The British government's Coronavirus response: "gaslighting" the UK population and Brexit "psy-ops"?

 The UK government's response to the Coronavirus pandemic has become more and more chaotic and confused in recent weeks. 

The government's strategy for dealing with the pandemic has from the start has been like that of how UK governments of the past have dealt with many national crises - the "command and control" instinct, with the Conservative Party having a particular instinct for centralized decision-making on one hand, while simultaneously outsourcing operations to unaccountable and inefficient private service providers (which coincidentally often have some kind of nepotistic link to someone in government).  

Heading into the autumn and a predictable rise in infections, this has left Britain's ability to deal with the virus highly compromised. The UK government appears to have had no clear strategy: a "track and trace" system that has effectively broken down; a testing system that is incapable of dealing with an increase in demand for tests; and worst of all, a "lockdown" that whose rules and regional nuances have become so confused and contradictory that they make no logical sense and are impossible for any reasonable person to keep a track of from one week to the next. More on this in a moment.

The sheer levels of appalling incompetence on Brexit meanwhile were sharply raised by Ed Milliband in parliament recently. On both Brexit and the Coronavirus, the Boris Johnson's government seem to have to have no coherent strategy; on both key issues for Britain, if him and his government have a strategy at all, it is about blaming others for the government's own failings. 

On Brexit, any failure to get a deal with the EU is always put down to the EU's "unreasonable" behaviour; on the Coronavirus meanwhile, ministers have been blaming the British public itself for the the government's own strategic failure.

What is interesting in the case of the virus is that surveys have shown that a surprisingly large segment of the population agree with the government's pointing the fingers at its own electorate. In other words, they believe that it is not the government's responsibility to look after the public health of the country, but the people's themselves!

"Gaslighting" a perpetually-anxious population?

This kind of psychological blame-transference is akin to "gaslighting": the abusive husband that makes the abused wife believe that it is her fault she is being abused, because she isn't doing enough to earn her husband's respect. But equally, the government's success in getting people to turn on each other rather than the government is a sign of the success of the kind of discreet "psychological warfare" that the government has been conducting through austerity for the last ten years. While "austerity" itself is supposed to be over (until the government finds some other justification for its return) the "nudge theory" approach by the government has shifted people' perceptions of how they view the government: they are now much more likely to blame individuals or each other for failings in the country than the government compared to ten years ago. This is also very useful for the government considering its plans for Brexit.

While there is far more evidence to support a "cascade failure" of incompetence behind the government's Coronavirus response than some kind of dark conspiracy, what is clear is that the government's chaotic and ever-changing strategy (and laws) on the virus have left the public disoriented and anxious. Rules are changed at short notice on some occasions while at other times their communication is staggered many days in advance of their actual implementation, so they are not implemented until after the population have had a weekend to congregate together (and potentially spread the virus further). If there a rational strategy in place behind these endlessly contradictory approaches, it is impossible to discern. But as already mentioned, the government have already laid in the "strategy" of blaming the population themselves for the spread of the virus.  

Under these circumstances, an anxious and disoriented population would be more willing to accede to greater government control over aspects of their privacy and their daily lives. Such controls have already been happening, both in legislation and greater use of technology for the sake of "public order".

Under the cover of a public health emergency, laws have been passed by the government without any real parliamentary consultation; "temporary" laws that the government would equally be able to conveniently keep on after Brexit. And while a covert power grab is underway, the government produces guidance and law changes on the Coronavirus that change from week to week. The public cannot keep up with these perpetually-changing restrictions, and you wonder if that is down to government incompetence or something else.

A perpetually anxious and confused population is also one that is easy for governments to control. This is something that authoritarian governments know very well; and Britain's government structure is still among the most centralized and authoritarian in nature in the democratic world. 

It is also well-observed that Britons are perhaps among the most anxious and neurotic of the national populations in the democratic world. Some of this is due to history and culture, with Britain still having a hierarchical culture of  a "landowning aristocracy" and "landless tenants", a long history of social inequality and lack of social mobility. These issues have only got worse over the last forty years, and especially in the last ten years after the detrimental effects of the financial crisis and austerity on the stability and quality of the job market and social cohesion.

So the levels of anxiety in Britain's population were already high; with the Coronavirus and the government's chaotic "blame the people" strategy in dealing with it, the government seem to want the British population to turn on themselves. Thus distracted, this kind of psychological environment would be an ideal one for an authoritarian government to make whatever changes it thought it could get away with. This is the kind of thing that Naomi Klein talked about in "The Shock Doctrine". An increased role for outsourced government contracts to unaccountable corporations and a greater corrupt symbiosis between them a favoured government figures. In such an amoral environment, these Brexiteers all fail upwards, with the law only applying to "ordinary people". 

While Brexit is at its heart a Libertarian project, the authoritarian and corrupt instincts of Britain's Brexiteers are never far away. These people are only "Libertarian" in the sense that they hate the idea of having to help the "ordinary person". This is why there a view that Brexit will leave the wider state to shrink to a bare minimum of support for the general population, while leaving the Brexit "elite" to further integrate their corrupt connections between government and big business. Like in any corrupt authoritarian state, Brexit will be about subsidizing the Brexiteer elite. Meanwhile, the people will be too disoriented by the perpetually-changing situation to know where to target their blame; they have already been "trained" to blame each other.   

The British government's "Command and Control" Coronavirus omni-shambles

The news that the 400,000 items of PPE the UK government ordered from Turkey had to be sent back is somehow befitting of an institution that has been shown to be clueless in their actions.

The government's systematic incompetence is made worse by its own dissemination, equaled by the way in which criticism of its actions is framed as being unhelpful or biased, as though a time of crisis should somehow absolve the government of accountability. In Hungary for example, that is indeed exactly the government's position.

Within the overall sense of chaos at the centre, the government has failed in almost every area of public health. The chaos over PPE provision is followed by the ventilator supply chaos, where the the ventilators asked for haven't met the government's standards, partly due to misunderstanding. The fact that these haven't been needed may well be a reprieve in one sense, though the fact that there have been thousands of elderly dying in care homes rather than being taken to hospital dampens any remote sense of "success" in the ventilators asked for not being used.

This comes on top of the closure of the London Nightingale hospital, which is marked as a sign of "success", while at the same time highlighting the unused beds there that could have been used for those dying in care homes, or the many "excess deaths" that are happening in the community as a result of people not going to any hospital at all. The hospitals opened for Covid-19 patients are not being used for their presumed purpose, while general hospitals are seeing far fewer non Covid-19 patients. The overall "excess deaths" tell us the story on that.

Then there is the testing fiasco. The "100,000 tests a day by the end of April" was only reached by fiddling the figures, and testing has since fell back to its previous modest levels. Within that, there are stories of tests being lost, poor communication, and so on.
The government is beginning to implement the system that South Korea had for "test, track and trace", albeit two months late, when it becomes a great deal more difficult to implement effectively. The small-scale trial testing system on the Isle of Wight has software issues, as well as being of questionable use when it requires close contact with people (i.e. breaking social distancing rules) in order to pass on information around the community.

The overall picture, then, is one of a government out of its depth. The rest of the world has been looking on at this level of incompetence in disbelief, while the government-friendly side of the media has been keen to deflect blame (NHS staff apparently being more likely to support Labour, so they are therefore "biased" against the government) or to gloss over the ongoing disaster entirely, with stories about Boris Johnson's bravery when in hospital, for example.


A hierarchy set up to fail

One of the key linking elements in this institutional incompetence is the organisation of government itself, and the ingrained thinking within government figures that any kind of crisis such as this must be "led from the centre". To be fair, this is a view that has been held within government for decades, but is especially true of the conservative wing.
It's best to understand England in particular as a historically hierarchical society, with its "public school" education system being the most important method of maintaining power within a limited core of society. By this thinking, power remains within the overall hands of  "the establishment": a loose social grouping of like-minded and similarly-educated people. Through their shared social connections, those in "the establishment" use the media, politics, and the arts to maintain their insidious grip on society. Those in society outside their esteemed group often have no idea why the lives of so many in Britain are set up to fail from birth, but merely take it fatalistically as their lot in life. This is the idea.

