Tag: Technocracy

Civil-Liberties, Culture, Media, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Heroes-to-Zeros who belong on the 2021 Covid Wall of Shame

Any 2021 Covid Wall of Shame must have a place on it reserved for a generic citation – the media commentator whose prior opposition to State-authoritarianism was revealed to have been a sham         

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked“- (US mega-investor Warren Buffet)

Identifying the most obvious prominent candidates for a 2021 Covid Wall of Shame isn’t hard. The list of Prime Suspects almost writes itself, but would certainly include-

  1. the Mainstream Media, assiduous purveyors over 21 months of Covid-propaganda, doom-laden statistics and dire ‘expert’ analyses, with – unsurprisingly – the BBC to the fore;
  1. Professor Neil Ferguson, whose personal breach, for assignations with his married mistress, of the first lockdown – imposed largely on his advice – served only to focus more attention on his unfortunate record of predictions which, though officially revered, often turned out to be wildly inaccurate;
  1. Professor Susan Michie, aka “Stalin’s Nanny”, lifelong Communist doyenne of both SAGE and ‘Independent’ SAGE and for whom, apparently, no regime of draconian restrictions on economy and society could ever be too long, or too harsh, or too damaging,

However, with British politics undergoing an unfolding realignment from the traditional Left vs Right continuum towards a more contemporarily realistic Authoritarian vs Libertarian divide, the Covid pandemic has seen several striking metamorphoses from the Libertarian side of that divide to its Authoritarian side by certain media figures from whom one would have least expected it. Two particularly egregious examples illustrate the point.

First the nominally conservative columnist, presenter and commentator Andrew Pierce. In the now far-off days when I used to watch Sky News, the papers review featuring Pierce and stock London media-lefty Kevin Maguire – the double-act once dubbed ‘The Lenin and McCarthy of late-night political TV” – was often notable for Pierce’s robust advocacy of small-c conservative positions, notably on the conflict between personal freedom and State-authoritarianism.

So it was especially disappointing to see Pierce, appearing on the BBC’s Jeremy Vine Show on 18 November, embracing full-on State-authoritarianism, including discrimination against anyone declining to take the Covid vaccine.  He-

  1. praised Austria for forcing the unvaccinated to go into a lockdown tantamount to house-arrest;
  1. dismissed the growing incidence of serious medical side-effects, some even fatal, from the vaccine;
  1. made an inaccurate claim about the relative ratio of Covid deaths between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, which subsequently needed public correction;
  1. demonised anyone with legitimate concerns about the efficacy of vaccines as impliedly mentally deficient conspiracy theorists: and
  1. ended by being equivocal on a lockdown of the unvaccinated in Britain, but only because practical difficulties might arise in its enforcement.

Neither has he stopped there. Since then, he has gone on to demand both a compulsory vaccine passport scheme for pubs and restaurants, and compulsory continuous mask-wearing for students in all, not merely communal, areas of all secondary schools,

as well as making another contentious claim, namely that 90% of Covid cases in hospital were un-vaccinated, 

which also turned out to be wrong, it having been established as early as 21 October that this was factually untrue, and that roughly two-thirds of Covid cases in hospital were actually among the vaccinated. Far from the defender of individual liberty against authoritarian State over-reach that he once was, Pierce seems to have been transformed into a virtual medico-totalitarian.

Secondly, and arguably even worse, Andrew Neil, erstwhile doyen of political interviewers, hitherto famous for his forensic filleting of disingenuous politicians peddling claims more in the realms of fantasy than fact, and searching interrogations of tinpot tyrants threatening our liberties.

In a quite extraordinary intervention in the Covid debate on 9 December, Neil lashed out at the unvaccinated with a degree of intolerance and malevolence that many found shocking. Not content with merely criticising the unvaccinated for being hesitant or sceptical, for both of which they may have many and varied reasons, Neil went on to disparage them for their presumed selfishness and to demand that they be punished.

His intemperate tirade contained some highly tendentious philosophical propositions. He asserted, for example, that we have a responsibility to act in ways that protect not only our own health but that of others – a foray into leftist-collectivist ideology which in effect substantially absolves me from responsibility to protect my own, by transferring it to the State to compel you, on pain of punishment, to protect it for me. The critic of Neil, who remarked that, while you can take the Neil out of the BBC, you evidently can’t take the BBC out of the Neil, had a point.

His argument repeated to critics subsequently on social media seemed to hinge on a purely transactional trade-off: that the costs of lockdown legitimised vaccine passports as a preventive alternative, even to the extent of creating a two-tier, “Show us your papers!” society in which the minority would be ‘othered’ and discriminated against. But this again carries echoes of a collectivist ‘ends justifies means’ ideology which dismisses the rights, autonomy and freedoms of the individual.

Like Pierce, Neil, too, sadly, appears to have succumbed to the blandishments of the medico-authoritarians.

