Coronavirus in the UK: a Brexit "stress test"?

A country’s culture tells us a lot about how it reacts to a crisis. When the Coronavirus hit Italy, the government put the entire country in quarantine (this literally being the place where the term “quarantine” was invented). When the Coronavirus came to Britain, the government’s approach has been one of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (as though stiff upper lip is a coherent strategy against a pandemic).

The advice the government is following comes from its Chief Scientist, who is in fact a behavioural scientist. This makes one wonder if Britain's official reaction to the Coronavirus isn't then turning into a kind of mass behavioural science experiment imposed on its population. 

Britain’s strategy rests not only on a lot of counter-intuitive thinking; it is also the dead opposite to what the rest of the world seems to be doing. Why?

Libertarian “behavioural science”

There is an attitude of “let things run their natural course” at work here, which is a mentality shared by proponents of laissez-faire Libertarianism. The “behavioural science” aspect of the government’s strategy is about “nudging” human behavior rather than through implementing drastic measures that could cause panic. In other words, the government wants the British population to be acquiescent and placid; fatalistic, almost, about the coming epidemic.

The government naturally has its own reasons for not wanting to create a panicked population, but the strategy here also seems to rest on some aspects of British culture as well. Fatalism and stoicism are two aspects of the British psyche that have been honed through different “crisis points” over the centuries, most recently the Second World War. Boris Johnson’s grave demeanour during these Coronavirus press conferences, feels deliberately designed to engender morbid acceptance of what is to come. In another (probably deliberate) way it feels like a quietly-knowing echo of the kind of “blood, toil, tears and sweat” of Churchill fame (which at the time definitely did not reassure everyone at all, by the way). Thus we have the national leader implicitly evoking the nostalgic spirit of “national struggle” and ultimate sacrifice, with the latter being seen as an inevitable consequence of the former. Those at the most risk, the elderly and the infirm, are already being made to be seen by the wider population as, to an extent, helpless victims of viral “natural selection”.

The scientific strategy seems to rest on allowing most of the population to be exposed to the virus naturally, with people’s own immune systems given time to fight it off. In this sense, the government seems to have already accepted that the health care system is unable to cope, and is encouraging people to “look after themselves”.

The fact that this strategy goes against all the official WHO advice and the responses of most other governments in the world is telling. It tells us the British government approach is a combination of Libertarian thinking backed up by the fatalism inherent in the British psyche. One wonders if some in the government haven’t already seen the “learning potential” from taking this “ideological strategy” to a pandemic outbreak to see how the same strategy could be used across the country more widely to deal with the political effects of Brexit next year.

Coronavirus: an opportune Brexit “stress test”?

If people can acquiesce to losing, for example, potentially half a million people on the back of ideological “science”, what else could they accept?

The dark echoes that this fatalism to mass death leads to need no explanation. Already Britain is a country where homeless people are left to die on the streets or in seclusion in the countryside and some of the disabled live in starved penury; people acquiesce as people are made homeless and the disabled starve thanks to government indifference. Such things are accepted, so it isn’t hard to see how that same population could accept potentially half a million dead as “one of those things”.

This is a society that has been “nudged” for the last ten years to accept what was once unacceptable in a civilized society. The British government’s approach to the Coronavirus has all the hallmarks of being ideological in its nature, against the approach recommended by the world’s health authorities. The ideological project that is “Brexit” intends to radically transform the structure of British society. Already weakened by a decade of austerity and welfare “reform”, those social structures are only supported by a government that seems willing to let a viral outbreak dissolve much of what’s left of British society’s communal bonds. 

With so many already homeless, so many disabled left to their fate, why would care about the old and infirm dying in a viral outbreak? This would be Darwinian "natural selection" on a national scale.

By making people acquiesce to the idea of half a million dead as somehow “feasible”, it psychologically prepares them for the ideological mayhem that a Libertarian “Brexit” would inflict on them afterwards. Worn down by a decade of austerity and a year of viral deaths, whatever ideological plans the government has for “Brexit Britain” would be accepted as almost trivial by comparison. There would be no effective opposition left.

In this sense, there could be a very discreet (and deliberate) psychological strategy behind the government’s “laissez-faire” attitude to the Coronavirus outbreak (as their strategy is so plainly at odds with every other country’s): using the outbreak as a way to “stress test” specific structural aspects of society, while weakening public resistance to the radical (and at one time, unthinkable) social change to come afterwards.

The “national struggle” that the Coronavirus is now being portrayed as by the British government evokes the jingoistic spirit of Britain’s mythologized past on one hand and the stoic fatalism in the British psyche on the other. The acceptance of the radical ideology of Brexit after the national trauma that an ideological approach to the Coronavirus could inflict could well be something the government is banking on.

The “ideological laboratory” that Britain has been for the last ten years seems to be stepping up in its approach, with Brexit as its endgame; in the case of the Coronavirus, using Britain’s population as expendable “guinea pigs” seems like just the logical conclusion of that when applied to medical science.

Finally, there is the idea of the virus as a "test of national character". By being able to deal with the Coronavirus with its own ideological approach, it implies that Britain can deal with any kind of adversity. The mythology of Britain's supposed exceptionalism fits the Coronavirus outbreak into the narrative of Brexit.

Brexit "culture wars", Meghan Markle, traditionalism and the royal family

The self-imposed exile of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is one of the many casualties of the “culture war” that has been taking place in Britain for most of the last ten years. It has intensified in the last five years to the point of infecting the image of the royal family itself. The whiff of racism is implicit in the way that the popular press (the “Daily Mail” being the most vivid example) has reacted to Meghan Markle’s behavior, criticizing her for the same actions that Kate Middleton has been otherwise fawned over for. It is incredible that two women can be treated so differently for doing the same things (one – of mixed-race heritage – scorned, the other – of white British descent – praised). The only identifiable difference between them is their racial heritage, and to not see that at the reason for how differently they have been treated by the popular press is to be delusional to what is going onin people’s brains.

Why do the popular press (and its very vocal readership) fawn over Kate on the one hand, and scorn Meghan on the other? Apart from the racial undertones, what else it going on?

“Embodying British values”

The “culture war” that has encompassed Brexit also overlaps into broader cultural issues of national identity, and both these issues affect each other. To “traditionalists”, the royal family represents a link to the values of the past: of deference to authority, ultra-orthodox family life, and maintaining “dignity” through an aversion to displays of emotion. These values are, to those traditionalists, embodied in the Queen Elizabeth II, who grew up at a time when these values were shared not only by traditionalists, but by most of the general public.

This behavior had been instilled in her father, George VI, and her uncle, Edward VIII, by George V, the queen’s grandfather. Those values, however, were noticeably absent from Edward VIII, and his very public persona and charisma made him immensely popular to the public, but hated by the traditionalists. His relationship with Wallis Simpson was only the most obvious example of how he wished to rule as a king in his own singular (and modern) style, against the values that the traditionalists held dear. This was a very public “culture war” that the traditionalists won, at Edward VIII’s expense; it was a “culture war” that cost the king his crown.

Edward VIII’s sympathies towards Fascism were, by comparison, a distraction; his views were shared by many others in the elite at the time, and what made it inconvenient was that Edward was sharing publicly views that many held in the elite held privately. Edward VIII “embarrassed” the image of the royal family by being indiscreet, and it was this that the traditionalists were determined to stamp out. Once he was “exiled” he could be conveniently dismissed as a “crank”.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are victims to similar sort of “culture war” today: by being open in their views, by engaging with public causes (in much the same way that Edward VIII did), being openly liberal, somehow, they are bringing the image of the royal family into disrepute. Nearly a hundred years on, Meghan Markle receives the same levels of scorn from traditionalists that Wallis Simpson did, with the added dimension of Markle’s mixed-race background.

So Harry and Meghan, to escape further scorn from the popular press, have exiled themselves to Canada; jumping before they were pushed, to save the embarrassment of being “shipped off to the Bahamas” like Edward and Wallis Simpson were.