In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four", the party operative O'Brien said "the purpose of power is power". With Britain, the Conservative government's rationale is similar. They believe they are the "natural party of government", and so their own incompetence is dismissed as something that couldn't be helped. Their natural assumption is that, as their own education has come from being part of the elite, anyone else in charge could only do an even worse job.
Their incompetence, though, stems from the corrupt nature of the hierarchy, with people being promoted far beyond their capabilities. Personal loyalty and ideological purity are the key to career advancement; competence and intelligence are merely coincidental. The so-called "elite" is no more intelligent than any other person in society, and in many cases, much less intelligent. You only have to look at how badly departments are ran by their ministers.

In many ways, England's historical hierarchy continues into politics today, with much of the media's portrayal of Westminster as a latter-day "medieval court", with daily reporting of metaphorical "palace intrigue" the norm. Many of these journalists being from the same "elite" background as the politicians, those selfsame journalists often seek public office themselves (such as the Prime Minister and his deputy, to name just two). This is just one illustration of the corrupting nature of the hierarchy, and explains a lot behind the motivation of the popular press.

So understanding the effect all this has on the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see that the government's own prejudice is to centralize control: for power to effective, the government's own hierarchical prejudice means that it is loathe to relinquish decision-making to those it doesn't trust. By this rationale, the only time it might feasibly relinquish control down the chain of command would be to undermine confidence in those lower down (i.e. only give others power to make sure they screw it up).
For example, one of the problems NHS England has had in obtaining PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic is due to the byzantine fracturing of the decision-making process. This fracturing happened when the government "reformed" the NHS in the early years of the Coalition. What was meant to be a decentralizing "reform" of a top-heavy institution turned it into one with thousands more middle managers. Now with dozens of smaller NHS authorities chasing after the same PPE, the result has been chaos and in-fighting within the NHS, all as a result of the "reforms" the Conservative government carried out during Cameron's tenure. One assumes this effect wasn't intentional, but by making decentralization a by-word for chaos, it boosts the government's own hierarchical prejudice for its own ends.

By contrast, Germany's federal structure has been to its advantage in this public health crisis. Its form of decentralizing power is designed for flexibility; unlike the British institution, where the government seems to make sure that decentralizing can only result in chaos and incompetence. The British government's own prejudice is for "Command and Control", to assume that only central government can have all the information or the key expertise, and against allowing others lower down in the pecking order the agency to make decisions on the spot. This all comes from the country's historical hierarchy.

In this public health crisis, this effect is deadly.


 

Brexit Britain: a rogue state, hostile power, and government of lies

Britain’s government is establishing itself as one that no foreign power in their right mind should trust.

The conditions to Britain leaving the EU with the “withdrawal agreement” (a legal document) included Britain having specific obligations, in particular about Northern Ireland. It has since come to light that, not entirely surprisingly, the government – under Boris Johnson’s tutelage – has been looking at finding ways to “get around” the obligations on Northern Ireland they agreed to with the EU - to ignore them while pretending they haven't. The minutiae of those obligations don’t matter so much here as much as the message that Britain is clearly sending to the EU: “You trust us to do what we agreed to? More fool you”

A "rogue state"

The message this sends to the EU, and to the rest of the world watching, is that post-EU Britain is happy to act as a “rogue state” in terms of its legal obligations. If you sign a treaty with Britain, its government is saying, don’t expect us to honour it; we have no honour.

Britain’s imperial past has many examples of how it has abandoned its obligations, legal or moral. Ireland knows all about that,when the British government allowed a million Irish people to starve to death. But Britain has been masterful over the years in creating a myth of Britain always siding with the “good guy”; of being a beacon for democracy and human rights. It was always much more cynically pragmatic than that in reality, only surrendering its colonies when they no longer became economically viable or worth the military effort to hold on to; it has also been a friend to many loathsome regimes at one time or another.

The British government today seems to believe its own historic myths, which may be one reason why the government is acting in such bad faith with the EU. In falling for its own myth of Britain as an “exceptional” nation, it follows that its politicians think international rules don’t apply to them. The fact that Britain (through its numerous tax havens) is the leading instigator of global tax evasion tells you enough. The EU tolerated this kind of behavior when Britain was a member state (and Luxembourg is likewise culpable in that regard, if on a much smaller scale); but now Britain is outside the EU and is self-evidently set on a strategic path that opposes (or is actively hostile to) the EU’s interests, Britain can only be regarded as a threat. The fact that the British government is happy for it to be known that its promises amount to nothing tells the EU that it is dealing with a hostile power.

The fact that the British government disseminates lies can hardly be surprising either. Even the Prime Minister in his earlier career as a journalist became infamous for creating “fake news”, long before the term was widely-used. Nothing that comes from the government’s mouth should be taken at face value; its signature on a legal document is apparently meaningless as well. It only chooses to abide by agreements when it suits them.

This, then, is the meaning of a “rogue state” when applied to Britain’s government: one that has a selective application of the rule of law. While Britain’s legal system has long been respected around the world, its twisted application of law means that London is the litigation capital of the world. “Brexit Britain” is a country where judges are seen by parts of the media as “enemies of the people”, while the government – and the infamous Home Office in particular – are habitual exploiters of the legal system to overturn judgments that go against them. The fact that these attempts are often expensive failures is just a sign of how the government happily misuses public funds simply on a savage point of principle.

This doesn’t even mention how the government is routinely denying the legal rights of citizens on a daily basis: people like the “Windrush generation”, some of whom have been denied their rights, lost their jobs and deported (or exiled) for just having the wrong skin colour. The same is expected to happen to many Europeans too, given time. 

Then there are the tens of thousands of homeless whose plight is often due to a collapse of the social care system. Britain as a “rogue state” is one where many of the mentally ill and disabled are abandoned by the state to fend for themselves on the street, with a system designed to torment them yet further. Britain today is a country that allows some of its mentally ill and disabled to literally starve to death. It isn’t the government’s active policy; it simply doesn’t care what happens to them.

The “rogue state” that Britain is becoming is an inevitable consequence of the “Brexit Agenda”: not caring about rules; not caring about the consequences of its actions. It is, at its heart, an amoral creed. 

Brexit Britain is a project ran by and headed by shysters and charlatans, crooks and ne’er-do-wells. Its agenda can only appeal to the worst elements of human nature: cranks who see it as an opportunity to pursue their own fringe obsessions; vultures who see Britain as a way to make their fortune at other people’s expense; careerists who see it as the easiest way to advance themselves, no matter how.

This has been true in many other countries as well, of course. Britain is just rediscovering its corrupt heart, with all the other corrupt countries in the world looking on at Britain as another member of their rogue’s gallery.

The irony of Britain’s “rogue status” in the eyes of the rest of the world is that it is a self-defeating cause. Going back to the issue of Northern Ireland, making things more difficult for the Republic of Ireland only makes things harder on relations with the USA as well as the EU; for the US Congress is a huge supporter of Ireland, and no trade deal can be endorsed without its support. So the British government’s “FU” attitude to the EU is also a two fingers to the USA as well. This leaves Britain without the support of both its closest trading bloc and the most powerful country in the world.

Maybe this is why Britain’s government post-EU is cosying up to China and the Gulf States: one-party states and autocratic monarchies might be where Britain’s government sees its future: as "dodgy" banker,  private tutor, luxury goods maker and tech provider to the world’s least democratic states.  

Neo-liberalism and the Conservatives: using intellectual and moral bankruptcy to run the UK

Since the onset of neo-liberalism with the Thatcher government, successive governments of both main parties have followed fundamentally the same ideological and economic script.

