CULTURAL CROSSROADS: media dumbdown & Left meltdown leave UK on cliff-edge

The truly astonishing opinion encapsulated below was expressed in an article at The Times website by James Forsyth this morning. Before I get into the meat of its flawed asumptions (and odd attempt to present democracy and liberty as interchangeable) let me just say that, on paper, Forsyth represents the cream of the crop: schooled at Winchester and degreed at Jesus College Cambridge. In a paper, however, the failure leaves me depressed and scared in equal measure:

Starting at Page 1, neither Taiwan nor South Korea are liberal democracies in the classic meaning; and both countries are riddled with corruption throughout the democratic process. Countries that tap phones – and, you have to laugh, persuade people to spy on themselves using Apps – are not liberal democracies. All democracies do this, all of them are wrong, and none of them are liberal.

Forsyth is wrong to even suggest that Europeans ‘would never bear such infringements’: they already do, everywhere. Our States all have intelligence services, they all have social media that censor anything “off message”, and they all have a mass media set that long ago stopped investigating what the Establishment thinks in any kind of critical manner.

James finds it hard to see the difference between a crime seen and fined, versus surveillance stealth monitoring behaviours that reresent unwillingness to comply with flagrantly illiberal and monied “advice” .

Then he elliptically praises the latter approach for being more effective.

All of which, my friends, is based on one simple and sloppy assumption – that we are in a health crisis.

There is no health crisis here; there is only a critical problem with globalist commercial aims being pursued in concert with States that have dangerous citizen control habits. Habits that are getting so bad now, those behind them might better be described as controlaholics.

But James Forsyth (left) political editor of the Spectator and a man privileged to have had a soi-disant élite education – not only can’t philosophically deconstruct what’s going on….he can’t even see it. We have masks on our noses and mouths; Mr Forsyth wears his on his eyes.

It would be a big enough disaster if this was all we face, as a sociopathic cynic inside Number Ten tramples thoughtlessly over the citizenry’s civil rights. But feedback from the killing field laughingly referred to as the Opposition makes it clear as I write that the attempted purge of Jeremy Corbyn is about to finally split the British Left in two.

It should have happened a long time ago: Gaitskell and Clause IV in the 1950s blew over, the Gang of Four SDP fell on its razor-sharp egos in the early eighties, former firebrand Neil Kinnock kicked out Militant later in the decade, and now Flatscreen Starmer wants a clean break from Corbyn and his insidious Momentum Sturm Abteilung.

Since God was a girl, there has always been inflitration of the social democratic left in Britain by various forms of Communist totalitarian schism. Equally, the ‘pure’ Socialist in the UK has always inflated the influence of the variously group-termed Hard Right tendencies that were never anything more than those who question the braindead assumptions of political correctness.

In the Seventies we had the Anti-Nazi League, in the Eighties Rock against Racism, and during Brexit the smear of UKIPpers being racist Little Englanders who “caused” Jo Cox’s death.

Under Miliband there was the LGBTQ fiasco of tiny-minority sexualities driving Labour policy. Now the situation is such that – just to be taken seriously as a Labour leader per se – Starmer had to Take the Knee to appease the violent narcissism of BLM.

Here’s my bleak conclusion: our elected Government is not safe in the hands of Boris Johnson and the hyper-hypochondriacs; our Opposition is not safe in the hands of an ideological split between Green>pc>minority>BLM Labour, and soviet>Momentum>Trot Labour; our administrative class is not safe in the hands of Fifth columnist admirers of EUNATO and biowarfare under the beady eye of Sir Mark Sedwill; and our mainstream media are not safe in the hands of bright people who use them to write puberty-level analyses.

Maybe I have been wrong these last ten years. I still think that the Movement we need is culturo-constitutional not political. But the likes of those behind Reclaim, for example, are really about restoring the balance back to being one of sovereign State versus responsible individual rather than Left versus Right, Brexit v EU, Multi-racial v Multicultural or – worst of all – Corporacrat Unelected Neotech Totalitarian States* v citizen resistance from an informed minority.

Perhaps the Euro/Brexit split in the Tory Party on the one hand and the pc/Soviet split in Labour’s ranks is offering us an opportunity to fill the gap with Reclaim….where ideology (be it socialist or neoliberal) is abandoned in favour of an empirically judged common good.

Whatever: we are at a crossroads where the lights are stuck on Stop. We need to create an amber light that can lead us to Go.

* Feel free to join up the capitalisations there

John Ward gained a Joint Honours Degree in History & Politics at the University of Liverpool. He began as an advertising copywriter in 1969. In 1971 he joined J Walter Thompson London as a communications researcher, later moving to Collett Dickenson Pearce as a communications Planner. He later held senior roles in various international agencies, before retiring from full-time work in 2000, and since 2005 has been a full time blogger on subjects involving the human species, social anthropology, constitutional injustice, totalitarian technocracy, free speech and the continuing survival of creative communitarian capitalism. The author of two books on communications, he has been a French resident since 2012, and remains a Europhile implacably opposed to Brussels Federalism.