It’s invariably disappointing to discover that the people we thought were strong allies have, just when it mattered most, when it comes to the crunch, and when the metaphorical chips are down, weakened, turned away from the fight, and made common cause with our opponents.

So, this nomination for any 2021 Covid Wall of Shame isn’t a person, but a generic type – the commentator whom we thought was One Of Us, but who turned out instead be One Of Them.  The assumed Hero whom Covid revealed as a Zero. A 2021 Covid Wall of Shame would surely contain few, if any, examples more deserving of inclusion.

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Climate-Change, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Is it Time for Constitutional Change?

Now that our once-impartial unelected monarchy has become eco-politicised, we need to consider whether it’s time for an elective presidency to replace it

Note: Extended and updated version of the article published at TCW Defending Freedom on Wednesday 3rd November 2021

In the political context, ultimate power is a double-edged sword.

When vested in dictatorships, even in the supposedly enlightened 20th century it has produced brutal oppression and death on an almost unimaginable scale; an estimated 100-plus million under Communism worldwide, and 10 million under Nazism, including the Holocaust, in Central and Eastern Europe’s Bloodlands alone. When vested in autocratic monarchies, it has had terrible outcomes too; Kaiser Wilhelm II bears a huge responsibility for launching Germany and the rest of Europe into the First World War, which left some  20 million dead and 21 million wounded.

However, when vested in a constitutional monarchy within a democracy, it is a relatively moderating, even benign, influence. Nominally vesting ultimate power in an institution like the UK’s hitherto apolitical constitutional monarchy has the advantage that such a power is specifically intended not to be actively exercised, but merely held passively as part of a system of checks and balances (in our case, the traditional conventions of our unwritten constitution and parliamentary sovereignty), so as to deny it to anyone else.

However, for that advantage to endure and to stay acceptable to the population, both the institution itself and its unelected incumbents must remain not only scrupulously impartial and politically neutral, but visibly so. Once either starts to express or even appear to endorse a partisan position on a contentious, divisive political issue, the institution’s constitutional legitimacy declines, making the continued justification for its very existence disputable.

The UK is now fast approaching this point; the unelected monarchy’s increasing tendency to involve itself in divisive political issues raises the question of whether we might not, after all, be better off with an elected presidency whose incumbent at least has democratic consent and more importantly, can be thrown out.

For 69 years on the throne, the Queen has wisely remained so inscrutable on matters political that, despite the occasional speculative but unconfirmed journalist’s claim, few if any have had much idea of her genuine views beyond her reportedly generally low opinion of politicians – which can hardly be controversial, given the extent to which so many people happily admit to sharing it.

But regrettably, she has recently been persuaded to venture into the political arena for the second time in only months – the first having been to tell the population that not to get Covid-vaccinated was selfish – and on arguably the most contentious and divisive political issue of our time, by calling climate-change the ‘biggest challenge facing the world‘, whose leaders should act urgently ‘to save the planet‘, and by also reportedly expressing irritation at their inaction.

Considering the enormous cost to the vast majority of her subjects of the ‘solutions’ proposed by her intended audience, she would have been better advised to avoid it. However, it’s hard to heap much blame on a 95-year-old woman, alone for the first time in 73 odd years, coming to terms with the death of her beloved husband, maybe lacking his guiding hand, and still on the receiving end of continuing attacks on her family from her self-exiled and self-indulgent wayward grandson and his narcissistic, resentful current wife. 

What we can guess is that her dependence on her eco-obsessed eldest son and her need for him must be higher than it ever was, and possibly higher than we previously thought. Whether it’s by him that she’s being urged to intervene, we don’t know: but what we do know is that he will not shut up on the subject, whatever the opprobrium he rightly attracts, and whatever the constitutional damage he thereby risks doing to the very institution that he aspires to head. In the run-up to COP26, he has surpassed himself in excessive Green loquaciousness, and, judging by the reaction, not in a good way.

I’ve written previously on the manifest unfitness of Prince Charles to succeed to the throne, not only because of his persistent advocacy of divisive Green-extremism but also his inveterate political meddling and attempts to influence government policy on many other issues as well, and I need not repeat those criticisms here.

But there are others. Nigel Farage has recently reminded us of the time, about ten years ago, when Prince Charles came to Brussels to deliver an address to the EU’s Potemkin Parliament, and actually demanded the arrogation by the anti-democratic EU of more power from nation-states to itself, so it could ‘deal with climate change because the North Pole will melt within seven years‘; (spoiler – it hasn’t).

This surely must be the first time a future British monarch has begged a foreign legislature to remove the power of democratic self-government from the nation of which he stood to become sovereign. One can’t help wondering if this is even borderline treasonous – intriguingly, ‘attempting to put any force or constraint upon…..both Houses or either House of Parliament‘ still constitutes the crime of felony treason under the Treason Felony Act 1848.

