Credo

The problem with The Left is that they don’t care.

Oh, they care all right about their fellow men - with a few designated exceptions who are beyond the pale - and often do a great deal to improve the lives of those whom they touch. But they are at a stage now in their ascendancy (read ‘hegemony’ if you agree with me that The Left includes the leadership of the Tory Party) where the way things are out in the phenomenal world, as well as the cognitive world, can not exist if they contradict their big picture.

Yes, that reality.

Thanks to David Duff of the awesome Duff and Nonsense, here are a few pieces about Britain, Europe, and the world’s economic prospects, and here’s one I dug up ages ago.

If you can’t be bothered to read them now – it’s a work day and many of you must be busy about your morning devotions or hoping that the antacids are going to be effective today or that The Pill was last night – here are some tasters; taken totally out of context and utterly unrelated to any connections that the writers might have to radical or militant groups:

We can only wonder at the Gramscian genius of those who have carried out this semantic inversion. To want to preserve your parliamentary democracy is extreme; to want to give more power to unelected functionaries is moderate. To consult the people is swivel-eyed; to connive at their disfranchisement is level-headed. To keep your promise of a referendum is obsessive; to break it is sensible. To have kept the pound was xenophobic whereas to have subjected Britain to the chaos now overtaking the euro-zone would have been… oh, you get my point…

This argument is too big, too important, to be reduced to an intra-party row.

And

One of Brown and Darling's favourite wheezes was to hide government liabilities 'off balance sheet' - the same kind of notorious business practice that led to the bankruptcy of the Enron energy trading concern almost ten years ago and Lehman investment bank in 2008.

They did this through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby the government built hospitals, schools and other public enterprises using money borrowed from the private sector which will have to be paid back like mortgages over a long period…..

In all, I guess that the black hole at the heart of the Treasury accounts as a result of 13 years of New Labour fraud and neglect is not far short of £2 trillion, or about £40,000 for every family in Britain.

And

Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked - shocked - to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.

That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom's aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn't, everything will go pear-shaped.

And

Contrary to Mr Purnell's assertion, Labour's debt pile-up preceded the credit crunch. As a state, we had become addicted to the never-never. In 2003, the Budget deficit was £28 billion, then £33 billion in 2004, £32 billion in 2005, £36 billion in 2006, £34 billion in 2007 and £43 billion in 2008.

From 2003-2008 inclusive, the Chancellor's overspend as a percentage of the Government's annual outlay ranged between 5.8 per cent and 7 per cent, with the average being 6.4 per cent. In his 2008 Budget, Alistair Darling predicted GDP growth of 1.75-2.25 per cent, yet still planned to borrow £43 billion.

This is a core structural deficit, which has nothing to do with the financial crisis "that began in America", as Mr Brown likes to incant. It was akin to a family with a weekly income of £500 spending £532 every week for six years. At first, the process is not ruinous, but trouble accumulates until something unexpectedly bad happens – then, the finances whizz out of control.

Now, the above doom-mongering is not based on top-secret information: most of it is published by the government and discussed in Parliament though some of it has indeed been sleight-of-hand shifted out of sight. But you don’t have to go to a Whitehall cocktail party disguised as the Ecuadorian ambassador’s wife, break into the Treasury’s state-of-the-art security programme with hacking software from a key card hidden in your powder compact, kick box a couple of beret-wearing security guards unconscious and download the data to a secure CIA server in a safe house in Marseilles to find out where much of these figures are from.

Curiously, great national institutions tasked with looking for, presenting and discussing such weighty matters; such as our national broadcaster seem to be uninterested in all this dry as bones economic stuff.

You might remember the many hagiographical farewell statements by Labour MPs and other Leftie politicians that were allowed to go on uninterrupted since Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister – at least uninterrupted by questions like But isn’t this the man whose housing bubble, financial regulation with a light touch and public sector spending spree have laid waste to the public finances and encouraged the once-thrifty British people to get into massive personal debt?

What’s going on here?

In the past few weeks I’ve encountered Left-wing people of various stripes dismissing national bankruptcy with a wave of the hand on one occasion and silence and a swift subject change on the other. A couple of them have expressed the certainty that with the Tories in all our jobs will go and one who said they’d never vote Tory and others still have stated the European Union could have been a loose free-trading Federation in line with Britain if only Mrs. Thatcher had negotiated better and another smiling at the possibility of UKIP and the BNP’s vote keeping the Tory candidate from Westminster enough times to prevent Mr. Cameron having an absolute majority: Right-wingers are just a few, powerless cranks on the fringes or (depending whether you’re Liberal or Reformed), secretly running the ConDem coalition to favour Big Business or The Military or Whoever it is that conservatives really work for.