Back in the 1970s, the British economy was struggling to adapt to the various crises that struck the world economy. The skyrocketing cost of living, loss of British companies' competitiveness, and inflation, all had the effect of bringing increasing demands from the unions, who sought to buffer their members from the worst of it. As we know now, the rise of Thatcherism created an "agreed consensus" that it was the unions that caused the crisis in the UK in the 1970s. Likewise, the same "agreed consensus" is at play with the Conservative government today, who successfully blamed the previous Labour government for "breaking the banks".

The "plan" that Thatcher and her successors have followed for the last thirty-five is simple: to "re-figure" the British economy from a manufacturing (production) based economy to a service (consumption) based economy. At the same time, this service-based economy has been supported by a massive expansion of the banking and financial sector, making the service-based economy - which has been designed to take up the slack of the loss of manufacturing - heavily reliant on the fate of the banking sector. Whereas a production-based economy is reliant on a competitive (i.e. relatively weak) pound to make British products attractive to buyers abroad, the kind of economy Thatcher introduced was reliant on a strong pound: this was what the financial sector was craving, and would also help consumerism (as it made imports cheap).
The result of this was the slow death of manufacturing in the UK, and a balance of payments that has been in a serious state of disrepair for years. Though no-one has seemed to care.
Following on from this, the Blair government took up the idea that young people in the UK were under-qualified for the modern world. For this reason, successive governments since then have promoted the idea that a much larger proportion of younger people should have degrees; the logic being that better-educated young people could get better-paid jobs.
The problem - as we now see plain today - is that these two plans are in many ways nonsensical, and also logically contradictory. But this is how those in government have been running the country.

Intellectually bankrupt

To the casual observer, the UK has done really quite well since the "neo-liberal" revolution has been introduced. GDP is up, and the country is self-evidently more prosperous. Except that it depends on who you are talking about.
Back in 1978, this was when "egalitarianism" was at its height: the gap between rich and poor was at its smallest. Things were only "bad" if you happened to be very rich and Conservative; for everyone else, things were - basically - fine. This all ended with Thatcher. Within a short time, unemployment had trebled. Since the "neo-liberal" revolution in Whitehall, the gap between rich and poor has successively widened, so that now while those at the top ten per cent are many times richer than they were, those at the bottom ten per cent are actually worse off. Yes, they may have some consumer goods that they can afford due to advancements in technology and cost-effectiveness. But they are still - financially - worse off than they were before. This is how this economic system works.

British governments since Thatcher have had plenty of time to make manufacturing more productive and competitive. The fundamental problem about British inefficiency stems back to the end of Empire. It may seem like a difficult point to deal with, but Britain's manufacturing and productive base was reliant on demand from the Empire to keep things afloat. This was surely shown during the Second World War, and going even further back. Once the Empire starting breaking apart, British governments never grasped the nettle about how to make British industry competitive in a real world economy, rather than in a "fake" Imperial economy. The "oil shock" of the 1970s brought that into stark relief, and the Thatcher government decided that it couldn't be bothered to try and make it work. The government would rather let the whole thing die.
As mentioned earlier, the UK has turned into a consumption-based economy, which ironically seems not far off how an Imperial Homeland would be run. Except that Britain no longer has an "empire" that can do its production for it. Instead of factories, the UK now runs on banks. Like in Switzerland. Instead of an "empire", it now runs the country like a PLC, where its citizens are treated like mere "employees", who can be hired and fired at will. Instead of colonies, the UK has "assets", which it sells off to the highest (foreign) bidder.

Which brings us to Germany.

Germany is the country that many others aspire to be, for the simple reason that it is perhaps one of the best-run countries in the world, in terms of productivity, efficiency of government, and the well-being of its people. In this sense, Germany is the "anti-Britain": a country which learned some very hard lessons before 1945 but also learned how to get the best out of its people. Germany is what Britain could have been, if the country were run intelligently.
Britain's economic system can be called intellectually bankrupt because it is a system that a con. By allowing Britain's productive assets to wither and die, though a combination of incompetence and recklessness, successive governments have put all the country's eggs in one basket. That was found out in 2008, when we suddenly realised how absurd the UK's "miracle" of banking really was.
Since then, the British government has decided to react to the greatest financial crisis since the Depression by doing...the exact same thing. Nothing has changed about how the UK economy is ran. The huge bubble that burst in 2008 is being re-inflated once more, except that this time the "recovery" is even more of an illusion than the growth that was created under New Labour. The economy now is growing only due to debt-fueled consumer spending, ever-worsening working conditions, a much greater number of low-skilled and low-paid jobs, and an out-of-control property bubble. The state of the economy is based on even more fragile foundations that before the crash, but George Osborne, the architect of this "long-term economic plan", is only motivated by short-term political gain and the harvesting of votes.
The governments of the past thirty years have all been complicit in the "asset-stripping" of the nation, leaving the taxpayer doubly worse off - in selling off national infrastructure at below-market value, and then allowing these privatised assets to fleece their customers. as mentioned earlier. For the private sector this is a win-win situation.

What has been created since the "neo-liberal" revolution has been a system of Corporate Socialism, where assets are privatised and those privatised companies are then subsidised and if need be bailed-out by the government - the worst outcome of all from the government's financial point of view. In the meantime, this amoral system creates a morally-bankrupt government as well as an intellectually-bankrupt ideology.

Morally bankrupt

The logical conclusion of this economic system is a moral system that has destroyed the essence of society.
On top of increasing inequality to levels now not seen since the Depression, those who have become the victims of this system are then demonised as the causes of its problems. This is where the idea of blaming those on welfare for the need for "austerity" comes from. Back in the 1980s, when the government started selling-off council housing, this meant that only those with the severe social and familial problems became entitled to state housing. The effect of this was creating "sink estates", and thus another "scapegoat" for the government's problems was formed.
This vicious circle is repeated time and time again: the government creates a problem, then blames the victims for the problem.

George Osborne is the architect of the current government's version of this system, where he has implemented a policy of "divide and rule" to a ruthlessly-effective degree. In reality, all his decisions are not based on what's best for the country, but what's best for his prospects. From "help-to-buy" to racking up tuition fees, Osborne implements policies that simply store up nightmares for the future. While David Cameron is the charmingly-affable front man to this game, it is Osborne who is the real "master in the shadows".

Dividing young against old, rich against poor, working poor against jobless poor, this is the morally bankrupt system that the Conservatives use to rule the UK.

The Queen's Nazi salute: what it tells us about the establishment

The leaking of private royal footage from the early 1930s has shown the then seven-year-old Elizabeth Windsor prompted to give a Nazi salute with her mother and the future King Edward, her uncle.
Criticism of the actions of a seven-year-old girl seems silly and nonsensical. What the footage does show however, is the private behaviour of the elders of the royal family. It was well-known at the time that a wide number of people in the royal family and the establishment in general, were sympathetic to the Nazi regime and its ideas. The future King Edward was the most high-profile member of the royal family to be openly supportive of the Nazi regime, even during the war and afterwards. For this reason, if he had remained as the monarch at the outbreak of war, the UK would surely have faced a constitutional crisis unlike anything it had ever seen; the actual "abdication crisis" would have felt like a walk in the park by comparison.

Further revelations have revealed (or more exactly, been re-told) that not only were many of the future Queens' relatives sympathetic to the Nazis, but her future husband's family were, in anything, even more interlinked with Hitler's party. Due to his family's German roots, Prince Philip's sisters were married to Nazi officers at the time. So while there may be the view that the UK had "dodged a bullet" by the abdication of King Edward, Philip's Nazi links through his family simply looked to have swapped one imbroglio for another.
In reality, the onset of war changed everything, and the vast majority of those in the royal family (on both Elizabeth's and Philip's sides) distanced themselves very quickly from anything to do with the Nazis. Philip's sisters, of course, could do nothing about being married to Nazis. This was something they had to live with for the rest of their lives. But the pre-war links to the Nazis and the British establishment are something that now look like very uncomfortable reminders of a different time.

Britain and Germany: "best frenemies"?