He now also appears to be backing, not merely the avowedly anti-capitalist and freedom-averse Green-Left Extinction Rebellion, but also Insulate Britain in their campaign of motorway disruption.

Presumably, he has so far been spared the experience of either missing a job interview, or not being able to take a child to school, or being prevented from following an ambulance taking a sick relative to hospital. How lucky for him; but surely now we have had a surfeit of royal catastrophist eco-lectures from him.

Possibly worst of all, Prince William, once regarded as the potential saviour of the monarchy – assuming it even survives his father – now appears to be going down the same road. From calls to the young to ‘fight climate change‘ to exhorting the world’s best brains and billionaires to ‘repair the planet‘, and even praising his father’s eco-obsessiveness, he appears to have swallowed the Green pill wholesale.

Though amazingly, he seemed less keen on swallowing a jar of dead bugs offered to him by his wife at a COP26 presentation of the kind of ‘food’ which would allegedly help to save the planet.

It’s apparently not yet dawned on him that under the radical Green policies he’s now openly espousing in the wake of his eco-zealot father, it’s we the masses who would be expected to subsist on a ‘sustainable’ meagre diet including the bugs he recoils from, while the gilded elite continue to enjoy jetting to magnificent banquets.

And if that’s not enough, also jumping on to COP26’s Royal bandwagon comes his cousin Princess Eugenie, – accompanied, naturally, by the obligatory celebrity friend – to ‘speak to experts, examine, and do more to help save the planet’. She seems to have been particularly impressed by Professor Gail Whiteman, founder of the Arctic Base Camp project, whose main contribution to the Glasgow eco-boondoggle was to transport an iceberg from an Arctic glacier to Glasgow to ‘prove’ that ice melts when exposed to mild November temperatures in temperate northern Britain. Who knew?

Did  it occur to our Eugenie to quiz Prof Whiteman on how much ‘carbon’ was emitted in bringing the block of ice from Greenland to melt in Glasgow? Or to ask what, in any event, this proved, given that glaciers in Arctic Iceland and Norway retreated rapidly during the 1920s and 1930s? Apparently not.  

It seems to have escaped the now openly and enthusiastically eco-Royals’ notice that it’s mainly among the normally anti-monarchy and anti-Royalist Green-Left that their interventions are most welcomed. Are they so naïve as to think they will gain friends and allies on that side of the political aisle by wholeheartedly embracing the Green shibboleths of climate change, Earth-destroying overpopulation and Gaia –worship? If they do, I suspect they’re making a grave mistake.

Curiously, the thought that the approval their eco advocacy attracts from the overwhelmingly republican Woke-Green-Left may be self-defeating, in that by furthering its ostensible environmental aims, they weaken their own constitutional legitimacy, appears not to have occurred to them.  But it has, rightly, occurred to others:

Three generations of the British Royal Family all intervening on the same side, in possibly the most contentious and divisive political issue of the day, erodes their very legitimacy. It’s not a question of denying their right personally to hold those views, but one of questioning their wisdom constitutionally in expressing them.

Elected presidencies in a republic are tricky things to get right. If largely ceremonial and non-political, the incumbents can be relatively insignificant, like Ireland’s O’Higgins or Germany’s Steinmeier. But if politicised and part of the executive, they can be incredibly divisive, like France’s Macron or Trump and Biden in the USA.

But the crucial point is that they are all subject to democratic consent and can be ejected from office by the electorate. Here in the UK, we appear to be progressing rapidly towards the worst of both systems – an increasingly politicised and thus divisive monarchy, but where the incumbents, being unelected, need no democratic consent and cannot be removed from office.

To find myself – formerly a staunch supporter of apolitical constitutional monarchy as the not-perfect-but-arguably-least-bad option for Head of State in a Western liberal democracy –  becoming a potential convert to an elective presidency within a constitutional republic suggests to me there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark (or more accurately, the House of Windsor), and that a national debate on the issue is overdue.

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Civil-Liberties, Culture, Public-Health, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Sadly, the authoritarian social attitudes legitimised by Covid restrictions appear likely to endure beyond them

Two new opinion polls suggest that a significant proportion of Britons want Covid regulations controlling routine social interactions to continue permanently, as part of ‘normal’ behaviour

Note: this is the longer and updated version of my argument, made as one of the two contrasting arguments set out in an article originally published at 1828 on Friday 9th July 2021, on whether the alleged public enthusiasm for continuing Covid social restrictions after the pandemic is likely to be merely temporary, or more lasting.