These are good people: the folk who are making Britain work – to the extent that Britain is working at all - in the public and private sectors. These are the folk in charge and with the money time and motivation to effect politics as well as taking part in political discourse.

And yet the facts of the matter become moonshine as soon as political belief comes into play.

Let’s a few of take paraphrases:

‘Oh, bankrupt!’

I’m not sure here whether the fact are held to be irrelevant or untrue, but they could be easily checked, so whatever’s going on here either implies that national bankruptcy is no big deal (perhaps when there are children in Africa starving or whatever) or whether it isn’t going to happen because the wrong kind of messenger is giving the message, but all those noughts that the commentators above are discussing are, well, worth nowt for some reason.

‘I could never in my life vote Tory.’

Again, I can understand a person being soured for a long time by a party’s earlier actions, as in my youth I was by Labour’s previous thorough economic rape of Britain, and as I currently am with the hilariously-named Conservative Party. But the way we are governed really matters in that it has real-world effects and here’s an active, philanthropic, utterly decent pillar of the community (way up the social scale from petit bourgeois me I should point out) stating implicitly that if a formerly disliked and wrong-headed party changed much of its personnel and all of its policies to ones with which such a person could now agree, and even if that party alone subsequently proposed measures clearly tending to the public good and even to national salvation and all the others proposed to continue in folly, then they still would not do so due to that earlier prejudice.

‘…before Cameron’s axe falls on us all.’

Really? I mean, did he ever look at the Tories’ pre-election spending plans? Can’t he at least look for the string of noughts mentioned above and see that little Georgie Osborn’s ‘cuts’ were, with multiple symbolism, intended to be mere pin-pricks: and that’s before the LibDems decided to sign my daughter’s soul into a longer period of debt slavery by producing this grey buffet of economic finger-food and snot-filled pastry cases.

As for the others; read the Treaty of Rome, which, like The Koran, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf can be read in translation so you can see what their authors said, what they did from the start, and compare words and actions to discover how those words were interpreted and thus to understand where we’re all going with this; look closely at the ‘ever-closer union’ phrase as the motor of a movement that Mrs. Thatcher could never have turned around into a mere free-trading negotiating bloc and customs union.

Also look at the EU referendum post about UKIP and, ahem, another Eurosceptic party’s success in keeping Cameron out of Number Ten in his own right.

I don’t suppose for a minute that any amount of factual persuasion – in the sense of asking people of the leftist mind-set to research the facts and think about them, and to compare the names and labels of the parties and their slogans and boasts with what’s actually going on in the world – will change most of their minds much about any of this stuff. One or two maybe, but it’s a lot of prejudice to overcome.

The reason that the Left in all its glory doesn’t care, deep down, about facts you can describe with numbers or demonstrate with eye-witness accounts or by reading original texts, is that long ago the culture war was won by the Left: so much so that its members are unwilling to look contradictory facts in the face, as it were, because the facts tell a different story from their orthodoxy.
Facts such as those above are to be treated as blasphemous because they can show a reality that is heretical.

So: first offenders sent to prison after their first conviction for something minor will surely come out knowing how to burgle homes and offices better than when they went in as old lags show them how in exchange for drugs or sexual favours. Children who are encouraged to order their own learning and provided with enough books and other resources and the minimum of guidance will usually do so and thus not require whole class teaching in specific subjects or the structure of a teacher at the front of the class: they will certainly not major in sand pit and Wendy house if left alone. Immigrants will always import new arts and crafts and music styles and delicious new cuisines and never the home country attitudes that have made migration to racist Hell-hole Britain so attractive in comparison that they’ll risk the violence of armed police and traffickers, suffocation in ships’ inner hulls, containers and lorries, and being trafficked as meat and shark-infested seas.

Life’s like that: it’s not any other way. It just can’t be.

And that’s the rub: it’s why teaching unions will never accept parental choice and the BBC will never ask what right a government has to tax sugary drinks to restrict consumption or why it might be harmful to peoples’ lives for Britain to enter into international unions with other economically unstable states: we’re not dealing with a political movement her but rather a religion.

And all that means that we on the Right are in trouble.

You don’t have to allow unbelievers free speech uninterrupted by orthodox counter-comments and interruptions during ‘news’ programmes. You aren’t obliged to hire contrary views when you pick new History Fellows or social studies professors for your university. You don’t have to think about the source and the scarcity of public funds when subsidizing trade union renewal or deciding which non-governmental organisations will receive your generous support for the next fiscal year.

Our rulers are in church, and we must stay respectfully silent.

However it is that we on the Right might seek to build a governing party or coalition, it isn’t going to occur on anything like a level playing field: that possibility died years ago.

Quite how we’re going to get through to the people who alone might one day vote our faithful owners out now that heresy hunting is all but official policy in the media and educational classes, I’m not sure.

Picture from here.