The dimension of race in today’s situation is emblematic of how the idea of “liberal” Britain became a myth. The popular press wants a monarchy that lives in their minds as an unchanging symbol of the past, rather than a representation of the present. It wants a monarchy with the cosmetic appearance of modernity, but with its “modus operandi” unchanged for eternity.

The Japanese once revered their emperor as a god; the traditionalists revere the Queen and her family as a living representation of British values; or more exactly, of the values they want to mythologize. While the 1990s were a time when the royal family’s veneer of respectability lost much of its sheen, as the Queen has grew older, she has still represented a continuity of values that traditionalists in modern Britain hanker for once more. Like Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who ruled that empire for more than fifty years through the industrial revolution to the First World War, Queen Elizabeth II has ruled Britain (and its dying empire) through many social and cultural changes.

Traditionalists’ “culture war” against modernity and liberal values is summed up in the values that spawned “Brexit” as much as the values that forced Harry and Meghan into self-imposed exile. In some ways, they are victims of the same “culture war” that has forced many Europeans to leave the UK; in the battle of values and culture, the values of tradition, the reverence of authority and mythologizing the past have beaten the values of liberalism and globalism.

“Natural selection”

As the monarchy represents traditional values, it also implicitly represents the ideology of elitism and inherited superiority. For traditionalists, that innate “superiority” (and implicit “purity”) is threatened by globalism and multiculturalism. This is the real stem of the racism that Meghan Markle has faced: traditionalists, at their heart, cannot abide the idea of a black woman marrying into the white Anglo-Saxon “elite” that the royal family represents. For the royal family to maintain its “royal” lineage and its elitist power, in traditionalists’ eyes it must remain “pure”.

This is the ugly prejudice and elitism that lies under the surface of Britain’s cultural traditionalists: for Britain to remain special, its royal family must remain pure. This is not so far removed from the thinking of racial eugenicists that was prevalent a hundred years ago, and the fact that such thinking has refused to die (and even seen a resurgence) tells us that Britain’s form of hierarchical racism has been long-hidden under a façade of respectability and a pretense of egalitarianism.

Britain’s traditionalist elite has maintained its hold by adapting to change; but allowing a mixed-race American woman into the royal family was always a step too far for them; thus she had to be discreetly encouraged to live as a “royal” in name only, if not meek and subserbient then better to have her exiled outside Britain. That she has done what they always wanted has then allowed them to blame it on her own “egoistic” personality. The conservative tendency has won.

These are the same kind of traditionalists that blame “Europe” for holding Britain back, blaming the egos of EU bureaucrats for not giving Britain what it wants; and when Britain gets what it wants – “Brexit” – they still blame the EU bureaucrats for sabotaging Britain’s destiny regardless.

Traditionalists blame immigrants (and Britain’s modern multiethnic society) for a litany of problems: from crime, to unemployment to welfare scams. If you read the “Daily Mail” this is certainly the impression you will get. The same tropes used in the 1930s are being repeated in the age of the internet; only this time, technology is doing the job much more efficiently, reinforcing prejudices and solidifying the cultural divides.

The traditionalists can’t turn back the clock on multicultural Britain, but they can make it uncomfortable for those who don’t fit in to their prejudices: people from “foreign descent” who are “uppity” for instance, and should learn to respect what Britain “has done for them”. In their eyes, Meghan Markle should be “grateful” for being in the royal family (and therefore keep her mouth shut, one assumes).

Traditionalists can accept multiculturalism as long as it is on their terms; if people start using their own languages on public transport then “it no longer feels like Britain any more”, and so on. Immigrants are only acceptable if they are “useful”, doing the jobs that Brits don’t want. Immigrants are meant to feel grateful that they are the underclass; they are meant to feel grateful for the dehumanizing articles written about them in the popular press. Non-whites, traditionalists assume, are all meant to be thought of as “foreigners” who can never be allowed to feel truly at home in Britain; they are there “on sufferance”, at the whim and pleasure of its “natives”.

Britain, as traditionalists see it, is an implicit “white power”. Britain’s historical power as an empire, it is assumed, came about from Britain’s inherent superiority. Its ability to dominate the world, given its relative puniness in geographical terms, can only be explained by the innate superiority of its natives. Britain’s historical dominance can only be seen as due to Darwinian “natural selection” that enabled its people to make its fortune beyond its shores. In this thinking, inequality is part of the natural order, and those Britons that have thrived abroad did so due to their own innate superiority.

The irony of this form of "eugenic mythology" is that many outside Britain implicitly admire the country for that very reason, seeing Britain as a country that has produced a multitude of intelligent scientists, academics, traders and adventurers. It is this mythology of Britain always able to "punch above its weight" and "thrive on adversity" that has led to Brexit’s most ardent supporters thinking that the nation is more than capable of thriving outside the EU in the 21^st century (as some kind of fantastical super-human innovation and trade hub that operates outside of the laws of reality).

Britain, in traditionalists’ eyes, is a nation that lost its empire due to ungrateful “colonials” and the conspiracies of foreign powers, rather than due to changes in global commerce and inefficient techniques at home. The mythology of Britain as a “global power” reliant on only itself, with a royal family acting as both an instrument and symbol of that innate power, is the myth the traditionalists maintain in spite of the uncomfortable (and embarrassing) reality staring them in the face.

The traditionalists will find out who wins when mythology trades comes face to face with reality next year.

Nazi Satanism in Britain: the far-right, esoteric occult ideology and chaos

Britain might seem like an unlikely location as a crucible of far-right radicalism and Nazi-Satanism.  In recent years, though, a succession of extreme far-right groups, advocating violence and Satanic ideologies, have proliferated in the UK.

It’s important to understand what these groups really represent. On the whole, they are NOT “Nazis” in what many think of in the traditional sense; since the Second World War, many so-called “neo-Nazi” groups are more exactly “Nazi-inspired” than direct ideological successors. While there are have been plenty of far-right nationalist groups in recent decades that certainly continue the anti-Semitic “race war” ideology of the Nazis, many other groups take their inspiration from the Nazis in a more esoteric form.

In this sense, the Satanist far-right groups in the UK nowadays (like in other parts of the Christian West) are “Nazi” in the sense that they see the Nazi ideology and the persona of Hitler as an “inspiration” for their own nihilistic, anti-Christian agenda. They see the Nazis as a "force of chaotic energy" that fits their own. Their agenda is the destruction of Western civilization, as the Nazis was, through the use of extreme violence and “shock tactics”; but the "Nazi Satanists" of today are using their own moral degeneracy as a weapon to infect the rest of society like a virus. These are the same tactics that Fascism used nearly a hundred years ago,using extreme violence and powerful esoteric rhetoric to instill chaos in society, and not unlike how Islamic fundamentalists have done in the era since 9/11, ISIS in particular wanting to create their own "Islamo-Fascist" state in the Middle East.

Violence, moral degradation and psychological terror are the weapons that the far-right uses, along with spreading paranoia and conspiracy theories. It’s no coincidence that “climate skepticism”, “flat earth theory” and campaigns against “cultural Marxism” are all propagated within the far right; the origins of these beliefs are anti-Semitic in their origin, and some of them go back a hundred years or more.


Fascism as a modern-day "in-joke"

At the same time, however, the “crackpot” beliefs disseminated by the far right (and the Nazi-Satanist creed in particular) are held as a kind of “in-joke” by their own ranks. 
Unlike when Fascism and Nazism first appeared, the 21^st century incarnation doesn’t take itself too seriously; it spreads nonsensical beliefs and conspiracy theories more as a tactic to confuse society (i.e. as a form of psychological terror). The rituals held by the Nazi-Satanist groups in Britain, for example, are clearly absurd, and are meant to be; but they instill terror in everyone else all the same, which is entirely beneficial to their cause; their cause is to instill fear, confusion, moral degradation and chaos. 
This is why when the “alt-right” first came to popular prominence through the image of “Pepe the Frog”, it was all meant as a joke at everyone else’s expense; the joke was on society, and society – unclear about how to interpret what was happening – played along at its own deprecation.

