu58Agmui_PzOkpagYUvg

…on the other hand, Bootstrap Cook is, after all, from Essex, the home of “bling”…

Meanwhile, though the @norfolkchatter1 Twitter account has disappeared, the storm around the Bootstrap Cook has, if anything, intensified, with many Twit-people (including the terminally “woke”) supporting her, but also with many others either criticizing her or demanding to know exactly how much capital or income she really has at her disposal, and asking whether she is exploiting people who donate to her when they really cannot afford to do so.

Legitimate questions, arguably, though it is almost axiomatic that the poor (however defined) do donate more generally than the wealthy or not poor (however defined), relative to income. Also, people are assumed to be compos mentis; if they want to donate to someone, that is their choice. There are many worthwhile-seeming appeals around: see, e.g. https://www.gofundme.com/f/judith-thorpe-funeral-children-fund; and https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-if-you-can-help-to-keep-our-boy-safe.

[Incidentally, I do not know anyone involved in either of the two GoFundMe appeals above; I just happened to see them].

“Covid” “panicdemic”

Looks like reality has started, finally, to break through…

Late tweets seen

https://twitter.com/ThomPain4/status/1562761733302673410?s=20&t=3pzw9xC8zd76pfKZEIeh2A

Sometimes I wonder what, WHAT, would make the mass of British people wake up to the “panicdemic”, the nonsense measures such as facemask-wearing that were part of the scam, or to the “support Ukraine” propaganda or, as in that tweet, the very real dangers of the “Covid” “vaccines”, but I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that nothing, nothing at all, will awaken the masses. A “victory” by a football team, or whatever absolute shite is on “reality” (unreality) TV that week, and the real and important issues are forgotten again.

Maybe after the nuclear war with Russia that so many have been brainwashed into (as they imagine) wanting to see, the survivors will see their reality more clearly.

Late music

Alt-Right, basic income, ethnostate, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Threefold Social Order, Uncategorized

The Society of Measure

2 Comments

In the mid-20th century, especially in the 1960s, it was commonplace to see articles or features about the supposed coming “age of leisure” which would be facilitated by machines and advanced industrial techniques. Now (since the 1980s), those predictions are often laughed at, as society (eg in the UK) finds itself enmeshed in the “long hours culture”, the workaholic culture, the low pay economy. Was this inevitable?

The fact is, that the predictions of the past about a future “society of leisure” left out one crucial fact in particular: that the benefits of industrial efficiency and the emerging developments in computing, robotics etc would be taken by the owners of capital, by shareholders and others.

Since the 1970s, real pay (whether absolute or per hour) of most employees has stagnated and indeed even declined across the advanced Western world generally. At the same time, the profit accruing to capital and the remuneration of the upper strata of executives, higher managers and their professional counterparts has rocketed.

The above was true to some extent even in the Soviet Union, except that there, the developments in technology and efficiency were not spread equally across all industrial sectors and the benefits were used mainly for State power and prestige: military and naval upbuilding, space programmes and other large-scale projects such as the BAM railway.

The result (focussing on the West and particularly the UK) is that people have to work ever-longer hours for ever-lessening real pay. If public services, amenities and State benefits are taken into account, the contrast between the optimistic promises and predictions of the 1960s and 1970s on the one hand and the realities of 2016 on the other is even more stark.

There is another factor to be taken into consideration: there are three “work/leisure” faces:

  • work as unwelcome and/or repetitive drudgery, with little free time;
  • leisure as mere absence of work, for whatever reason;
  • creative work, balanced with stimulating leisure or free time

Adolf Hitler was referring, by implication, to the above alternative lifestyles when he noted “the Aryan ideal of creative work“, to be contrasted with (as he saw it) uncreative Jewish profit-making, as well as equally-uncreative paid drudgery [see Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf 2:7]. In explaining, for example, the symbolism of the red-white-black NSDAP banner, Hitler wrote:

“And indeed a symbol it proved to be. Not only because it incorporated those revered colours expressive of our homage to the glorious past and which once brought so much honour to the German nation, but this symbol was also an eloquent expression of the will behind the movement. We National Socialists regarded our flag as being the embodiment of our party programme. The red expressed the social thought underlying the movement. White the national thought. And the swastika signified the mission allotted to us — the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind and at the same time the triumph of the ideal of creative work which is in itself and always will be anti-Semitic.”

In our contemporary society, we see the temporary victory of uncreative work/leisure modes: on the one hand, soul-less profiteering (whether by manipulations on stock and bond markets or by buy-to-let parasitism etc); on the other hand, everyday work becoming less and less interesting for most people. Soul-less economic serfdom. Creativity and a decent work/life balance become the province of the artist, the maverick off-grid person, the creative writer. Most people are excluded.

At the same time, those without paid work and who are under pensionable age cannot even enjoy the one major benefit of being unemployed: leisure! They are harried and chased around by Department of Work and Pensions drones. In other words, in place of actual paid work, there is a ghastly and ghostly simulacrum of work consisting of the tick-box applying for (often non-existent) job vacancies or the attending of pointless “courses”, in return for which the unemployed claimant is paid a shadow version of a very low real salary: State benefits.

It is estimated that, between now and 2030 or so, developments in robotics alone will mean that 20%-30% of UK jobs will disappear, including some presently “professional” ones (eg in the medical and legal fields). The numbers of unemployed, under-employed and poorly-paid will increase. The “precariat” will include ever-more people.

The solution to all of the above is not a “society of leisure” but a “society of measure”:

  • strict limits on hours worked by employees, perhaps 30 hours per week;
  • strict enforcement of break-times within the working day;
  • strict demarcation between work-time and free-time (leisure time);
  • strict limitations or barring of employees being “on call” when at home;
  • payment to all citizens of “Basic Income”
  • more equitable distribution of the fruits of the economy.

Such a society will have time for those important things which have traditionally been part of “leisure time”: home, family, culture, rest, sleep, entertainment, sport. This must be the way to go and will cure many of the ills of the present society.

Text reference link:

http://www.angelfire.com/folk/bigbaldbob88/MeinKampf.pdf