Truth and Justice - and Power

Governments gaslighting the public as they hide the truth. It seems to be a common problem across the Western world.

I have spent every day of my life since the 1980s thinking, it can’t get any worse, and every day ‘the authorities’ prove me wrong. I could date this from 1989 and the Hillsborough disaster, which cost the lives of 97 people, and caused the injuries, physical and mental, of hundreds more. I was present on the terraces that day, and was involved in the rescue, as those in uniform stood paralysed. But I can go back further, to the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, when we saw the extent to which the state can go in crushing ‘the enemy within’ – decent working people and their communities. I knew there and then, when still in my teens, that should the miners lose this struggle, the working class and their solidarities, traditions, and organisations would be destroyed and, with them, the heart of the nation. Conservatives are now trying to evoke a collective spirit to rally the nation against its continued destruction – it is their collective symbols and organisations that are now being hollowed out and destroyed. They cheered it on when it was the working class and socialism decades ago. They fought the class war, little realising that in winning it they destroyed the collective substance and solidaristic ties and communities that sustained the nation. Now they evoke only history and tradition, a memory that lacks active communities of practice and character. And now they face the revenge of a bastard ‘socialism’ which is no socialism at all, the enforced bureaucratic collectivism of the global corporate form. People are still so blinkered and bigoted that they see it as communism or socialism. The so-called Left cheer it on, the so-called Right damn it to Hades; neither of them have the first idea of what they are dealing with, both will be destroyed, insofar as they cleave to political ideals (many will be happy to be apparatchiks, functionaries and servants – the mediocre, value-free, midwit middle managers of the techno-bureaucratic managerialism that is now emerging).  

One of the great books and movies is the Western Shane. We read it at school. And I learned the lesson. The hot-heads, presented with an injustice, are easily incited into anger. They can be placed in an impossible situation and pitted against impossible odds, and still allow themselves to be provoked into a fight they can only lose. The farmers are having their land taken from them, and a gunslinger from out of town is hired to be the public face of the expropriation. The hot-heads among the farmers take the bait and allow themselves to be drawn into a gunfight they can only lose. And having lost, the other farmers are cowed and beaten into submission. Shane, a gunslinger who just happens to be passing through, befriends the farmers. He observes, and identifies the tactics in play, keeps his cool and maintains his silence. He is provoked, he is abused, he refuses to respond. Instead, he bides his time, plays the long game, picks his moment, the right moment. This is the only way to win here – restitution and restoration of social power and sovereign, its reorganisation through the land as a reconnection, sustained by networks and communities grounded in practice. All of this has been lost by processes of individualisation, privatisation, and marketization. People appealing to government are wasting time and energy – governments are facilitating the final enclosure of the global commons, the ethical and the political commons as well as the physical commons.

Hold fire and keep your powder dry – the enemy, the real enemy, is very rarely in view. Power is best preserved by being concealed. ‘The state,’ ‘the government,’ ‘the bureaucracy,’ politicians are visible targets, but are mere second order mediations within the social form. You have to go deeper. Don’t take the bait. Instead, reorganise.

This is an active court case, so there are legal difficulties in speaking. The truth is to be established by due process. We cannot say anything that risks prejudicing the right to a fair trial. And, in truth, there isn’t that much to be said. Police investigations always take time. Digital material and forensics take time. Nothing will have been known immediately. There are reasons why the authorities would not and could not go public with the information as soon as they knew it, whenever that was.

But we do need to know who knew what and when. And that information has no bearing on the trial.

The government claims it only found out a few weeks ago. Is that credible? Maybe, possibly. But when this is over we need to have a reckoning with how the state responded to the Southport attacks and the ensuing riots. Instead, asking the simple questions of who knew what and when is being cast as conspiratorial and dangerous and inadmissible, not to be raised at all, simply left in the hands of the authorities. The clear danger is that defence becomes an all-purpose excuse for governments never to reveal information. There are clearly questions to be answered, and they are legitimate questions.

In the aftermath of the Southport attack we had the state pursuing people who were posting comments considered incendiary on social media with a vigour that is singularly lacking in other areas of criminality in the country. It created the impression – and was intended to create the impression – that people were having to watch what they say as much as what they do. We had various ‘official’ accounts fog-horning the words ‘think before you post.’ The Director of Public Prosecutions that said even retweeting material could land you in prison. That had a felt impact on people’s willingness and ability to comment, to raise questions, to discuss these issues period. The Free Speech Union has seen a surge in membership. People have seen the way the government is going – consistently failing to act on issues of general concern, acting quickly and forcefully on issues that suppress and silence people.