Large parts of the British establishment became fascinated by the Nazis during their rise to power. Like the higher echelons of the then British Empire, the Nazis were fiercely anti-Communist, saw strikers as a Third Column for Stalin, and were instinctively anti-Semitic. What's often forgotten is that many of the Bolshevik elite were themselves Jews, and the "internationalist" nature of communism was partially what drew some Jewish intellectuals to the Bolshevik cause. For some Jews who did not have a real nation to call their own, Communism fitted the bill.  For the same reason, this was why this was seen by some as a mortal threat to the "established order" around the world at the time: "Godless" Communism was therefore a "Jewish conspiracy" at world domination. At the time of Hitler's rise to power, plenty of the great and the good in the UK and the USA saw the Nazis as, at least, a "necessary evil"; others, as we have seen with the future King Edward, actively supported their ideas.

This "moral support" with the British establishment may not only have come about through the "shared goal" of aggressively fighting Communism, but also through a sense of injustice inflicted on the "sister country". Britain's royal family is of German origin, with many of its members married to members of the (former) German royal family in the years after the First World War.
The schism that occurred between Britain and German relations in the year immediately prior to the First World war was down to a variety of reasons. Up to the early 1890s, relations were very friendly, not least because of the extremely close family ties (Kaiser Wilhelm was Queen Victoria's nephew - more on his personality here). It was the poor choices that the Kaiser and his advisers made in foreign policy after this point that led to the collapse in good relations with the British government; in that sense, Germany and Britain became "best frenemies" in those last, fateful years before the war.
In the aftermath of the war and the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there were probably many in the British establishment that must have felt pity for what went wrong with Germany. So by the time of the Nazi's rise to power, those same people would have felt relief that the country was back on the road to recovery that it should never have been forced to take. Whatever misgivings they might have had about the Nazi's methods of this "recovery" would probably have either been put at the back of their minds or dismissed as Communist propaganda.
Seen in this way, the royal family's distancing from the Nazis as the march to war got ever louder by the end of the 1930s would probably have re-ignited the same sense of disillusionment that the British royal family must have felt at the outbreak of the First World War. Germany and Britain had become "best frenemies" once again. The "love-in" that Germany and Britain's establishment once shared had turned into a "mutual loathing" - for a second time.

Controlling "assets"

Apart from the historical context, the establishment's reaction to the publishing of these "revelations" is perhaps more telling than the revelations themselves. The palace has become highly-defensive about the nature of the footage revealed, and is highly-protective of the royal's privacy, for their past private behavior and actions as much as currently.
As the adage goes "information is power". The author recently discussed how technological advances have allowed government the "control of information" in ways never before possible. These days, the "establishment", in the guise of the security services, has the capability to know almost everything that is happening. At the very least, this allows them to have a very good idea about where "threats" may come from.

The phrase "national security" is used a lot by the government to justify its mass surveillance: they cite the now "unpredictability" of the world and the "new techniques" that dangerous groups and individuals pose.
But "security" has a double meaning in reality: officially, it means the security of the nation-state (and by extension, its citizens); unofficially, it also means the security of the government (and its assets).

The reaction that Buckingham Palace has had to the release of the "damaging" footage is the same the reaction that the British government had when Edward Snowden revealed the way that GCHQ work with the NSA to make mass collection of people's communications. The palace sought to punish the leaker of the "damaging" footage, discredit the implications of the footage, and to strongly defend the head of state's right to "privacy" (this last point is an odd stance to take, which we'll look at more in a moment).
When the government discovered "The Guardaan" newspaper had information disclosing how it used mass surveillance, its reaction was to have the newspaper destroy it - which it did under government supervision, even after being told there were other copies outside the UK the government could do nothing about. Later, it used anti-terror laws to arrest the Brazilian partner of a "Guardian" freelancer who was in transit at Heathrow airport, and confiscated his laptop to try and find out what information the "Guardian" had on them. Meanwhile, it strongly discouraged other newspapers from writing any negative coverage about the whole issue.

There's the old saying that you only really know someone when they're really tested. The same can be said of governments and institutions. When tested (using the examples above of Buckingham Palace and the UK government), the establishment's instinct has been shown to be authoritarian and secretive. It behaves so even when it is probably against its longer-term interests. While on the surface the establishment makes a show of respecting "democracy", "oversight" and "freedom of speech", when the chips are down, these ideas are swiftly disregarded.
As seen earlier, the British government gave itself some awful press for the sake of pointlessly destroying a newspaper's computers, and pointlessly (and almost certainly illegally) arresting and detaining a foreigner because they wanted to see what was in his computer and flash drives. Buckingham Palace protects the royal families "privacy" and longer-term legacy with fearsome possessiveness. Some royal experts even argue that it would be better for the royals if more private correspondence was made public, to show that the royal family is, indeed, just a fairly average family in many ways. There have been some good people and bad people in it; people make mistakes and do foolish and horrible things from time to time. This is normal. But by their instinct of wanting to keep many things private, it simply feeds the conspiracy theorists that the royals have a host of "skeletons in the cupboard"

Information is an "asset" for governments; outside information is precious to obtain; inside information is even more precious to keep hold of. Unfortunately, this is also the same thinking used by authoritarian regimes around the world. The establishment, by following this nature, has done itself no favours over the years. It is due to this climate of secrecy that the child abuse scandal has been so damaging. Bad people swarm to a "climate of secrecy" like moths to a flame, for they know they will be protected at all costs, no matter what they do. This is innate, corrupting power of "the establishment": it is corrupt because there is no accountability. If one card falls, they all fall: this is the self-justifying logic of the establishment.

It explains by the infamous MP Cyril Smith was never prosecuted (because of who he knew), and also why Jimmy Savile got away with his behaviour for decades (because of who he was).

Westminster and First Past The Post: A British political system not fit for purpose

Westminster is a living museum, in every sense of the word. A recent piece in "The Economist" gave an accurate and thought-provoking reminder of how impractical a place the Palace Of Westminster is to deal with the day-to-day tasks of dealing with British politics in the 21st century. Built in the middle of the 19th century, no-one would disagree that the building is an architectural masterpiece. But still using it in the same way in the 21st century as we do now is like insisting on using the same clapped-out, classic car that keeps failing its MOT and you can't fit your family into simply because it was your grandfather's. As reported some time ago, the building needs urgent repair work that would probably take at least several years, resulting in parliamentary business being conducted elsewhere.

Even on a practical basis, the current arrangements are an ad hoc solution. There is not enough space in the Palace Of Westminster for MPs to work, even to fit all the current MPs into the House Of Commons. When there is an important debate, many MPs have to stand; when there is an important vote, because - as pointed out in the "Economist" article, MPs are housed in any one of three separate buildings - there is a dash to get to the chamber in time. This is ridiculous. It may look good on TV to have MPs housed in the Palace Of Westminster, but it makes no sense in reality, least of all for the MPs themselves who have to deal with these issues every day.
And this is before mentioning the antiquated procedures and "traditions" that the recent cohort of neophyte SNP MPs are  - rightly - finding an absurd distraction from the business of politics. Some of these points (and the "fighting" over where to sit in the House Of Commons) were recently mentioned in a "Question Time" debate on the BBC (in the episode's first question). The SNP is looking at the way things are done in Westminster, compared to how things are done in Holyrood, and seeing the London institution as a place trapped by its own history, unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century.

The Palace Of Westminster is a museum piece, and should be treated and preserved as one: it is not a suitable place of work for 650 MPs and staff in the 21st century. It is a museum, and should be used as one. And this is without even mentioning the electoral system....

The most unfair election in history

A recent article pointed out the fact that the election result of the last election produced a result in parliament that was the most unrepresentative (compared to how people actually voted nationally) ever.
On the one hand, the Conservatives gained a majority of the seats in parliament based on 37% of the vote. The SNP took 56 of Scotland's 59 seats in Westminster based a little over half of the vote in Scotland. The Greens, who received over a million votes (a little under 4% of the national vote) only returned one MP. And then there is UKIP, who gained 12.5% of the national vote...and also returned only one seat in parliament.