This was how the “alt-right” was able to become so powerful, disproportionate to its own numbers. Other Populist groups achieved a similar level of recognition and “air-time” using the same tactics, making their fringe ideas mainstream by exploiting the malleability of fallibility of society’s beliefs. When no-one can claim to know what is right or wrong, or true or false, a land of “alternative facts” is never far away.  

Likewise, by spreading fear and confusion, the agenda of the pagan far-right is furthered. Using, for instance, a picture of Hitler as part of a Satanic ritual is certainly shocking; but then, that is the entire point. When the far-right advocates social or ethnic cleansing, it does so more than anything to influence wider opinion, by making these views “normal”. By spreading these ideas on social media, for example, its chaotic ideology seeps into the popular imagination. This is how “random” acts of violence, or hate crimes on the street, become more and more endemic. Views that would have once have been seen as extremely racist or hateful (and indeed still are, by any objective standard) are instead seen as “typical”.

The mainstream media plays along with this, by giving these extreme views a form of “moral equivalence” on talk shows or debates. Extreme views are then publicized without criticism, or not even by pointing out where they are factually inaccurate. In this way, nonsensical beliefs become “mainstream”.

This has been happening gradually since 9/11, but accelerated after the global financial crisis, and Britain has been one of the crucibles of this ideological transformation. These days, Britain has become a country in the grip of a “belief-based” project. No one in their right mind thinks that Britain could benefit economically from leaving the EU, but the power of belief over facts was behind what led to the referendum result in 2016.

The power of belief – of “the will” – is also a strongly-held concept in the far-right. The fact that some of the beliefs are nonsensical, as mentioned earlier, is also a kind of “in-joke” at the expense of society; if they can convince the rest of society that they are serious they have already succeeded in their task at manipulating society.  

This is why the psychology of the “cult” is so similar to that of the far-right: they are ran according to belief systems that defy rational thought; their agenda is, indeed, to destroy rational thought (or at least, make enough people question it). If their beliefs are then shown to be in error when they come up against reality, it is not the fault of their belief system, but reality itself that in in error; the only explanation for this dichotomy must be some kind of conspiracy against them.

This is why conspiracy theories find such fertile ground in the far-right: they are the only way to rationalize how their beliefs are so self-evidently nonsensical.


The cult of chaos

Britain nowadays seems a fertile ground for conspiracy theories,“magical thinking” and “cultish” ideology. All these things have come together under the convenient banner of “Brexit”, and it is no coincidence that the same crackpot conspiracies once held by the far-right gradually came to be held by a large portion of the electorate: the EU is responsible for all the ills in British society; the EU is a Jewish plot; the EU wants to abolish the British army etc. etc.

The “Nazi Satanists” in Britain are meanwhile reveling in the potential they see for chaos; spreading race hate, hate between the Abrahamic religions, hate for minorities, outsiders and those from alternative lifestyles. Their aim is to create fear and chaos between them all in order to make civilization disintegrate, and replace the old order with an ideology completely free of morality; an age of Satan. 
No-one in their right mind expects Britain to morally desintigrate to that extent; but Nazi Satanists only need their degenerate beliefs to infect enough of society to create moral disorder and a spike in intra-community violence in order to consider their methods to have been successful. Their use of the internet is the way they have been promoting their extreme ideas.

Britain has a tradition of the esoteric and the occult, with Aleister Crowley being one of its most famous figures. It was said his disciples tried to form a connection between him and Hitler, in the end to no effect. The esoteric world blossomed in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the same time as in the UK. The factors behind the fascination were the same; the rapid change in society and technology sent many looking to alternative routes for guidance amidst the uncertainty of an ever-changing world; falling back on ancient wisdom was something that had a strong tradition in both German and British paganism, through Nordic and Celtic (Druid) culture.

Satanism has become mixed in with these among the modern far-right in Britain. Fascism, since the global financial crisis, has had a "reboot" as a force for energetic, chaotic change. The hypnotic power of esoteric symbolism has seen a new home in the changing social and economic climate in Britain, and it will take a radical rethink if its dark forces are to be defeated.

The UK "Porn Block": ineffective, counter-productive, intrusive…and a microcosm of Theresa May's psychology?

The author some time ago wrote about how Theresa May’s psychology seemed like a microcosm of Britain’s collective neuroses. As a person, her inner thinking is defined by her background. The manner of how she ruled the both the Home Office as Home Secretary and has run the country as Prime Minister can be explained by the self-evident moral rigidity of her upbringing: the only child of a priest, growing up in the whiter-than-white heart of traditional “Middle England”.

There is more than a whiff of poisonously-regressive, moralistic sanctimony to the manner of both May’s idea of society and the social agenda that her government has pursued. It is as though under her watch, she wants to actively encourage the authoritarian moralizing that typified the Victorian era, but implemented with 21st century technology.

Under May’s watch, Britain loses its identity as a progressive Western society, and slides into the authoritarian realm, where people’s private actions are policed, even when what they are doing is entirely legal. These are not even people suspected of being criminals or conspiring in criminal behavior; they are simply doing something that is entirely natural as human beings. This is done in the name of “protecting children”; as all authoritarian actions are done in someone else’s name.

In this way, she is taking the idea of “nudging”public behaviour that was introduced under Cameron’s administration, and applying her own deeply unsubtle, authoritarian methodology: from coaxing people’s inclinations to hammering them into their head.  

The “Porn Block” is merely the logical conclusion to May’s pursuit of a regressive moral agenda that both stigmatizes the private realities of modern life, and removes the right to privacy for those interested in most online sexual content. The consumption of pornography becomes an implicit “thoughtcrime”: while it is “legal”, those who consume it are made to feel stigmatized, with all their online private inclinations stored and recorded. How convenient. The infamous phrase that “people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear” is the exact opposite of the intention of this policy: they have everything to fear.

Of course, the real intention is as “red meat” to the Conservative Party’s geriatric grassroots. Of those people, few of them see the internet as anything else than a corrupting and dangerous influence. Of course, it can be this, but that is the same any form of media.

Then there are the practicalities behind it, which explain how the “Porn Block” is such an utterly stupid idea at various levels. Apart from all the security dangers it poses to users at recording vast quantities of personal data and sexual interests, it is easy to circumvent the age barriers using VPN software in any case, making it largely ineffective to any savvy (underage) internet user. And to those who can’t get around the age block, then the “dark web” will be another unregulated avenue for them to explore. In the same way that banning soft drugs simply means that it sends users to the same dealers of illegal harder drugs (and thus being a counter-productive government act), the “Porn Block” will simply entice more teenagers to the “dark web”, where the most extreme content possible can also be found. So how about that for protecting children from porn?

The fact that this policy is so ineffective, counter-productive and authoritarian and that is also has occurred under the watch of Theresa May cannot be mere coincidence. Apart from being a national leader who is so utterly useless at almost everything she deals with, she then has to distract her ineptitude with authoritarian policies that can only appeal to her party base. Even if the policy is disastrous on so many levels, the fact that her party base would probably love it supersedes all other concerns. This was true of the “hostile environment”, welfare reform, and “austerity”, and is also true of the “Porn Block”.

Another social consequence of the “Porn Block” is that is amplifies the moral gulf between the rulers and the ruled. 21^st century Britain is a "liberal" country, but this is a policy that does not belong in a liberal country. It is a policy that doesn’t even belong in the West at all. But Britain’s ruling elite are a class apart from those below them whose taxes pay for the moralizing of their rulers. The rulers don’t care about the “Porn Block” in practical terms, because they know how to circumvent it already. Many of them already do this in how they “manage” their tax affairs. In this way, the “Porn Block” is simply more evidence of the contempt that the rulers have for the private lives of the ruled. As far as the rulers are concerned, the ruled don’t deserve one; the “Porn Block” is simply confirmation of this.

 

No sex (education), please – we’re British

The “Porn Block”, as the government seems proud to point out, makes Britain a pioneer in online security. As mentioned already before, the “security” aspect is both dangerous and pathetically-easy to circumvent. So all this proves, in the same manner as Brexit, is how hopelessly how out-of-depth and painfully lacking in self-awareness Britain’s government looks to the rest of the world. If the “Porn Block” makes Britain’s government a pioneer, it is only a pioneer in embarrassing ineptitude, under the guise of moral authoritarianism. It makes Britain’s government look like a slapstick version of the “morality police”.

