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| Image Daily Telegraph |
As we face the possible demise of Brexit at the hands of Britain's established political parties, it is only natural that some, like Nigel Farage, want to start a new political party that actually exists to do the will of the British people, and that others with different motives, such as Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, wish to start new political parties of their own, to ensure that the will of the British people never again gets so close to fulfillment as it did with Brexit, before the political establishment managed to run it off the road with the wholehearted cooperation of the civil service and key figures in all the main parties.
Working from the simple premise that it didn't want what the public wanted, the Establishment proceeded to spend two years redefining the meaning of "Brexit" until it meant something different, something that people were no longer sure they wanted, because every single aspect of it had been sabotaged with deliberate malice. At no point was there ever really a chance that any of the existing major parties would behave honestly, because that isn't in their nature. The existing major parties cater, in some "wing" or other, for just about every possible ideology, but they all have exactly the same character, which denies the British people good government by ensuring that every decision is shaped by prejudice and the rejection of objective evidence and informed debate. Given that the major parties are ostensibly bound by different prejudices, the outcome is quite remarkably uniformly poor.
For any new, honestly-conceived party to do better, requires an understanding of what is wrong with all the existing parties, and for that we need to go back in time sixteen years, to when countless lives, rather than masonic principles, were at stake. We need to go back to the decisions which culminated in Britain's leading microbiologist lying dead on Harrowdown Hill and a war, a WAR, being started on entirely false premises because any objective evidence had been willfully and systematically excluded from the decision-making process. Because the subsequent public inquiry into this prominent decision concluded that, regardless of whether that particular decision was wrong or not, the manner in which it was taken was exactly typical of all decisions taken by the Blair government -and, by extension, the slavishly copycat Cameron Government. If the decision to go to war with Iraq was flawed, so was every other Blair/Cameron decision, from education policy to fish quotas, because objective evidence, alternative views and even the evaluation of possible alternative courses of action, were never considered, even if they weren't always expunged from the record with the absolute ruthlessness shown to David Kelly and his evidence. ("An Inconvenient Death: How The Establishment Covered Up The David Kelly Affair" by Miles Goslet covers this in detail and with a closer attention to the truth than any other published account so far.)
Proponents of ideological parties always claim to be suspicious of non-ideological or "populist" parties, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they? The fact is that ideology, from whatever part of the political spectrum, is always a barrier to sound decision-making because it provides a basis for taking decisions other than an objective look at objective evidence! Suppose, for a moment, that you had a much-loved cat who was feeling poorly, and when you took him to the vet you were told: "never mind the obvious evidence that Budge has worms: I became a vet to rid the world of feline dementia because that's what I firmly believe cats suffer from and I shall be putting Budge down immediately to end his suffering!" Any vet with views like that would be struck off immediately, if not sectioned under the mental health act, but this is what most politicians are like most of the time and their ideological beliefs usually do trump the evidence in front of them. And that's before we even consider the role of corruption in bad decision-making, which may have been a somewhat greater factor in the Blair/Cameron governments than in Mrs May's or Mr Brown's governments.
An important part of this is that, undeniably, the ideological parties have to know what and where the objective evidence is, so that they can avoid having anything to do with it. So there's a powerful element of doublethink: to react to David Kelly with the vicious fury that they did, Anthony Blair and Alistair Campbell had to know that he was basically right, or they could have dealt with any threat he posed to them simply by showing that he was mistaken. The number of other people, challenging Blair's claims and decisions only to find themselves the target of a wide-ranging media smear campaign, is really quite large and illustrates that Blair and Campbell knew quite well what the damaging truths were, which they had to suppress. One cannot exactly say that they always knew they were doing the wrong thing, though, because of their power of self-delusion, but one can say that they had probably encountered all the evidence that they were doing the wrong thing, even if the encounter was only ever on the way to the office shredder.
