This may seem like a strange question, but unless you have known different times, you will have nothing to offer as a comparison and today will feel like the way things have always been. Being a boomer, I can remember things being very different as late as the early nineties.
However, there are some indicators that show at best we are only partly free and in quite a few ways, we have been in metaphorical chains for some time.
I was thinking about this after my son sent me copies of some old photos of when he and his sister were children. The little so and so had raided the old albums last time he was down to make his own family history one! We all looked so different then, in the eighties and nineties. Even in the photographs, we seem relaxed and well, “normal”.
One of the main indicators that things have changed is that the dignity of the individual has been missing in action for some time. Our current “leaders” like to talk about shared values and ways of seeing and being in the world. Blair started it off when he described “Britishness” as being all about fair play, supporting the underdog and helping the disadvantaged. These were the things that he believed the world should judge the country on and it opened the door to woke and rule by the judiciary. I hope you note that he never once referred to British culture, customs, habits and history, in his vision. In my personal opinion, Blair gave birth, or certainly voice, to corporate management speak as a way of bypassing such parochial things as national history and culture and establishing the Britain he wanted to see on the global stage; where nation states at that level are often seen as nuisances to be bypassed. What he couldn’t easily bypass, he changed the narrative so he could trash.
Our current leaders have taken this one step further and decided to protect us from what they would consider “unhelpful or false information”.
The dignity of the adult to decide for themselves has been replaced by the state knows best approach to information and we are bombarded with psyops day and night, training us to think in the right way; and more importantly, to accept things that we know are unacceptable or in some cases unreal.
There are many examples of this in society and not just in this country. I was shocked to find that left wing politicians in Germany had put a firewall between their left and centre partners and the centre right and right wing ones, solely to stop the right being able to gain influence on the political process. Apparently if it hadn’t done that, the next incarnation of Hitler would surely have been elected and we would all be back 1939 again. Thankfully, this now seems to be breaking down.
I can only assume that Germany’s government thinks that it’s settled population are all secretly wishing for the fourth reich and need to be permanently constrained for their own good, no matter whom they vote for.
It does make me wonder what is going on in the background in this country and what shady agreements are being made to manipulate the general public; apart from Raynor taking it upon herself to cancel the local elections for a significant percentage of the population.
I didn’t know she had the power to do that, without the consent of parliament.
Of course all these machinations make the left far more fascist than the right wing they oppose don’t they?
Well yes; and then again no!
Let me explain.
Prime ministers, or in the case of other countries, presidents, get themselves elected these days in order to have the power to make the country in their own image. Voting is just the current means to do that with the cooperation of the rest of us. The corporate responsibility that Blair brought in, meant that politicians in this country serve the party and not their constituents in return for safety and the ability to avoid any sort of personal responsibility or calling to account; unless of course they break the party line.
This is abuse of the general public, because when in power, they assume as much control over peoples lives as they need to fulfil their ambitions no matter whether the people agree or not and no matter what the cost to them, either in money or lifestyle, or even their health.
There is no comeback from this either in terms of the law, or a reduction in their benefits and certainly not a loss of their jobs; due to the safety that the party and the state afford them. Because of this, most of them are making rules for you and yours, but not them and theirs.
One small illustration of this is the winter fuel payments to older people. We are told that the economy is in such a state, we can only afford to give it to people on pension credits. Yet politicians get to keep theirs, which is ten times the amount a none politician would get and no one in authority seems to be particularly focused on what is a clear breach of their own rules. Why?
Well, because a tiered system has been gradually evolving where our individual expectations no longer have respect or currency anymore and our life expectations are being moulded to fit not only the level we are born into, but the category we are placed in at birth. Depending on the “vision” of the leader, our unalterable characteristics will either help or hinder us; but the important point is that most of this is outside our control no matter who is in power.
At the moment in this country, although still the majority, white British are seen as a problem in society that needs to be either reconfigured, or if that can’t be done, reduced to a minority group that can be contained.
Like the German state, the British state sees its white people as potential Fascists who can’t wait to riot and overturn the vision they have been patiently working on through several generations. This is why they are seen as more dangerous than actual terrorists; even though the white people who would seriously be inclined to do this probably number no more than a couple of hundred. To the state, even one is one too many.
Occasionally the state shows its hand a bit too obviously and riots or protests break out. These of course are then used as evidence that they are justified in clamping down on the white population.
It’s a case of heads I win, tails you loose.
People talk about the uni party, because the vision since Blair has been to dilute British history and culture until it is no longer recognisable and substitute it with something more acceptable to the corporations and think tanks that make up the globalisation project.
We are free to choose what is on offer, but not necessarily what we really want or need.
For quite a few years now, people have been extremely dissatisfied with the route the left have been taking in recent times with their whole hearted embracing of globalism and the needs of other countries and their populations. Because of this and their insistence on spending the money the country generates on things important to the ideology that is globalism, more right wing parties have been gaining traction, especially since adopting such policies has lead to a continuing reduction in living standards and impoverishment of life chances and expectations.
By right wing, I mean parties who recognise that the needs of the population they have been elected to serve should come first and other countries and political ideology should be low down on the list.