In any case, these actions only underline how abysmal Britain’s sexual education is compared to most other developed nations, and how the government’s first instinct is to prevent people from finding things out or (heaven forbid) enjoying themselves in a way that their rulers find somehow offensive or socially dangerous. British sex education is almost an oxymoron, as governments (especially Conservative ones) are so constrained by their own sexual insecurities they are horrified at the idea of people having an “education” in sex. They simply cannot countenance seriously talking about it.

The alternative to sex education is the situation Britain has had for decades: among the highest rates for teenage pregnancy in the Western world. Government policy that engenders sexual ignorance in society does not reduce the desire for sex; indeed, decades of evidence have shown it produces the exact opposite effect.

One glaringly obvious reason that teenagers watch porn is that – apart from entirely natural hormonal reasons – because they know so little about sex from their schooling or their parents, online pornography becomes the only “resource” they can access to discover more about it. Therefore the most obvious reason that teenagers have such questionable morality about sex is because, lacking any proper guidance from responsible adults, they get their “sex education” from porn. The end result of “porn” being their primary sexual resource, are (male) teenagers with highly questionable ideas of consent, among many other issues of sexual realism.

And now the government wants to prevent teenagers from having any practical knowledge of sex at all until they come of age, in a true moralizing throwback to Victorian prudishness. It is true that before the internet age, pornography was very much limited in its circulation to the general population. 

But is that really a regression that Britain should be making in the 21^st century – back to a time decades ago when pornography was a realm that only “perverts” inhabited? It is telling how pervasive that outdated thinking still seems to be in the socially-regressive mind of Theresa May.

In this way, Britain under Theresa May has become, in regards to sex, one step closer to the moral universe of puritanical absolutism with modern technology: a moral plane that is much closer to the contemporary Muslim regimes of the Middle East and Asia, for example; or to use a fictitious parallel, the logical conclusion of this path is the descent some kind of twisted British version of Gilead.

Not so much “Under His Eye”, but “Under Theresa’s Eye”.

Culture, creativity and inequality: how conservative ideology suppresses societal growth

Britain is a place of contradictory tendencies: both the historic home of the Industrial Revolution, and also the home of that most traditional of institutions, the monarchy and the aristocracy.

This contradiction is clear today from how the government, on the one hand, publicly encourages creativity in its many forms, but in practice its policies do everything to stifle it, by depriving channels of funding, and only encouraging channels that perpetuate (and exacerbate) inequality.

Under the Conservatives, the British government's natural bias is thus to see culture and creativity as something that should only be encouraged in "people like us" i.e. the well-off.
Part of this comes from a conservative definition of "culture" in the first place: that "culture" also means "tradition", such as the high arts. This natural bias follows from the belief that only those with the right education can truly appreciate, and therefore benefit from, "culture".

At an anecdotal level, this stratification of the arts in Britain has become apparent in fields such as contemporary music, the film industry and literature.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the music industry in Britain was filled with working-class bands (and from where the "indie" scene sprouted); go back further to the 1960s, and the egalitarian nature of the music industry - that anyone with a guitar who was good enough could "make it" - was clearly evident.
Today, apart from the dynamic and successful black music scene (successful partly because, by a happy coincidence, it is centred on London), there are few obvious routes for talented musicians of limited means to "make it". Again, this goes back to the wider conservative trend that has spread from politics into British culture. A career through creative pursuits is something only really available to those with the means: to most others, it is a pipe-dream. Whereas at one time an enlightened government might find the funds to help talented people with limited means, those days have long passed.
For those without the means, the fact that the most obvious route these days is through a TV talent show says it all - "culture", to the ordinary person, has become even more facile.


Bottom-up and Top-down conservatism

That facile perception of "culture" is perpetuated among the lower class. This is the flip-side to conservatism: bottom-up rather than top-down.
.
Working-class conservatism stems from the deep adherence to orthodox thinking.
Partly this may be down to lack of education meaning that they lack the imagination to think of doing things in any other way. As a result, people who think differently are seen with suspicion and thinking ideas "beyond their station"; there are a whole host of other belittling terms that have been used by the conservative working class to describe creative or talented peers. "Get a real job", "fancy Dan", etc. etc.
People from their background who think, act, dress, or talk differently are made fun of, or at worst, stigmatized. Thus "creative" people in these circumstances are encouraged to suppress their inner tendencies out of the need for social acceptance within their peers.

The traditional mindset is that male and female roles in their strata of society are fixed, and the implication is that a "real" man would not waste his time thinking of creative pursuits. Equally, a woman from the same background ought to be thinking of her family and not her selfish day-dreaming.
In this way, creative and talented people from the lower classes of society, without government support, can find it almost impossible to reach their natural potential. Discouraged by the conservatism found among their peers, and by a government that treats them with indifference, the result is a tragic waste of human creative resources. Talent and creativity go to waste by a society that sees little value in their worth. Meanwhile, the human impact on those people directly impacted by this might be immense, resulting in a whole plethora of mental health issues.

It is this combination of both top-down and bottom-up conservatism in a society that suppresses its natural growth, leading to stagnation. It is no coincidence that the most conservative societies are also the most stagnant: societies with no dynamic "culture", other than the narrow definition that suits the accepted orthodoxy. These are societies that are frozen in time: culturally-dead to the outside world.

Britain is one of the most unequal developed societies in the world; a situation that has exacerbated in the last forty years, after previously improving.
The long-term effects of de-industrialization in Britain on the working class have resulted in a class of society that feels emasculated and forgotten, its sense of self-worth lost. In that sense, when many of these areas voted to leave the EU, this was also a forlorn cry of frustration. These are people that have lost their sense of motivation.

As said before, there was a time when Britain was more egalitarian; this was also a time when society was arguably at its most dynamic and creative.
The most obvious reason for this is that egalitarian societies provide an evident motivation to improve and be imaginative; when there is a greater chance that being creative will result in social success, naturally you will try your best to do so. There is a good reason why, to use one example, for a while in the 1960s it seemed that every group of teenagers wanted to be (or tried their hand at being) a band.
The other reason is that egalitarian societies tend to be less conservative; the belief that inequality is somehow "natural" to society is a key tenet of conservative thought. Thus egalitarian societies tend to be more open-minded because society is closer together, both economically and culturally. In an egalitarian society there is less of a social division between (for example) the working-class factory worker and the well-off artist, musician or writer. In this way, there is more engagement between the different strata in society as opposed to social "self-segregation" in more unequal societies. More engagement with other social groups leads to hearing different perspectives and naturally helps to improve someone's creativity, and thus social creativity as a whole.

It is that "self-segregation" in more unequal societies (such as contemporary Britain) that is the cause of the top-down, bottom-up "double lock" on creativity.
The most extreme manifestation might be like this. Those at the top of society see "culture" as something that is wasted on the uneducated lower class, and thus perpetuate the problem through their indifference; they don't want to educate the lower classes in something they wouldn't understand, therefore the lower classes will continue to be uneducated in "culture". Besides, there is also the barely-suppressed historic fear of the lower classes becoming too "cultured", and thus too intelligent: intelligent enough to want to change the social hierarchy completely.
Meanwhile, the lower classes see "culture" as something only connected with "bourgeois" pretensions, and anyone within their strata that affects to be interested in it is a "class traitor". In this way, people from this background who aspire to creative tendencies and an interest in culture are "forgetting their roots" i.e. their traditions and upbringing.
In this way, those at the top and bottom of society segregate themselves from effective contact from each other.

These types already exist, in one form or another, in Britain today.

Britain, the EU and the Brexit negotiations: a clash of cultures?

