At the End of the …..?

Is there really an army of disenfranchised, thinking people out there? Is there any such thing as the Silent Majority? Or are we the Unaligned simply deluding ourselves?

Take a look at this – for once genuinely audited and official – statistic from today’s Daily Mirror:

The choice here is between whether the Government and its private assessors are incompetent, heartless or both. But the Tory Cabinet is unmoved by it. I’ve just experienced a lunch table of Conservative voters calling it ‘propaganda’. All of them voted to Remain in the European Union.

Now take a look at this piece of ‘logic’ from the Remoaner Left doing the rounds of the Twattering Classes at the minute:

Every time it pops up on my account, I give it the merciless hammering it deserves. I mean be fair – what kind of chairleg for a brain thinks the above is any kind of argument? The 18.6 million who can’t vote are under eighteen. Looking at the UK’s current child profile, a good 60% are under twelve. The almost 13 million who didn’t vote might have said anything from ‘let’s bomb Brussels’ to ‘I love Geli Merkel’. However, they couldn’t be arsed to undergo a sofaectomy: that’s their right, but they’re apathetic – so we have to assume most of them couldn’t care less.

Yet this exemplar of Stürm Abteilung Drongo drivel is being retweeted by people who seem otherwise normal. Almost all of them are of the Left. All of them voted to Remain in the European Union.

Yesterday, I posted this piece using the right apertures of US time and media to get it noticed:

It’s based on a piece from the Murdoch-owned NY Post; not the best of sources, but it merely records what the Clinton Foundation confirmed last Friday: Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accepted the gift from the Qataris when she was Secretary of State in charge of Middle East foreign policy and didn’t declare it. The rest of the US (largely pro-Clinton) media blanked it.

In the last 24 hours I’ve corresponded with three US Democrats who claim to be “sick of this Get Hillary campaign”.

The Slogpost hits were the equivalent of those one might expect from ‘Mayor opens Church fete despite rain’. So imagine Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary (because he is) and takes a £1m gift from NATO HQ before refusing to condemn the devious US policy in Syria. Sadly, it’s very easy to imagine: Boris had a meeting with Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks the day before he held a press conference to say that Hackgate was “a waste of police time and just left-wing poppycock”.

I must’ve spoken to dozens of Boris-lovers over the years, all of whom think my distrust of the man to be “an obsession”.

I’ve reached the uncomfortable conclusion over the last few years that Western “first world” electorates have lost the capacity for independent thought and balanced analysis. Furthermore – and I assert this with no affectation whatsoever – I have run out of ideas about how one might change this.

When people can see a 20 year old yob and think him a vulnerable child, see National Debt figures and still think there is a point to starving the citizenry, lose a referendum and invent daft reasons for declaring the result invalid, see glaring evidence of criminality in public life and defend it, know the track record of Government spending waste but then accept anti-Waspi lies about there being “no money left”, support neocon failure, forget socialist failure, turn a blind eye to Labour MP hypocrisies and Tory MP cronyism….when voters can perceive all this and still vote for the bastards because ‘they’re our bastards’, then I give up.

How can the Labour Party support the EU of the Tories, with its track record of austerity, wage repression and illegal sovereign bullying? Because it is peopled the by same moral acrobats who stuck with the Soviets after the 1939 Nazi pact, and the 1956 crushing of Hungary.

All these examples are symptoms of ideological tribalism; but such human wiring goes beyond politics: it suffuses fiscal, financial, economic, business, trade, religious and societal behaviour. I can’t say ‘thinking’ here, because no objectively balanced thinking is involved.

So let’s return – in a last ditch attempt to revive some optimism here – to the daft four quartiles of the Remainian nitwit from earlier on.

In the referendum, a whopping 13 million people didn’t vote. Fair enough, I was rude about them….and I suspect a lot of them deserve it. But allow me to ask two simple questions:

1. How many of them didn’t vote because – regardless of the occasion – they just don’t see any point any more? And more broadly,
2. How many citizens in Britain – or the US, or France, or Greece – get to the polling booth every five years or whatever, and think ‘I don’t like any of these Parties’?

Because I am here to tell you, if it isn’t one shedload of a lot of people, then there is no hope whatsoever. And the great thing about banging one’s head against the stockade walls is, the relief once you stop is wonderful.