Those figures there tell you the nature of the problem: while the electoral system has for decades not been a true reflection of the political reality, resulting in distortions that favour the two biggest parties, today the system has created not so much a distortion as a perversion of how politics is meant to work. In the multi-party reality of UK politics in 2015, we have an electoral system that is loaded massively in favour of the two main parties; clearly, much more in favour of the Tories at the moment.
In short, it could be called a "fix". It is not "democracy". As the electoral system favours the party in government (currently with a majority), the party with that position has no inclination to change the system. Ergo, the party in government has a stranglehold on parliament and the electoral system that benefits itself at the expense of the other (especially, smaller) parties. Furthermore, in this parliament the constituency boundaries are due to be redrawn in a manner that will benefit the Tories, giving them a further in-built advantage. With Labour likely to be out of office for ten more years, it is difficult to say what the UK will be like after fifteen years of Conservative rule in 2025.

So the hideous irony here is that as British politics becomes the most multi-polar it has been for generations (arguably, ever), the "natural party of government" - the Tories - tilt the system in the exact opposite direction. The UK has a multi-polar political environment with a political system weighed massively in favour of one party: the Conservatives. Only in Scotland does the system produce a different result, now weighed massively in favour of the SNP.

Not fit for purpose

The author has made comments on the easily "corruptible" nature of the British political system before. The British political system has always been a "fix" of one form or another, ever since the electoral franchise was extended beyond the landed classes. It could be argued that the system worked at its best (i.e. it best reflected the political reality) in the 1950s and '60s, when Labour and the Conservatives dominated British politics.
That system began to break down in the '70s in Scotland with the rise of the SNP, and Liberals more generally. In the 1980s, the SNP/Alliance were the victims of a system that didn't give any "space" for a third national party. From the '90s onwards, their successors, the LibDems, managed a way to get over some of the hurdles in their way, while by the time Labour gained office in 1997, the next thirteen years saw the system skewed in their favour instead, up to (and including) the 2010 election.

Britain has changed, but its political system remains fundamentally the same as it was two hundred years ago. Stepping away from the House Of Commons, to the House Of Lords, we see an assembly of hand-picked individuals, aristocrats and bishops - one of the world's last remaining bastions of modern-day feudalism in the developed world. This is masked in the tones of deference to the "mother of all parliaments" and reverence for "families that have generations of experience at the highest level of the decision-making process".
But this is simply masterful misdirection; something that the establishment has been good at for centuries.

The Tories are the party of the aristocracy, and have been since the 17th century. They know how to make people want to vote for them, and when you are up against (in the words of Alastair Campbell) a set of "ruthless bastards", what can you do?

The UK, the 2015 general election and the illusion of democracy

Some would say that England has gifted the world with two valued exports: parliamentary democracy, and football. As any Englishman would know, England "invented" the concept of football. Englishmen also know that after being the country that created the football "system", other countries over time developed the same system and evolved it, while England lagged behind, for a long time failing to update its "system" at all. We still were sticking to the same ideas from generations past, while other countries had taken the idea to the next level. his is partly why England only won the World Cup in 1966.

However, much the same could be said of parliamentary democracy, England's other "export". When foreigners understand fully how the political system in the UK works, many of them are in disbelief. This author has witnessed this reaction a number of times.

In many ways, the UK's progressive "public image" to the world abroad is in stark contrast to the grubby and backwards reality. This is one of the many ways in which the "elite" of the establishment fool those abroad, and their own electorate, into being turkeys that vote for Christmas.

England's parliament gained its power over the monarch during the events of the 17th century, when the actions of two Stewart kings (Charles I and James II) took England back into the realms of autocracy that had existed in previous centuries. The result was a much more powerful parliament, composed of combination of aristocrats, landowners and "men of means", that substantially reduced the power of the monarch. That system has remained unchanged since, and was gradually extended over the 19th century to better reflect the changes in population and society.
The idea of parliamentary democracy spread to America, resulting in the War Of Independence, and throughout the 19th century, across parts of Europe. Even by the end of the 19th century, it could be argued that Westminster was still one of the best models of democracy in the world, compared to the embryonic attempts of much more limited "democracy" across parts of Europe.

How To Waste Your Vote

Today, almost all representative democracies in the world use the system of Proportional Representation, which has existed since the early 20th century. Although there are rules that give a threshold for parties to pass in order to enter parliament, this voting system allows the fairest reflection of the electorate's will in parliament. Of course, this usually results in coalition governments, but this is accepted as the natural result of the system. Coalition government has its critics, but the electorate is used to it, and would struggle to think of an effective - and fair - alternative.
The "First Past the Post" system (or a variation of it) is still used in the English-speaking world - in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This is the same electoral system that existed more than two hundred years ago. While the franchise of the vote has extended, the electoral system remains the same.
The natural result of that FPTP system is fewer parties in parliament. To become an MP, a party needs to have more votes than any other party in that particular electoral district (called a "constituency" in the UK). Naturally, this means few parties will be able to gather that kind of support, and this get into parliament.

Advocates of this system point to the fact that it allows local representation that is not the case in PR. However, it can equally be argued that as one of the effects of the FPTP system is a large portion of "safe" seats, this puts into question the motivation of any MP who has the luck to be sitting in one. Because of the way that district boundaries can be "gerrymandered" (e.g. in the USA or the UK) to suit a party's interests, it means that a large portion of the electorate are effectively disenfranchised - their votes become "wasted" simply because of where they live. Prospective candidates in a party can easily become MPs in "safe seats" through smart politicking and networking, and then once in place, the party "favourite" has little incentive to be an effective MP for his constituents, but far more incentive to spend time in Westminster for the purposes of self-promotion. This is how the game works for many.

Many of the "safe" seats can easily become "rotten boroughs". Any voter that happens to live in a "safe" seat but doesn't support their MP's party, has no effective way to get rid of him. Only a highly-organised "tactical vote" by supporters of other parties working in unison for an agreed candidate would work - one rare example of this was the election of Martin Bell standing as in independent candidate in the 1997 election against the sitting Conservative MP in the constituency of Tatton (currently George Osborne's seat). This demonstrates the extremely high level of organisation necessary to "beat the system". Only significant (and, therefore, rare) changes in political mood - such as those in Scotland since the historic referendum last autumn - make this possible.

In this sense, the FPTP system makes the electoral process a "closed shop". With the election - and 2015 is likely to be a prime example - often decided on the votes of some tens of thousands living in "marginal constituencies" in England (in the USA, read: "swing state") - it makes a mockery of the supposed power of the electorate.  Only those who happen to live in the right areas have real power, and it is always these "swing voters" (that supposedly represent "Middle England") that decide things. This is the reason why the political parties focus so narrowly on the issues that matter to those specific voters.  The effect is not far from that which existed two hundred years ago, when it was the voters in "rotten boroughs" that had a big say in things.
In this way, the UK is really ran in much the same way it was in the 18th century. While the franchise has been extended to all adults, the electoral system basically is the same as it was in the 18th century, with the "power" of the electorate's vote highly dependent on where they live. Millions of votes are "wasted", while the established parties tussle over a smaller and smaller proportion of the electorate.

And this is even without mentioning the House Of Lords - or what might better be called the "House Of Boyars". Like in the days of the Russian Empire, the House Of Lords is simply a parlour for aristocrats and political appointees, a pathetic joke on the concept of "democracy". The "House Of Lords" is a place where giving enough money to the governing party can "buy" you a place in the upper parliament of the UK. None of them are elected and - along with the theocratic Iran - is the only "parliament" in the world where theologians (i.e. bishops) have a place alongside those who have gained their place through a nod and a wink.

In more unpleasant ways, of course, there is plenty of evidence that the "establishment" has been covering up the truth for years.

A "managed democracy"?

It is no wonder that as politics in the UK has become more "professional", it has also become more of a charade separated from the reality of ordinary people's lives. The current Prime Minister is a self-evident example of that: a son of a minor aristocrat (and distant relative to the Queen), he represents the psychology of the "establishment", in spite of his protests: seemingly self-confident but actually incompetent, publicly sincere but privately scornful.