There will be some who say that as long as your ideology is mildly right of centre, then you cannot actually go wrong. Yes you can: you can try to impose a system of local government finance that deliberately takes no notice whatsoever of any household's ability to pay, leading to widespread fury and violent protests on the streets. If you are "centre of centre" like President Macron, you can feel moved to tax the rural poor in order to improve the urban environment with subsidised public transport at no cost whatsoever to the urban elite loudly demanding a low traffic, low pollution environment, leading to widespread fury and very violent protests on the streets. If you are left of centre, like President Xi, you can go wrong by rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent people and working them to death in labour camps, save for the select few whose organs you can sell to desperate transplant patients, leading to a grim silence because nobody then dares to complain about anything. Ideology seems able to supply a catastrophically wrong answer to pretty well every question. Problems (and opportunities!) are addressed by the sprinkling of ideological fairy-dust, and it makes no difference to the real-world effectiveness of this process if the fairy dust comes from right, left or centre ideology.
According to Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, corruption is the root of everything wrong with the economy in South Africa and most other places to boot. He's very nearly right, but corruption is such a blight mainly because ideological parties are inherently incapable of addressing it effectively, here is how the different ideologies fail:
Right-wing parties see corruption entirely as a function of "big government", to which the fairy-dust solution is to simply and dogmatically make the government smaller. They tend to not recognise the possibility of corruption in private enterprise! Unfortunately, corrupt public employees are invariably better at keeping their jobs during a "rationalisation" than honest ones, due in part to their willingness to tell monstrous lies, and to them the contraction of government is merely a golden opportunity to get shot of all the whistle-blowers and more passive honest employees, whom the corrupt will always see as a lurking threat. The net result is the same amount of corruption concentrated (and more secure) in a much smaller government, which consequently performs almost no useful function at all.
Left-wing parties see corruption entirely as a function of class enemies and the fairy-dust solution is the passing of numerous anti-corruption laws and the construction of powerful state institutions dedicated to the destruction of the class enemies, which may include Jews and usually will also include Christians and quite often Muslims: Daoists if the party is very left wing indeed. The "anti-corruption" institutions will inevitably end up processing significant assets from the class enemies who are destroyed and, helped by the reign of terror the same institutions impose, this provides an ideal breeding ground for corruption to grow and flourish as never before.
The ideology of Centre Parties tends to be written around the personal agenda of the leader: becoming the first and greatest head of the world's first superstate in Anthony Blair's case and becoming the first and greatest head of the world's first superstate in the case of Immanuel Macron. (Oh dear, how will they ever work that one out peacefully!) Since the most efficient way to further personal agendas of the global domination variety is to cultivate vested interests very widely and harness them to the cause, the Centrist fairy-dust solution to corruption is to ring round all the known vested interests, seeing who they would trust (and pay for) to investigate themselves for corruption and appoint an anti-corruption commission from the resulting shortlist.
The only way to actually deal with corruption is to reach an objective understanding of what corruption consists of and who is doing it and take, rational and persistent measures to deny the culprits opportunities to receive improper advantages and to determinedly prosecute only those against whom genuine evidence can be obtained from competent, well-resourced investigation. This is very boring -no fairy dust!- and it requires effort, determination and patience as well as objectivity, but it is the only course that stands the least chance of working.
The only viable way to deal with any problem is to analyse it objectively and construct a solution that specifically addresses that problem, without trying to lazily apply ideological generalisations aka fairy dust.
Decisions have to be taken fairly and on the basis of the available evidence and not a select subset of that evidence. Dissenting voices must be heard, not drowned out by an orchestra, whether that orchestra is the majority view or that of a powerful minority. Evidence must be sought from a variety of sources and not solely those trusted to only forward evidence supportive of one's ideological prejudices or personal agenda. Fairness and propriety must not be seen as vices!
Bullying must not be seen as strength, let alone "cool".
The blog author has recently published, on Amazon, a novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row" in both Kindle E-book and paperback formats. The relevant author's pages are Amazon.com:
and
Amazon.co.uk
A Smashwords edition is now available in multiple E-book formats from this link