The past 16 months have given us many unpleasant surprises, from the Government’s apparent cosiness with Big-Pharma extending as far as exempting from any product liability its manufacturers’ relatively untried and under-tested but nevertheless hastily approved ‘vaccine’ (aka experimental gene therapy), through its eagerness covertly to deploy techniques derived from behavioural psychology in order to ‘nudge’ Britons into following its ‘guidance’, to its readiness to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money buying largely and favourably one-dimensional media coverage for its Covid-fearmongering messaging and authoritarian policy response.

But, to my mind, the most shocking of those surprises has been the seemingly supine acquiescence of the British public, traditionally assumed to harbour an instinctive visceral hostility towards, and intolerance of, excessive state-authoritarianism, to the most draconian restrictions on their economic and societal liberty imposed on them by their elected Government in peacetime.

That recent Ipsos MORI and YouGov polls suggest this level of submission could be prolonged, if not permanent, then, though a frightening prospect, feels real, for three principal reasons.

Firstly, and unfortunately, fear works; especially when fresh ‘variant’ scares follow one another in quick succession. An induced apprehension about contracting in the near future – and, moreover, merely via participating in what would otherwise be perfectly innocuous everyday activities – a hitherto unknown virus with a lurid reputation, creates a perception of both imminent and potentially fatal personal risk far greater than, say, apocalyptic but scientifically flawed warnings about a 1°C temperature rise by 2050.

It’s the apparently threatening combination of immediacy, proximity and lethality which boost the fear’s potency, and thus in turn, the susceptibility and inclination to compliance.

Secondly, over the last few decades, the British population has become inculcated with an almost pathological aversion to risk. The twin official fixations with both health and safety culture on the one hand and consumer protection on the other, taken to sometimes absurd lengths, have not only eroded individuality and personal responsibility in favour of reliance on Authority, but also created an expectation of protection as something to be provided by others, and thus a lowered tolerance of risk.  

Thirdly, the poll findings are supported by the conclusions of the IEA’s newly published paper on how favourable attitudes towards socialism and collectivism are no longer a youthful aberration, but now persist even among those in their 40s. Against this background, it’s perhaps reasonable to assume as a concomitant a greater inclination within that demographic to see the activist and controlling State as a solution rather than a hindrance, a source of beneficial pastoral care rather than oppressive restriction.

Will it take a long time for the attitudes suggested by Ipsos MORI and YouGov polls to change, even if they do at all?

Well, we know that public opinion is both notoriously fickle, and logically inconsistent. A year or two from now, with the Covid scare receding in the memory, today’s professed enthusiasm for perpetual State-authoritarianism, still relying on it for justification, could have subsided to merely a minority obsession, in the same way that somehow reversing Brexit and rejoining the EU is for a dwindling core of unreconstructed Euro-obsessives.

But at present, it doesn’t feel like it; this feels different.

As well as being a lifelong sceptic of State power, for the last four years I’ve gradually become more and more convinced that the globalist, ‘liberal’-elitist clerisy which has actually governed most Western countries for the last three decades, irrespective of whichever particular gaggle of politicians has happened to be nominally in power, was rocked to its core by the democratic-populist revolts epitomised by the votes for Brexit in Britain, for Trump in America, and for anti-EU parties in Europe, and has been searching ever since for a means of re-asserting its hegemony.

Covid has provided the ruling clerisy with that means. As well as the advantages of immediacy, proximity and lethality mentioned above, it also has the advantage of obscurity – few of us are medically qualified and even fewer of us are virologists or epidemiologists, so most of us lack a readily accessible alternative to believing in the accuracy of what we’re being told by professions which we’re culturally accustomed to regarding as independent, disinterested and trustworthy.

In my view, that naïveté has been cynically exploited by a political class intent on regaining its erstwhile hegemony over the public sphere, and assisted by the susceptibility of a large part of the population to a quantum expansion of both State and non-State social authoritarianism as the palliative for a partly manufactured apprehension.

Having lost, and then regained, its dominance comparatively quickly, the ruling clerisy will be determined to prevent that loss re-occurring, and so will have few qualms, either about periodically warning of an actual or imminent re-emergence of medical threat, or about employing behavioural ‘nudge’ to perpetuate enough public willingness to comply with an illiberal, authoritarian response.

After all, it has been shown to work; and nor do we need to delve far back into history to see how the State rarely gives up, either willingly or quickly, the freedoms and liberties which it seized from the people under the guise of national emergency, even long after any such emergency has passed. So, how seriously should those two opinion polls indicating a widespread public desire to keep Covid social restrictions in place, even once the Covid threat has fallen away, be taken?

Because those poll results presage a dystopian nightmare that’s simply too terrifying to contemplate, I’d prefer to hope that my argument in the preceding paragraphs is wrong, and the mistrust of polling organisations currently expressed by so many people is valid, so that the pollsters’ figures are therefore just an outlier, an over-statement which at present is conveniently agreeable to the State.

But I genuinely worry that my apprehension is, in fact, well-founded, and those truly alarming opinion polls might actually be right.

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