And yet, in the 2010 election, Cameron said - with a straight face - "Vote Change, Vote Conservative"(!).

Apart from the political system being a "closed shop" in many ways, in any case the way the country is ran - through the economy - is effectively a debate-free zone. The economic orthodoxy of austerity and the neo-liberal model has transformed the UK from a diverse economy with a large manufacturing base, to a largely reliant on the fortunes of the (now bloated) financial industry. Having tied the fate of the UK economy to finance, the banks then promptly crashed the economy and made the government pay the bill. And now the rest of society is "paying the bill" in the form of austerity, the shrinking of the state, and the (often dubious) selling-off of government services to an incompetent private sector.
In this way, the UK is barely operating as a country at all, and more like a corporation that should be "restructured", with its population as "employees" that can be offloaded. There are always cheaper supplies of labour, and cheaper ways of getting things done.

Lastly, there is the media, which during this election campaign has seemingly done its best to promote the virtues of Cameron and his "long term economic plan" (see above). As Cameron himself has said in the past: "There is No Alternative".

Well, we may as well all go home, then.

The Conservatives, Labour and the SNP: the Tories' cynical strategy of divide and rule

The Conservatives' election strategy has been marked by negative tactics and low politics. This reached a low point with the personal attacks on Ed Miliband the other week, but has not stopped. In spite of the fact that there is little evidence that this is actually having an effect on the polls (and some suggesting it may have had the opposite effect), the attacks on Miliband have continued by major Tory figures.
Cameron seems intent on flogging this particular dead horse. One particularly-telling moment was a Cameron interview with Sky News the day after Fallon's remarks, where Cameron admitted that he didn't know Miliband personally (or really, at all), but still felt justified in making these highly-personal attacks. This is just absurd: the Prime Minister trying to defend making unsavoury personal attacks on a person he barely even knows. The fact that Cameron has to resort to them to make a point, while Miliband simply has to talk about the effect government policies are having, tells you a lot about the character of the two men vying to be Prime Minister after the election.

The wider truth about the Tories is that they would do and say almost anything to have power. Their manifesto was full of ridiculous promises; where the money came from, nobody knew. While all parties are guilty of exaggerating the danger of other parties, the Conservatives' threats at times have bordered on the nonsensical: that they would create "millions" of jobs, and that Labour would destroy "millions" of jobs. Since when do Conservative governments "create" jobs? Only the private companies can do that. The talk of Labour "chaos", which ignores the fact that - prior to the global financial crisis - Labour presided over the longest period of growth in living memory. Yes, there was a crash, but it was a worldwide crash, that cannot simply be blamed on Labour. In any case, the Conservatives' economic policy at the time was even more gung-ho than the then Labour government's. But these facts must be conveniently forgotten to project the fallacy of Conservative competence.

Divide and rule

The Conservative Party is the historic party of the old aristocracy, and the party still rules the UK with the same attitude the Empire had towards it's colonies. These days, with the empire long gone, it feels like the "empire" is just London ruling the other parts of the country like outlying colonies. For those in the Westminster bubble, the rest of the country certainly feels as remote. The country is ran as though it is just an economic extension of the London economy: this explains why London acts as a vampire on the "real" UK beyond the M25. The economic model the UK has had for the past thirty years has been made in London, for the benefit of London. Any beneficial effects on those areas outside of London have been incidental. It's essentially the same economic model as some parts of the Third World.
The only way the electorate can be distracted from this reality is by the Tories creating poisonous false narratives like "strivers" versus "shirkers". The "politics of envy" that the Tories hurl at Labour more accurately reflects how they use the politics of fear to protect their own interests and positions. When you have a lot to lose - like the media barons that support the Tories  - anything that could possibly prevent your own expansion is perceived as a mortal threat.

The Tories have been gradually losing support in Scotland over the last thirty years. The loss of the 1997 election saw the last generation of Tory Scots swept from Westminster, leaving only a vestige of support. The irony was that, after opposing devolution, the Scottish Conservatives found that they could have a larger voice in Holyrood's new, proportional system. The same was true of the SNP. When the nationalists became a minority government in Holyrood, the SNP had to rely on Tory support from time to time to get some bills through parliament. Then, with the collapse of Labour support becoming even more dramatic after the SNP won power outright in the following Holyrood elections. a historic change looked to be taking place. The aftermath of the independence referendum last year confirmed the historic nature of the collapse of Labour support to the benefit of the SNP. The Tories looked on in delight.

As said earlier, the Tories have a track record of doing and saying anything in order to have power. Regarding the national integrity of the UK, this will even extend to happily losing one part of the country if it means having a better control of the rest. For this is the calculation that Cameron and other figures in the government have clearly made. This is, quite literally, "divide and rule".

And yet, the Tories' strategy is at a complete counter to one of main tenets of their existence: the preservation of the UK. While it may be argued by some that it was the Labour party that "gave up" on the empire, it is the Tories who seem happy to give up on the idea of the UK - so long as they think they can rule what is left of it.

While in the election campaign they talk about the dangers of the "chaos" of the SNP somehow having control over Labour and the UK as a whole, at the same time people like George Osborne are talking up the talents of the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon. It is almost as if some Tories want the SNP to do well, regardless of the implications this may have on the wider future of the UK. And yet, while offering more powers to Scotland after the referendum, now they are talking about how Scottish voters' choice will have no effect in Westminster - words that seem almost designed to make the Scots even more angry and disconnected from the decisions in Westminster. This would no doubt suit the long-term aims of the SNP.
One theory doing the rounds is that the Conservatives are somehow hoping to destroy the Labour party in Scotland through the proxy of the SNP. With the simultaneous collapse of the LibDems north of the border, this then gives them a free run as the main "unionist" opposition to the SNP. A plot as nefarious as this couldn't be put past the Tories, regardless of how fanciful the aim. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (until he's the enemy again).

A Game Of Chess

In this light, the Scottish Conservatives may be trying to play a very long game. Meanwhile, the English Conservatives are trying to make Labour - the only party with serious levels of support in each part the union - as the party prepared to "do a deal" with a party (the SNP) that would split the union asunder. As we have already seen, this claim is as nonsensical as it is shamelessly hypocritical and disingenuous.
It would suit both the SNP and the Tories for Labour to be dislodged as "Stewards Of The North". To use a "Game Of Thrones" analogy (apologies to those not in the know) the Tories are playing the Lannisters, who secretly did a deal with the Boltons (the SNP) to take over from the Starks (Labour).

But this is not a game. While Cameron and Osborne play petty politics with Scotland for their own reasons, at the same time they are also playing games with the "insurgents" in British politics, UKIP. The Tories criticise Labour for refusing to rule out a deal with the SNP, but already in the previous parliament, Ukip's agenda forced Cameron into promising an EU referendum in the next parliament. And that was even at a time before UKIP had any MPs. While UKIP are unlikely to get more than a handful of MPs, they have plenty of "soft power" over the Conservatives in terms of the many Euro-sceptic MPs amongst the Tories themselves.
So, assuming that Cameron did get back into power, he would be beholden to the "insurgents" of UKIP on one hand, and powerless to prevent an angry and politically-disconnected Scotland breaking away, on the other. A Cameron second term could conceivably conclude with Scotland breaking up the union and the UK leaving the EU. While these might seem far-fetched scenarios, they would be even less likely if Ed Miliband were Prime Minister. 

To the likes of Cameron, politics is a game of chess, but one he thinks he is much better at than he actually is. His record as Prime Minister and statesman is actually pretty appalling. It sometimes feels like he's doing it for the lack of anything better to do.

Politics, the media, and the 2015 general election: the establishment's "dirty tricks"

The Leveson inquiry a few years ago delved into the sordid underbelly of the relationship between politicians, the media and the police. I wrote an article discussing how the media in the UK is in reality more of an oligarchy of individuals whose views are espoused through the mouthpieces of their own newspapers (and - in the case of Rupert Murdoch - media outlets as well).