But wait. All these people, who seem like such a breath of fresh air to a suffocating population are still working within the same system. They may recognise that the people generating the money that their opponents so carelessly spend rarely see the benefit of it, but their solutions still fit within the globalist framework.
At this point I want to ask a question. What is the difference between Starmer and Trump?
I know there are several obvious ones that people talk about every day; the main one seems to be that Trump wants to conserve America and Starmer wants to dismantle Britain.
However, they also have much in common. Both have a vision and want to bend the countries they are supposed to serve to that vision. Both are in a great hurry to get it done as fast as possible. Trump because it is his last shot and Starmer because he knows that it is probably his last shot too.
Both are prepared to sacrifice awkward and inconvenient parts of the population to do it and neither has respect for the dignity of the individual, but for different reasons.
Trump is definitely on the side of the majority in several important areas, but I don’t think there is anything altruistic in it. He wants to rebuild America as a tight well-functioning society again so that he can use it to leverage the rest of the world to go the American way, which is of course his way.
Starmer on the other hand, does not believe in the nation state, especially not ones like Britain with a long ancient history and customs, which once punched well above its weight. His view is that the peoples of the world should be interchangeable, managed by a system of international laws and rules, worked out by a “superior class” of intellectuals and heads of global corporations for the good of all mankind. To someone with that view, the British people are no more important than anyone else in the world and do not deserve any special respect or consideration. In Starmer’s case, the man who pays the piper certainly does not call the tune. For us, international lawyers and agreements call the tune, and parliament is expected to dance.
Both Trump and Starmer are empirically driven, but from opposite ends of the spectrum. Individual freedom is impossible under either system because the end game is always that the majority will fit the system, not that the system will fit the majority. It just so happens that at this point, Trumps ideas do fit the majority, but that does not mean that he is the servant of the people he might claim to be. In order to be that, the leader would have to find a way to make the wishes of the public manifest, even if they disagreed with them personally and I doubt any of the world’s politicians would adopt that perspective nowadays. The fact that some look like they are, is more likely to be a lucky coincidence than part of the underlying plan.
Cameron was the ultimate example of this; resigning after the Brexit vote.
So, what was so different before Blair? Well, if you read what previous members of government used to say, it was clear that they took very seriously what the population might think if they did certain things. Although there have always been some politicians who have thought above their populations, the majority still came into politics expecting to be held to account and because society was still quite stable, were very careful about what they promised and their reasons for breaking any promises.
In other words, politicians still felt the need to respect the public and the individuals that made it up.
Now things are completely different. The public is expected to respect the politicians and be eager to go along with them. If they don’t, the problem is with the public because they do not have the right attitude or values. This is why the terms racism, fascist, extreme right, Islamophobia etc are bandied around. To identify and either correct or eliminate dissent.
Back in the day, people could go for months without hearing a squeak from politicians, unless something unexpected happened. Now they are in your face every day. Most ordinary people just want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit in their local community. They have accepted that a certain amount of tax has to be collected to keep the country going and as long as they see something for it, will put up with the inconvenience.
They do not elect people on the understanding that they will use law to manipulate social change to suit their own ideological beliefs or to advance the causes of their favourite groups.
One of the problems with the Labour party is that they were always a middle class intellectual project and still are. They harnessed the working class, especially the unions, to their beliefs in the days when most businesses were privately owned and sold the idea of communism and left wing dogma as the best way of being in control of their own lives to the poor and needy, as well as a way of getting revenge on rich factory and business owners who sometimes treated them very badly. Well, we all know what happened in Animal Farm!
Conservatives on the other hand, sold the dream of upward mobility. You too can join the upper middle and upper classes if you follow our dogma.
Both parties were always full of false promises. The intelligentsia in Labour had no intention of accepting the working class on an equal footing, anymore than the aristocracy would accept the upwardly mobile. They just wanted everyone to support their ideological perspective so that they could stay in charge.
The phrase no taxation without representation has never been as apposite as it is now. Whether in this country or elsewhere, the party system is a system that keeps people in chains and robs individuals of the freedom to live their lives without hindrance. From being a collective of people with the same ideas seeking to convince others , it has become a source of fascism which brooks no challenge and is well past its sell by date.
So, are we free or not? Well, it depends what you mean by free. Certainly, looking over those old photos, it came to me what it was that was so different. At that time, we were not bombarded with information 24/7 seeking to push us this way and that. We were allowed to think on a local, rather than global scale and our opinions were respected as our own. Nowadays, everything that happens, no matter how ridiculous, is repackaged for us as a moral lesson; from wars in far flung countries to spats between wags, to the great moral questions such as how to bring up children and the best way to die, to did the person who won strictly deserve it as they have been branded a sex pest, amongst others.
Things that don’t matter at all are given equal weighting with things that do, and the answers are always simple. The “party” knows best so follow the programme. Technically speaking we can still say what we like, but the media a lot of people use to do it is full of its own macabre punishments for those who stray.
Freedom has become just another tradable commodity. If you say and do the right things, you are free to riot, protest and say what you like about the noncompliant and the State will support you one hundred percent. If unfortunately, you have different ideas, the very least you can expect is ridicule, if not a jail sentence for preaching hate or misinformation.
Are we free? Well, some of us think we are and some of us know we’re not.