An article in the Guardian articulated part of the problem the British government has with its negotiations with the EU. Apart from not understand the nature of the EU (in spite of being part of it for over forty years), it doesn't even understand how it is seen itself by others. As the writer in the article explains:
"In Brussels, the British are viewed with suspicion – seen as hiding cunning behind charm, using manners as a cloak for ruthlessness, and, at their core, being strategic, stubborn and mercantile. These stereotypes of character are joined by experience. It is precisely because Britain has so successfully secured its interests as a member of the EU – shaping the evolution of the European project while securing opt-outs from key parts of it – that the other member states understand how ruthlessly it pursues its interests. One of the great ironies of the current impasse is that Britain’s success in the EU stokes fears of its conduct outside it "
Apart from that, it also seems that Brussels has a better understanding of Britain's own culture than even Britain has itself:
" British politics is erratic, unstable, and irrational. British politicians are, therefore, not to be trusted. There is a belief that the British – accustomed to great power for centuries – are simply incapable of accepting any rules. Britons lazily project their domestic political model – where one side wins, the other loses, and the winner dominates the loser – on to a European politics that is very different"

In a nutshell, we have above a cultural explanation of why Britain's government is failing so abysmally in its negotiations with Brussels. Apart from Britain's government having the ingrained culture of seeing politics and diplomacy as a zero-sum game, coming from its long tradition of an adversarial style of statecraft, its ignorance in even its own self-awareness (let alone of the culture of "foreign powers") is dooming its fate.
This is just one example of the cultural disconnect between London and Brussels. The EU cannot fathom, for one thing, how Britain's government can be so ignorant of the rules of an organisation that it has been a member of for more than forty years. It cannot fathom how Britain's government seems to repeatedly set demands for its post-EU relationship that would break the EU's own rules; rules that Britain should have been well aware of for decades.


The buccaneer versus the bureaucrat

One explanation for this is "culture", and that Britain's ruling class has simply become utterly complacent in its relationship to Europe and its own intellectual competence. Britain's cultural default in international relations is the imperial power-play, where it plays off one "Johnny Foreigner" against the other for its own advantage. This is one method that was used to expand and maintain the British Empire, and the same methodology was used in its past European relations.
Brought forward to a post-Imperial setting, Britain joined the then EEC for its own economic necessity, as well as joining the power-play tussle of the major European states within the organisation. This worked well for the first ten years or so inside "the club", but by the late Eighties it was clear that there were elements within the British establishment and the media who saw "Europe" as the enemy, and bristled against the increasing regulation and bureaucratic centralisation. By this time, it was clear to Eurosceptics that the European "project" was turning into something they didn't sign up for, and this was the start of the series of "opt outs" that the British government negotiated with the EU to mollify its critics.
We know how this story ends: with Britain outside the Eurozone, with a Conservative Prime Minister (David Cameron) going so far to mollify the Eurosceptics that we have ended up leaving the EU completely, with the current Prime Minister promising to even leave the single market (EEA/EFTA) as well. The mythic image of Britain as a "trade buccaneer" is what helped it join the single market in the 1970s, and it is that same self-delusion that is leading many in government to believe that Britain can thrive outside of the European single market now.
In this sense, the negotiations have failed because Britain falsely believes in its own self-delusion as a trading goliath, where the EU "needs us more than we need them". This leads to the belief that the EU's stubbornness is merely a negotiation strategy (more on that later) where they will eventually buckle. The British government's fatal misunderstanding of the EU's necessary preservation of its own interests is what we'll look at next. And it is also this British "buccaneer" vision that is fuelling the EU's need for self-preservation: it doesn't want to have a super-sized free-trade tax haven right on its doorstep, without the regulatory means to protect itself.


Short-term versus long-term

Regarding the Brexit negotiations specifically, Theresa May's strategy (if she can be said to have one) seems to be to find a short-term fix to any problem that arises, that kicks the can down the road a little further, until it has to kicked yet further down the road again later.
This classic short-termist strategy is something that has been a part of British politics for decades, arguably centuries. In British government generally (and also often in industry), big issues that need to be tackled are often "fudged", relying on a culture of "muddling through": from in the modern era, things like HS2, Heathrow's new runway, investment, infrastructure planning and the approach to the economy in general (feeding a rapacious financial sector or voracious property bubble, for example) to historical examples like the wasteful use of North Sea oil revenue, selling-off government assets for the short-term boost to the treasury's books, and so on. The tendency within the British system is to find short-term solutions to problems - and if possible, ignoring the problem completely - creating a culture of "make do and mend" that feeds an atmosphere of institutional backwardness.
Theresa May, however, has taken this mentality to new depths. As her main priority seems to be focused on purely self-preservation (of her, and her government's unity), survival is continued by the necessity to "fudge" any issues of disagreement, allowing them to be dealt with later. Regarding the agreement her government made with the EU in December, the semantic "fudge" allowed her to both satisfy the different voices in her government, as well as the DUP who prop her government up in parliament, and also the EU.
With Donald Tusk's recent comments, we know now that the EU has called May out on this clear act of short-term deception. The EU cannot accept any "fudge" that fails to provide clear legal certainty (see the next section below). It is this reason that the negotiations appear stalled. Besides this, and even more importantly, the EU has a cultural aversion to short-termism. In fact, in its very inception, the then EEC marked itself out as a long-term "project" for "ever closer union". While its solution to the Greek crisis several years ago looked like a "kicking the can down the road" exercise, this was also a demonstration of how the EU are risk-averse, taking the longer view that it was better to have Greece under control and inside the club than a potential basket case out of its control on its edges.

With Brexit, the EU have taken the view that as Britain's government has decided it will leave all associated EU institutions completely, it must act for its own self-preservation and self-integrity. The EU accepts that there would be an economic hit to the single market from Britain's actions, but it cannot compromise its own systems (or its long-term future) for the sake of one non-member, even one the size of Britain. And as the EU has stated, it is precisely Britain's size and close vicinity that make its deregulation strategy potentially so threatening to the EU. In short, (among other things) having such a lax attitude to tax regulation, treating citizens with callous indifference, and its threatening language from its media, has made Britain the "bad guy":

So the EU is prepared for the consequences of Brexit, and takes the longer view. It's only Britain who doesn't.


Amateurs versus technocrats

The EU has often been derided as a technocratic bureaucracy of faceless cogs in the wheel, but it is in the Brexit negotiations that the EU's technocratic system is shown to have its uses. On the side of Brussels you have Michel Barnier and his technical team of legal experts, with supporting roles by Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker. These are people who have an entire legal team of experts to support them, along with their own long experience of EU procedures. On the British side you have David Davis, supported by Theresa May and Boris Johnson. These are people whose grasp of technical detail is hazy at best; for example, you have David Davis not seeming to understand such basics like services not having tariffs, and so talks about removing tariffs from services to get better trade deals, to demonstrate his utter ignorance. There are a thousand and one examples like this.

In this sense, Britain's negotiations are led by figures who are literally amateurs. This is partly the result of how they came to get where they did; not through their expertise but their similar background, the ability to "blag it" and be on the right side at the right moment. They are all hopelessly out of their depth. With their personas formed from a political system that seems to run on the "Dilbert Principle", in this system what matters is having some degree of cunning and charm that masks your incompetence. That way, people lower down in the food chain do all the tricky work, leaving you to lord them around (while they clean up your mess). Related to this is the concept of "Mushroom management" (which Theresa May seems to best embody): giving out as little useful information as possible and keep everyone on their toes.
This system of "amateur governance" has a long tradition in Britain, and is one reason why the civil service was so highly-valued historically by comparison (as satirized so well in the "Yes, Minister" series); it was they who really ran the government on a day-to-day basis. But Brexit seems to be the "reckoning" on this system: most of the government's EU experts work for Brussels, not London, which leaves the few experts on this side of the Channel hopelessly outnumbered by all the special interest groups who see Brexit as nothing more than an opportunity for profiteering. This helps to explain why Theresa May's strategy seems strangely-similar to that of the Legatum Institute: out of her depth, she falls back on the voices of those who seem culturally closest to her, from the same background of elitist amateurs.
Brussels has no time for the kind of "blaggers" seen the the British government; it expects detail backed up by legal argument, while those supposedly "advising" the British government have their own agenda for seeing negotiations break down.