We talk about a "free press" existing in the UK, but the major national newspapers are owned by what we could easily call "media barons". Murdoch is the most famous, of course; the Australian owns the "Sun" and "The Times", as well as the media (and news) outlet, Sky. The "Daily Mail" is ran day-today by its autocratic editor, Paul Dacre, but has been owned by Lord Rothermere and others for over a hundred years. These are the two most popular newspapers in the UK, both of which are instinctively conservative-leaning (though the "Sun" was more left-leaning back in the 1960s). There is also the "Daily Express", whose aim appears to be to out-do the "Daily Mail" at headline-grabbing scaremongering, and shores up the remainder of the conservative press, albeit with smaller circulation numbers. It is also the only national newspaper to be publicly supportive of UKIP.

"The Daily Telegraph" - casually known as the "Torygraph" - is effectively the editorial mouthpiece of the Barclay brothers, whom are tax avoiders and own the Channel Island of Sark. You'd be hard-pressed to find a newspaper that more symbolizes "the establishment" that this. 

By comparison, the "Mirror" is the most popular left-leaning tabloid, while  the "Guardian" is the newspaper of choice for the "mainstream" liberal-left. Lastly, there is the "Independent", a newspaper that was only established in the 1980s, and is (also with the London "Evening Standard") now owned by the Russian liberal Anglophile, Alexander Lebedev. This shores up the remainder of what could be called the "liberal left" segment of British society.

Fighting against the tide

It is fairly clear from this summary of the media environment in the UK that British newspapers are mainly owned by people who are rich and naturally have conservative beliefs. It can also be said that the most popular newspapers are owned by people who are rich and naturally have conservative beliefs; the same is true of their editors, and many of their journalists. These people have come from privileged backgrounds, have gone to public schools and top-class universities, mainly live in London, and thus have priorities that are completely different from those of ordinary families in the UK.

The problem is this: most people in the UK don't share those views. If they did, then British politics would be much more dominated by the Conservatives that it actually is. In effect, the majority of the British media is controlled by conservatives, and it is their views that are reflected in their newspapers. Anyone who believes that newspapers are there to reflect the views of their readers is living with a dangerously-naive view of the world. 

This point was made clear when Rupert Murdoch answered questions to parliamentary committees, and the Leveson inquiry. There is a clear "line of communication" explaining how a newspaper ought to explain a "story"; this often involves having a headline that reflects the views of the editor/owner (any sane editor matches his view with the view of the owner), and having the facts of the story fit around the headline. This is not "news" in the conventional sense of the word, but "spin" (or propaganda, to use the old-fashioned term).

Now this is nothing surprising, of course. Newspapers are businesses, and thus need to make money: this explains why some of them use sensational (i.e. misleading) techniques to grab readers' attention. But this is only one part of it. If newspaper owners were only there to make money, this would at least be understandable. But many of them are clearly interested in much more than money: being human beings, they crave power as well as financial success. Rupert Murdoch is the easy example to use for this, with his seemingly-insatiable appetite to buy more and more media outlets (and thus more and more influence). 

In this way, it can be argued that newspaper owners, their editors, and their high-flying journalists, are effectively another wing of the "establishment". The difference with the "establishment" in Westminster is that media "wing" of the establishment is un-elected, and (as the many recent scandals have shown) effectively unaccountable. When the Conservative government talked about possibly implementing reforms to hold newspapers to account, they screamed blue murder; as though they had been stabbed in the back by one of their own. And so the sacred "free press" were preserved from statutory intrusion.

Now that the election campaign has got underway for real, the "establishment media" have been using all their "dirty tricks" to undermine the Labour campaign. From the Telegraph's publication of top business leaders backing the Conservatives (really? who'd have thought, given that the newspaper is owned by tax exiles?), to the relentless message by the Telegraph, Mail, and the Sun that Labour is "anti-business". 

In some ways, this election campaign is being played in the media as a repeat of 1992. The Tories use a negative (and narrowly-focused) campaign to scare people against "Labour chaos" and another tax bombshell; at times, it seems the media are "triangulating" their attacks in conjuction with CCHQ. Ed Miliband, while certainly not the most charismatic person in the world, is certainly not the "weirdo" the media make him out to be. In recent days, he has been seen giving interviews and explaining his ideas in a much more natural and straightforward way than before. But this has barely had a mention in the media.

Meanwhile, David Cameron is given a "soft-focus" interviews by the media, and lots of media exposure of him looking either "prime ministerial" at a factory or a building site, or looking fatherly and easy-going when talking to families. The bias to distort the reality is blatant. 

What's worse is that Cameron's real record as a Prime Minster, and that of his government, is one of failure, That was clearly shown in the seven-way debate, where is abjectly failed to defend his record, gave (at best) misleading answers, could only revert to repeating the same negative points, and was (rightly) attacked by the other party leaders. His performance was one of the least convincing of the seven leaders. Yet somehow, polls in the media were showing him as either leading in the performance stakes, or coming a strong second. Who did they ask? 

For these reasons, we can expect more of the same over the coming month: a co-ordinated attack on Miliband a la Kinnock in 1992, from the Conservatives and their media allies. It is for this reason why the London press are now fixated on building-up the threat that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP pose. As Labour look very unlikely to gain a majority, the best method of attack is to go after those who may prop them up, and thus shore up the Tories as a safe "anti-SNP" block against the insurgents north of the wall.

Will it work? Well, it has before. And while no-one is seriously expecting the Tories to get a majority, if they can indirectly depress the Labour vote in Scotland through the SNP, and scare enough English voters from voting Labour, the Tories will have done what they always do: divide and rule. 

And then, post-election the media barons will have another "scapegoat" to threaten their readers with: the "Queen Beyond The Wall"...

 

  

Why people will vote Conservative, and the illusion of Tory competence

Recent polling for the general election has started to show the Tories slightly ahead of Labour. This can only be explained by "floating voters" starting to be swayed by the "message" that the Tories have to explain their economic plan, and the comparative incoherence of the Labour "message" (as well as people's opinion of each party's leader).

For this reason, it's worth spending some time to study the psychology of why the Tories are seen as "a safe bet", and exactly what type of "economic plan" they have.

First, some context: who exactly are "the Tories"? The modern Conservative Party stems from the old Tory party. The word "Tory" started being used after the English Civil War, to define people who supported the monarchy and represented the established gentry. This is in comparison to the "Whigs" (later to become the Liberals), who more represented the merchant class of the day, and thus in favour of greater controls on government and more effective accountability and transparency.

In this way, the modern-day Conservatives - who are essentially the same group of interests as three hundred years ago - could as well the called the aristocratic party, albeit with some cosmetic alterations to fit into the 21st century. While Margaret Thatcher arguably went the furthest to try and change that perception, the reality could never be hidden. The fact that the Prime Minister is of noble stock (more on his personality here), and many of the Cabinet went to "public school", says all we need to know about how their background influences their perception and judgement (more on that later).

The recent publicity given to the Conservatives' fundraiser, that was essentially a "who's-who" of the rich (and nefarious) elite, as well as some of the shamelessly out-of-touch antics that went on there (shopping trip with Theresa May, girls?), say more than any words could. This was the Conservatives demonstrated how the Conservatives behave on their "home turf", away from prying cameras (or so they thought). And in spite of such naked money-grubbing, many people still view the Conservatives as the most competent group to rule the country. Why?

Born to rule

It helps if, when you want to run government, you sound like you know what you are doing (even though you don't). In this area, the Conservative Party, in its leader and senior members, have a group of people who are nothing if not self-confident. One of the main reasons that Cameron became leader was his clear self-confidence in his own abilities, and his clear ability to appear statesman-like. He could talk for an hour without a tele-prompter (woo-hoo!), and knew how to "sound modern" and act like a human being. Cameron called himself the "heir to Blair", and made himself believe he was.