A haggle versus a checklist

Finally, Britain's government has from the start misunderstood what the negotiations are about.

Britain comes from its historical perspective of negotiations being a haggle where getting a deal means having something you can have to wave in exultation when you return home (a la Neville Chamberlain). Therefore, any "win" in the negotiations for Britain would necessitate a "loss" of some kind for the EU; the kind of zero-sum game that was mentioned at the beginning, and carried out every week in Westminster politics.
Brussels sees these talks not as "negotiations" in the traditional sense, but more like Britain deciding which one of several options Brussels offers it. And this latter analogy would be accurate, as it is incumbent on Britain to agree terms with the EU, not vice versa. This should have made it all the more simple in some ways, as it should have been about Britain "checking" which option "on the menu" it wants from the EU, giving both sides time to organise the agreed future relationship.
Because Britain's goverment has been in complete denial about this reality - thinking it can haggle in a "pick and mix" style over which bits it does and doesn't want, in spite of being repeatedly told otherwise, most of the "negotiation" has been about each side talking at cross-purposes. So, nearly a year on from the start of the negotiations, we're really little further on than we were on Day One, with the transitional deal that Britain asked for nowhere near being done, because Britain keeps asking for something that isn't on "the menu".

As far as Brussels is concerned, Britain just doesn't "get it". And on all the above evidence, it looks like it never did.

Brexit and British pathology: the "three men in a pub" analogy

I've reached the stage where it feels as though Brexit is government policy organised by three drunk guys in a pub.

If you've ever been in a pub during a week-day afternoon, when it is more likely to be populated by problem drinkers, you might recognise the analogy. After a few drinks, conversation inevitably descends to a few core topics, that all revolve around the issue of culture: sport, identity and history.

When not talking about football, rugby or cricket (depending on the men's background), conversation drifts to broader cultural issues: things like immigration, cultural assimilation of said foreigners, how the face of Britain has changed over the years, and so on. Linked issues like gender identity may get a look-in on the conversation. Of course, politics also runs through all of this as well, as issues of cultural identity also raise issues like Britain's wider place in the world. In short, the narrative can gradually devolve to one of men feeling dis-empowered in the modern age; somehow emasculated, and that a sense of Britain's decline is tied in with their own sense of losing pride in their male identity. Men together, after a few drinks, love talking about themselves, but always in a wider context of their sense of identity and culture. Things that they would never say when sober they feel free to say when drunk, as if their inner id has been unleashed.
This is one of the reasons that British male culture (or pathology) is so schizophrenic - they feel restrained by the wider culture into a certain type of taciturn modesty in everyday life, which then results in a kind of repressed "inner demon" being unleashed when drunk. It also explains the propensity for drunken violence so common on British streets after dark. This "pathology" is something I want to explore in more detail.


"Take Back Control"

This may all sound familiar (hopefully, it does). The "culture wars" that seem to have been unleashed by the forces behind Brexit are the same ones that are behind the wider rise of Populism, and the ugly undercurrent that is somehow "rehabilitating" the politics of Fascism. In a different context, the same could well be said for the rise of Islamic extremism.
Ultimately, it can be argued it boils down to a "loss of masculinity", for what these events all share is a primal desire for "men to be men". The rise of women's rights, the disruptive effects of globalisation and then the financial crisis all accumulated the core issue of loss of power. What this means in a British context (for that is the focus of this article) is about "taking back control", epitomised in the brilliantly-concise and innately-primal slogan of the "Brexiteers". This explains one part of why Britain chose to leave the EU. Apart from the wider cultural context (more on that later), the "Brexiteers" in government knew how to manipulate the "pathology" of the British psyche to make the referendum seem a question of British freedom versus European dictatorship. If we classify "culture" as meaning "history plus identity", we can begin to see how the "three men in a pub" analogy is something ingrained into the British psyche. It's no wonder that part of Nigel Farage's appeal was the constant association of him with a pint in his hand, thus subconsciously putting him on the side of the "man in the street" (or the pub). In a different way, Boris Johnson, as one of the leading "Brexiteers" in government, was able to inject his own brand of charisma into the referendum campaign, thus ensuring that the side for leaving the EU had all the most easily-identifiable personalities.

It was emotional appeals that won the day, rather than rational argument. Like how the "man in the pub" can never be rationally argued against without provoking violence, the arguments of those in favour of the EU were never going to win over the "Brexiteer" ideas that were all about "pie in the sky" thinking. There was never one moment when the arguments for leaving the EU were decisively shot down, because, in a way, there were no real arguments for leaving; there were only "beliefs". In the same way that an atheist can never truly win argument against faith (because it misses the point), Brexit is a faith-based ideology that requires a suspension of disbelief. We'll look at some of those "beliefs" below.


"This sceptred isle"

Part of the identity issues mentioned earlier naturally come down to national history shaping the national psyche. The obvious fact that Britain is an island plays a fundamental part to that, which leads to two well-understood "truths": a) that Britain hasn't been invaded for a thousand years, and b) that we have historically been apart from continental Europe.

Britain's role in the Second World War is still, seventy years on, an integral part of the national psyche. For the "three men in the pub", this is what our national identity is all about, and fundamentally shapes our relationship with Europe. The fact that the country wasn't invaded during that war (as well as Dunkirk - more on that later  - "the plucky underdog") emotionally stands for a lot to "the man in the pub". It infers that Britain is different (i.e. "special"). This lends itself to a complacency about life in the modern world; that because Britain was able to stand apart and free in the Second World War, suggests we'd be able to do the same again today. Because Britain was a victor of both World Wars, it infers that we'd be a victor in the world again today. The fact that all this was possible through a combination of luck, happenstance and outside factors is ignored. In a sense, Britain's experience of war in the 20th century was cosmetic compared to that experienced on the continent.
In the industrial era, Britain never experienced mass displacement of refugees, entire cities levelled, or real starvation. It has never experienced a real "national humiliation", like many nations of Europe have. It has never experienced Fascism first-hand, either. It is this "luck" that the "man in the pub" confuses with "destiny", and therefore adds to the complacency that supports his "pie in the sky" assertions over Brexit, as well as his faith that Fascism could have never happened in Britain anyway.
To take a more recent example of this complacency, Britain winning the Falklands War was, to a large extent, pure luck. If Britain had lost that war (which was always likely), the sense of national humiliation would have been profound. The Thatcher government wouldn't have lasted long, and Britain's national psyche would have been shattered. But we won, and so Britain's belief in its own indestructibility continued to the present day. A "Hard Brexit" would be a real test of that indestructibility.

Likewise, the fact that Britain's success as a nation came about through world empire rather than entanglements in Europe is another part of the narrative for "the man in the pub". Even the term "Brexiteer" sounds vaguely romantic, like the word "buccaneer", evoking the travails of Britain (or more exactly, England) as a vibrant, sea-faring nation of the world. This goes back to the time before Britain's involvement in continental wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, while looking at more recent centuries, evokes instead the successes of the empire. Put in this light, Europe's closeness to Britain feels almost incidental to its history.
More generally, historians understand that Britain's relationship with Europe is complex. While in general Britain's role on the continent was often as a semi-detached observer, it has had a part to play in Europe for centuries, even if only for the self-interested reason of maintaining the balance of power. This is exactly one reason why Britain joined the EU in the first place: to maintain its influence on the major players from inside the club, rather than as an impotent outside observer. But Brexit relegates us to exactly that role, if not worse: by our actions turning ourselves into a "troublesome neighbour". Again, the "man in the pub" is not interested in the wider picture or the more strategic outcome: he is only interested in defending his narrow sense of self.


"The plucky underdog"

As mentioned earlier, there is also an element of the "Dunkirk spirit" to the British pathology and Brexit. For some reason, British psychology is to "stick up for the underdog", which is also an integral part of our sporting culture. Wars that the country has been involved with have often had an element of needing to side with the "bullied" underling in the conflict. The most glaring modern example was being on the side of Serbia against Austria in the First World War (although Serbia was the clear aggressor in being a state sponsor of terrorism against Austria), while it was Germany's invasion of Belgium (as a path to attacking France) that was the ultimate trigger for British involvement.
This strong sense of a "moral code" and right from wrong is a part of British psyche. One reason why many British people still seem set on their course to leave the EU come what may is due to this feeling that to back out would "betray" the point of the vote. No argument can be reasonably put against this belief, as it is exactly that: a "belief". The vote was cast, we are leaving, and that is that. To backtrack on that would be anathema.
Another part of British pathology is the celebration of the "glorious failure". Going back to Serbia, this nation is one glaring example of how "glorious failure" can utterly dominate its pathology. Defeat of the Serbs by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 at the Battle Of Kosovo was given a moment of glory when one of the battle's last acts was the death of the victorious Sultan. Thus although Serbia was defeated, it went down fighting in glory. And this is what led the Serbia's emotional attachment to Kosovo, and all the bloodshed there in the late 1990s.
Dunkirk was a famous example of Britain's "glorious failure", and it is that "Dunkirk spirit" that has shaped the narrative around Brexit. It may be difficult, the "Brexiteers" admit, but it will be glorious. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, they might say.

This kind of emotional hyperbole is typical of "the man in the pub".


"No Surrender"

This is the masculine tag-line that seems to habitually crop up in belligerent news articles about the Brexit negotiations. It evokes the Churchillian rhetoric of the Second World War, that also melds with the same attitude that more recently punctuated "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. The psychological result is something that sounds more like the drunken chant of football hooligans on tour in the continent than a coherent strategy; a juvenile stubbornness that comes from a deep-seated sense of insecurity.

When his brittle sense of self is threatened, "the man in the pub" reverts to these age-old emotional crutches. To cave in to other people's demands would be unacceptable; compromise a sign of weakness, and anathema. To back down is unthinkable. This is the same kind of masculine fragility that led to historical disasters the world over.


"Make do and mend"

"It will be fine" Boris said reassuringly about Brexit during the campaign.

Again conjuring Second World War symbolism, the "Brexiteers" conjure up Britain's past in order to describe its future. The misty-eyed perspective of "the man in the pub" looks back fondly to his youth and the "oldern days", and looks at the grim reality that it was through rose-tinted spectacles. Because Britain has a culture of "making do", it implies that even if Brexit is a disaster, people will get by and manage, just as they did during the war.
Sometimes it feels as thought everything about Brexit somehow relates to how things were "during the war". The feeling that people might somehow benefit from "lean times" also explains how many people were once highly-supportive of austerity, as though there is some innate virtue in self-deprivation.
This is another aspect of British pathology that is hard to get to grips with, or to understand its origins. Could it have its cultural roots in the "Puritan revolution", now given a second breath of life as Brexit? Going back to the masculine analogy of earlier, Brexit is also seen emotionally as a way to make people "toughen up" after having softened from years of the good life and European luxuries. It is this line of thought that leans unfavourably into the realm of Fascist ideology. Given long enough, and the drunken conversation of "three guys in a pub" will enter into realms such as "survival of the fittest", cutting away society's dead flesh by one means or another, and the restoration of the death penalty.

This is the real "Brexit Agenda": the drunken fantasies of boorish louts.

Extremism, Islam and British appeasement: how Islam has become Britain's "national religion" by default

I've written before about how Islam has slowly encroached into Britain's national imprint, through using the language of "freedom of expression" to defend the interests of its extremists.

As I wrote in that article:
"Islamofascists have been able to preach their violent, undemocratic and pernicious ideas under the protection of "free speech"; at the same time, they have also been allowed to conduct behaviour that could land any British non-Muslim in prison, while claim the right to religious expression; and most subversive of all, have denounced and threatened anyone who criticises their faith, ideas or behaviour with violence"

There are regular stories in the press about this, and another one this week (highlighted by Nick Cohen) displays to what extent the BBC, Britain's national broadcaster, and the Liberal Democrats (part of the government), have succumbed to the will of extremist Islam.

It is as though the very institutions of Britain and its ruling politicians have given up on the idea of real, universal, freedom of expression: freedom of expression is dying as an idea in Britain because no-one in authority believes it is worth fighting for, at least when it comes to Islam.

This seems to be how "freedom of expression" is defined in Britain these days: the state will defend your freedom of expression, unless your point of view questions something about Islam. Thus Islam holds the unique and vaunted position in The UK of being the only religion people are terrified of offending.

In this way, it has become the "default" religion of The UK, by virtue of its unassailable status.

A state within a state?

From a practical point of view, then, extremist Islam has been given almost free rein in The UK. While the police and intelligence services may closely monitor the more radical parts of Muslim society in Britain as part of the "War On Terror", on a day-to-day basis, the authorities do not interfere with the actions of the Muslim community.

On the surface, this may seem a good thing, but this also means that the authorities have been turning a blind eye to cultural practices that are clearly illegal in British law, and would get any non-Muslim in conversation with the police if they repeated the same behaviour.

When I talk about "cultural practices", I'm talking about domestic violence that goes unreported by battered wives; arranged (and underage) marriage that is got around in the Muslim community by being organised in Pakistan rather than in Britain; marriage between relatives, that creates children with deformities and cognitive dysfunction; there was the famous case of the "rape ring" in the Greater Manchester area, which suggests an endemic culture of misogyny; there is the incendiary rhetoric that goes on in the mosque and in the community (the police are paid to monitor this, however); and finally, the idea that all Muslims' first loyalty is to their faith, their family, and only lastly their country.

While the danger of the last point can be over-stated (if you compare this to the "Red Scare" back in the day), the effect that extremist Islam has had on British culture in the past ten years has been noticeable and undeniable. The policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have been called "creeping Islamisation", but in a different way the same could be said of life in Britain.

Assigning blame

Ten years ago, for example, there was no stigma attached to criticising (or simply discussing) some aspects of Islam. In the light of the 9/11 attacks, shining a strong spotlight on Islam seemed like only the most natural thing in the world.

In Britain, this "critical eye" seemed not to last very long, though. Because Britain had had a culture of tolerance, its defenders said, it was unfair to overly-blame "every Muslim" for the terrorism of its extremists. This is a fair point, but at the same time every "ordinary" Muslim has a moral responsibility to stand up to the extremists and pick apart their false arguments and dangerous rhetoric. This has not really happened.

So on one hand the Muslim community has shown weakness as a whole towards its own radical brethren, and thus allowed the radicals to hijack the faith and hold the rest hostage. On the other, some in the British establishment have held up the historical "culture of tolerance" as a sign that Britain didn't really have "a problem" with Islam and its Muslim population; unlike, say, France.

This is complacent and it misses a crucial point, though. Historically, the wave of Muslim South Asians who came to Britain after the Second World War to fill in a weakness in the British economy and labour force: in other words, the arrival of these populations to Britain was a sign of Britain's fundamental weakness and failure of its Imperial model. The empire had collapsed in on itself, almost literally, from a population point of view.

I'm not saying this was a mistake; simply a sign of the times. However, it is possible that the relative weakness of the British state after the Second World War was simply storing up problems for later. While those South Asian immigrants who arrived were subjected to local prejudice, racism and (sometimes) worse for decades, from an official government point of view, they were allowed to live, culturally and religiously-speaking, much the same way as before.
And here begins "the problem" that the British establishment refuses to accept it created. The British government, by the Sixties and Seventies, believed it was creating something like a "multi-cultural" nation. But it some crucial cultural respects, especially in regards to the Muslim community, it wasn't: it was creating mono-cultural ghettos in towns and cities with sizeable Muslim populations.

When "multiculturalism" goes wrong

This form of so-called "multiculturalism" was mostly a sham when it came to the Muslim community, because they either tended to be encouraged to move to post-industrial towns in the North, or to poor inner city areas in larger cities, such as Birmingham and Leicester, to name two. And when immigrants are not encouraged to integrate, but allowed to stay together, the result is a closed-off community. When you introduce religion into the mix, you have a potential time-bomb on your hands, as Britain has seen post-9/11.