Since being in government, Cameron has always appeared the statesman. This explains why his leadership ratings are so much higher that Ed Miliband. The same can be said for George Osborne (who is really running the country): because he seems so self-confident, even all the people in economic institutions who criticize his policies (and are much more qualified than him) are like water off a ducks back.
These two "bright young things" are the ones who are running the show, and because they seem so self-assured at what they do, it is enough to convince those in the public, who don't have the time to check the facts. The Conservatives seem to know what they are doing; compared to them, Labour's plan is incoherent (even though it may be better!).

The character "The Joker" in The Dark Knight said that people don't panic if everything goes to plan, even if the plan is horrifying. To an extent, the same may be said of the Conservatives' economic plan.
What exactly is their plan?

As we are now looking at voting for a party that will govern for (potentially) the next five years, let's look at George Osborne's plan. As he reminded us late last year, most of the austerity measures have yet to happen. The Conservative plan is to shrink the state even further, to a point where it may not even be recognisable in its current form. Put another way, a vote for the Conservatives could be seen as a vote to destroy the UK as we know it.
Osborne's justification for this is that we can no longer "live beyond our means". But this term is highly-misleading at best, for this comes back to justifying austerity as a measure to rectify the previous Labour government's overspending. And this is based on a fabrication, or a willful twisting of the historical facts of the financial crisis. By creating this false narrative - in short, a lie - it creates a mindset in the public so that people see austerity as inevitable - or as Cameron has said "there is no alternative". In short, it is treating people as subjects.

If there is truly "no alternative", then why have elections at all (as Greece is finding out, to it's cost, at the moment)? This mentality goes back the moniker I gave to the Conservative Party - the "aristocratic party". In its heart of hearts, Britain (or more exactly, England) is a monarchy, and the centuries since the Civil War have never dimmed the instinctive respect people have for the ruling elite. Otherwise, why on earth do people find the trivialities of the royal family so distracting? The Conservatives know this. But in spite of the plethora of evidence that has damned the elite as a corrupt and instinctively self-serving institution, few people care enough (or feel powerful enough) to do anything about it.
This explains why the Conservative Party is so adept at modifying its outward appearance, and changing with the times. After all, Britain's politicians in the nineteenth century didn't give away suffrage out of the kindness of their hearts: it was a simply case of political expediency. As politicians at the time said, it was either give away some control away from the centre, or face a revolution. The Conservative Party - like the establishment it represents - has always worked to stay one step ahead of the game, predicting where future threats will come from, and seeing them off before they mature. While this hasn't always worked perfectly, the party has always done what is necessary to survive and protect vested interests - as the recent fundraiser demonstrated.

It is this self-assured quality that other politicians, and the public, naturally find disarming. But with self-confidence also comes complacency, and incompetence - and this government has been more incompetent than most.

The worst government ever?

The list of blunders of this government is analysed in the epilogue of the book "The Blunders Of  Our Governments".
I talked briefly about the government's (i.e. George Osborne's) economic policy. Even according to the government's own criteria, it has failed - by a large margin - to do what it intended. Controlling the deficit is one of the government's key objectives, and it has utterly failed to do so. This is for the simple reason that those running country have little understanding about how government and the economy really works. They think they know how things work, but in reality have little idea. This is why economic experts think George Osborne's plans are, at best, rubbish, and at worst, downright dangerous for the economy.
The deficit has continued to increase because, for one thing, borrowing has not been controlled, and government tax receipts (such as from income tax) are massively down. This is the effect of the "Osborne recovery": where many jobs are low-paid, insecure and with poor employment rights. Under the Conservatives, this appears to be the "new normal", where the UK is ran like a developing country. Sadly, most people seem so distracted by the simple act of fending for themselves in this new, much more unforgiving, environment, that few have time to think who is to blame for it.

In a sense, the country seems to be in "recovery" not because of government policy, but in spite of government policy.

Osborne's other big blunder has been the "help to buy" policy, which every respected economic institution calls a potential economic disaster in the making. If continued into the next parliament, this scheme - which effectively subsidizes home ownership - could create, not only (yet) another housing bubble, but  - due to inevitable, eventual rises in interest rates - create a mammoth negative equity crisis like twenty-five years ago. This scheme alone demonstrates how much Osborne cares about politicking, but cares little for proper economic analysis of policy.

The blunders continue with other parts of government, which often seems intent on making one bad decision after another.
In some ways, this government could also be called an "experimental government", as many of the ministers who run departments seem to use them as a means to try out new ideas - often without any serious appraisal beforehand. Of course, this idea is not new; what does seem unique is the scale of the "what about-ism" that many ministers possess, and also the purely ideological grounds for many of the decisions, without being based on proper evidence for its benefit to government finances. While Cameron publicly appears the statesman, his "hands-off" approach to controlling his ministers has turned departmental policy into a free-for-all. This is one of his (many) failings as a leader, despite the appearance of the contrary.

To name just a handful of examples, there was the re-organisation of the NHS masterminded by Andrew Lansley, which occurred without any consultation with those who worked in the sector. After some time, Lansley was demoted, but the policy (and all its chaos) has continued under his successor, Jeremy Hunt.

The raising of tuition fees to £9000 looks to have been a massive financial disaster for the government, because there is little likelihood of the government ever recouping much of the money from graduates. The purpose of increasing the fees was meant to make higher education better value-for-money while at the same time increasing the quality of university education, while the jury is still out on the latter (and who can say when we will know?), the former has been a complete cock-up, likely to cost the government untold sums of money in written-off loans in the future.

The government's much vaunted target to reduce immigration into the "tens of thousands" (which Cameron himself said the government should be held to account on at the end of its term) has seen immigration - at best - remain at much the same level it was at the end of the last parliament. Again, this was due to pleasing its party base, without any thought being put into the reality of what controls the UK government has over its border (regarding EU immigration, none). This is why some people have turned to UKIP. The government's targets here have been shown to be a laughing stock.

The reform of the Probation Service - while not on many people's radar - is one of huge consequence for the sector in question, and is - again - a victim to ministerial ideology and whim. The Probation Service is to be downsized and the probation services provided to lower and medium risk offenders will be open to tender from a wide number of companies. The service itself is - unsurprisingly - up in arms about these changes, which effectively privatise most of the sector. Many suspect that these private sector companies will cost more - they usually do - without there being any real evidence that this approach would have any beneficial effect on re-offending rates (and may well reduce the quality of the service).

The "bedroom tax" is a prime example of Conservatives in government having little idea about the reality of life for many people in the UK, as well as having no understanding of the UK's housing stock. It hasn't stopped them from making policy based on their out-of-touch understanding of reality. The result of this policy has been to cause a great deal of financial hardship for some of the most vulnerable in society, including the disabled, even - tragically - suicide. The idea of this policy was to make further savings, but the savings that have actually been made are much less than were originally anticipated.

The introduction of Universal Credit (UC) has been a disaster in all senses of the word, and has been a prime example of how not to do something. Again, this was another "project" due to ministerial whim. The fact that Iain Duncan Smith hasn't been sacked is a testament to the failings of David Cameron's leadership.

The reduction of the armed forces looks to be a blunder strategically, as well as being short-sighted and without using any proper analysis. This is most surprising (and worrying), considering that the Conservatives would have been assumed had good contacts with the armed forces' establishment.The reduction in the regular army was meant be replaced by a reserve army, but the numbers of actual recruits for the reserve army are currently running at more than five times less than the forecast numbers.

There are also the various fiascos of out-sourcing - for example, the A4e scandal, which completely missed its targets on the government help-to-work programme; more infamously, is the gross incompetence of G4S to provide security for the London Olympics, as well as costing the government a fortune.

The fact that the Conservatives still insist on using the private sector as the first port of call for service provision, in spite of the mass of evidence that few of these providers ever do the job either competently or prudently, tells you everything. It tells you that those in the Conservative Party who govern the country are incapable of making a judgement based on the facts, and will persist in doing the same thing again and again, even though it never works. Are they stupid, corrupt or both?

And people call them competent?