By the Nineties, "multiculturalism" had become part of the establishment's "PC" campaign, so that by the late Nineties, the Muslim community was one of many parts of Britain's "multicultural tapestry" that became "Cool Britannia". Britain was "cool" because it allowed different cultures and religions to freely exist without government sanction, or so it thought.

This brings us to the present day, where the British tolerance for "the other" has become almost a fetishisation in parts of the establishment, while the Muslim community has become increasingly dysfunctional. I say dysfunctional, but what I really mean is that the extremists have seized the banner for the whole of the Muslim community. A combination of weakness within the Muslim community, and the British establishment's weakness for allowing "culture" to trump freedom of expression (or even the proper application of the law), have brought us to the current situation.

It is not "multiculturalism" that has brought about this situation: it is the state actively allowing (even encouraging) mass mono-culturalism in some parts of Britain for decades, then congratulating itself on its own "tolerance".

Real multiculturalism does exist in some cities in Britain: places where there are dozens of nationalities living in the same neighbourhood. This is what multiculturalism really means: when people exchange their cultures freely while living in a third country, for example. But this tends to be where Muslims do not make up a noticeable chunk of the local population.

When you have a weak state and a weak community, you allow the social conditions for extremism to breed, take root, and finally control others through fear.

This is what has happened in Britain over the last ten years.

UKIP, the Woolwich attack, multiculturalism and the political establishment

I wrote previously about the Woolwich attack, and how it has been hijacked by extremists to advance their own causes. This is entirely predictable, as the political situation in England begins to resemble that of Germany between 1929-32. History has a habit of repeating itself if people do not learn the right lessons. The rise of "Golden Dawn" in Greece is one example; the rise of UKIP in England is another.

I wrote in an article a few months ago that UKIP had the potential to become a permanent force in England by learning from how the LibDems became established as the third party of British politics. The May elections only served to prove that point.
UKIP's popularity is no surprise, if you look at the political undercurrents, and the gradual changes that have happened in British society over the last twenty years.

The rise of Blair's "New Labour" came about after the defeat to John Major in the '92 general election. After the Labour leader John Smith died, Blair took Labour to the political centre, and it allowed his party to ideologically dominate British politics for the next fifteen years. David Cameron, when he became Conservative leader in 2005 (roughly ten years after Blair had dominated British politics), decided to ape his ideology to get his party into power. So by 2010, the next general election that was fought under this new "Blairite consensus", the three main parties had all officially accepted the so-called "social democratic" agenda. The only major difference was on how to deal with the financial crisis.

The last twenty years has seen a growing acceptance of the "social democratic" agenda: a diverse, accepting and socially-liberal society, in contrast to the earlier mood of narrow-mindedness and social conservatism of the previous generation.
It is also important to emphasize the generational aspect of this shift: that young people born in the last twenty years have accepted much of the "social-democratic" agenda. However, while the younger generation are more socially-liberal than their parents, they are also more economically-liberal as well. This has been borne out by evidence: that "Thatcher's children", or "Generation Y", think that the state should have a smaller role to play in their lives, and are more sceptical of the "welfare state".
This is of huge importance to the future of British politics. But even more than that is the fact that participation in conventional politics (eg. membership of the "big three" parties) has collapsed. The generation raised in "Blair's Britain" have registered extremely high levels of apathy towards conventional politics, and most of them have felt ignored by the political establishment. The rise of student fees, I imagine, is just one issue that would unite the young against those in power. The young, therefore, do not take politics half as seriously as their previous generation.

This "social democratic" consensus has occurred at the same time as the rise of the "professional politician" as a class. To become a politician, the vast majority of those in Westminster have been involved in politics since university; they study politics, then straightaway enter into politics, working their way to the top.
The "professionalisation" of politics that Blair brought to the the UK with his reform of the Labour party (after being inspired by Bill Clinton's Democrats) became the norm as we entered the 21st century. Politics became about "following the party message", so that politicians all began to speak with one voice for their party; and after Cameron became Conservative leader, all three parties became obsessed with speaking with the same voice in order to appeal to the "centre ground".
As a result, many political issues became "non-issues": the positive effect of the EU; uncontrolled immigration; complete acceptance of all faiths and opinions. The rush to the "centre ground" also meant that both Labour and the Conservatives effectively ignored their traditional voter-base (the "working class", both urban and rural). As these voters had no other parties to represent their concerns (which included the so-called "non-issues" mentioned above), Labour and the Conservatives allowed themselves to become complacent. Even if some of their traditional voter-base didn't vote for them, the first-past-the-post electoral system (and the concept of "safe seats") ensured that no other party could appear to steal their votes. Westminster was, to all intents and purposes, a closed shop.

All these factors now work in UKIP's favour. Although the first-past-the-post system works against them, it simply means that for a new party to appear, it must have a solid and broad voter-base to break into the system. UKIP have shown that they have that. Proportional Representation favours small parties, but it also means that parties can appear and disappear from parliament quickly, with the rise and fall of political passions. FPTP makes this less likely. The three main parties in parliament have all been there for more and a hundred years. This suggests that the new four-party system that UKIP is carving out in England, may be here for a while to come.
I've said before that UKIP is essentially a "Thatcherite" party. As the younger generation are more likely to espouse "Thatcherite" economic values (economically liberal) and "Blairite" social values (socially liberal), this favours UKIP more than the other three parties, if UKIP can tap into the well of disaffection with politics that many young people feel. As UKIP is perfectly-positioned as the only "anti-politics" party around, it's not surprising that many of those who support UKIP are those who didn't vote before.

If UKIP didn't exist, it would be necessary to create it. The political establishment has brought itself to an ideological dead-end, to the extent that it has forgotten what it truly stands for. The "social-democratic" agenda came about in tandem with the concept of "political correctness". A few months ago, I wrote about how the idea of free speech has become warped into a self-defeating cause. The establishment has now become so wrapped-up in the concept of "free speech" that it will protect the legal rights of (Muslim) extremists who encourage mass murder. This is not "protecting free speech": it is ideological suicide. It is the behavior of a political creed that has lost the will to live.
Britain as a state has lost the will to defend its own beliefs. Since the Woolwich attack, the actions of the establishment and the police give a helping hand to the extremists.When the British police are protecting the rights of Muslim extremists who preach death to Britons and abhor democracy, this is not defending "multiculturalism": this is creating a logical contradiction. It is no wonder that Muslim extremists look to Britain as an example of a state with no beliefs of its own. It has forgotten what those beliefs are, so no longer knows what "rights" it is supposed to be defending.

This is how the political establishment are surrendering the moral high ground to the likes of the EDF, who therefore manage to give the impression of caring more about "British values" than the establishment itself. It is a pitiful indictment of those in power that they would rather perpetuate a system of "multiculturalism" that creates a segment of society that has little sense of belonging to the country they were born in. This is not "multiculturalism" - it is perpetuating cultural segregation.
It is telling that America has much less of a "radicalisation" problem with its own Muslim population than does the UK. This indicates that America as a nation has a much more defined sense of identity and values than Britain; that many more American Muslims feel "American" first and "Muslim" second rather than the other way around. The experience in Britain suggests the opposite.

Because Britain's establishment has an unclear sense of identity and values (and because the "social democratic" political establishment refuses to discuss these "issues" in case they appear "racist"), it surrenders the debate to the extremists on both sides.

With the present crop of self-serving, uninspired and vacuous "career politicians" in Westminster, it is no wonder that UKIP are so popular: for many people now, they are the only alternative. This is what happens when the political system seizes up and becomes broken, its only sense of purpose being self-perpetuation. Every so often the dialectic of political ideology changes, when the old orthodoxy loses its legitimacy. For the past twenty years, the "social democratic" orthodoxy has ruled the roost. But now, with the political establishment so complacent and arrogant towards its electorate, UKIP appears as the force for change, to bring a new dynamic to British politics that more accurately reflects the political reality.

Some might say UKIP are Fascists in all but name; but for others, it may be a price worth paying, if it means a restoration of sanity to British politics.