It is the worst development of all, with government reticence to tell the truth creating the very information gaps that, in the context of the deteriorating situation in the nation, which we can all see, invites conspiracy theories and speculation. And it is either incompetence on an industrial scale, or it is deliberate.

It is wisest to see what successive governments – and governments around the Western world – are now doing, and avoid confrontation. These governments know they are unpopular, know they are pursuing policies which are unpopular, know that they will face opposition from members of the public, and have prepared accordingly. Protest and demonstration are not only futile, but are precisely what these governments aiming to extend the apparatus of repression want.

The resolution of all the problems we face remains the one that Karl Marx outlined in the 1840s – the practical restitution of power alienated to extraneous bodies of state and capital (now embedded in the corporate form) to the social body and its democratic reorganisation as a social power, issuing in a form of social self-governance to take the place of the corporate form.

It’s a tough ask. It may well be an impossible ask. The consistent degeneration of socialism into some form of vanguardism or elitism suggests it may well be a pipe-dream. It’s for ‘ordinary’ people with the root of the matter in them to prove otherwise. In the age-old clash between democratic theory and elite theory, elite theory keeps on winning. But those hankering after enlightened despots ought to open their eyes and see the degeneration and destruction that accompanies that victory. Some theorists hold that the only genuine progress occurs when an aristocracy of some kind works in alliance with the common people, the wise rulers who know how to take people with them, being genuine leaders with the ability to lead people. Such aristocracies are in short supply. The technocrats of this age are mediocrities. There are no architects and engineers among them, they lack wisdom, knowledge, reading, and vision. They form a kakistocracy - government by the worst, least capable, and most unscrupulous citizens. I trust that I don’t need to name names. Each government we get seems to be the worst government in history – until the next. There is something rotten in the political system, there is something rotten in the principal institutions of society, there is something rotten in our social relations and steering media. The politicians are the personification of the rottenness. Remove them all you like, they will be replaced with like, only worse.

I’ve lost patience with people who continue to obsess over their fantasy hate figures, all the better to avoid having to come to terms with the problems that afflict society. It’s all Trump’s fault. Trump has been around five minutes, and we have had war and disorder for decades. Those people are cowards. They seize on any rationalisation offered by the authorities to cover their complicity in the continued deterioration of the polity and the nation. They prefer to slay monsters to actually confronting the barbarians who gave rise to the monsters in the first place. If Trump is the one leading the opposition to the establishment, then that is because ‘progressives’ are singularly failing to offer a viable alternative. And, despite their rebellious rhetoric, are on the side of the status quo. They are comfortable in their protest, asserting luxury beliefs at a safe distance from costs and consequences.

“The authorities knew. They kept silent.

The mainstream media helped them.

People have been demonised and jailed.

We should feel nothing but disgust and anger.” (Peter Whittle)

‘The authorities’ are the politicians, police, judiciary, media. This is all very familiar from Hillsborough and the aftermath. I’ll never forget the cowardice and complicity of the public, too.

Control the anger, focus it, inform it, direct it properly. Don’t protest, don’t demonstrate, don’t speculate: such things are punished. Don’t play the game. There is no punishment for cover-ups. We may presume the authorities are hiding things from us. And they invite people to fill in the blanks, and punish them when they err. Starve people of information, invite misinformation, turn to repression. Protests at crimes are punishable in a way that those crimes are not.

I don't want protests and demonstrations; protests and demonstrations are a blight on politics and society. The thing that the authorities fear the most are pertinent questions the answers to which power finds impertinent.

Put aside judgements and assertions, channel the anger into asking the right questions: when did the police, political leaders, the Crown prosecution service know what has now come to light, what precisely did they know and when? Given that politicians and media have been busy condemning people for misinformation and disinformation, there is a need to know what ‘the authorities’ knew and when. Where ‘the authorities’ deliberately withholding information from citizens of this country who deserve to know the truth about events affecting them in this country?

Let us have answers to those questions. Let us analyse those answers, should they be forthcoming, to see if they ring true. And if they are not forthcoming, we can be sure we are being deliberately and systematically misled by an establishment that is hapless or worse.

The charitable view is that our political leaders are making calculated decisions to withhold information from the public, for fear of public reaction. If this is the case, the people doing the calculating are cretins and cowards, but there are worse things. We may be seeing a divide and conquer strategy from an establishment that is indeed hapless, but determined to hold on to power and serve its ends, whatever it takes. People fell for the bait and switch. Political enemies were locked up, labelled, intimidated, and cowed, and will now be self-censorship. A big dose of fear has been injected into the polity. The information was withheld and then released before a Budget that has been trailed as one full of ‘tough decisions.’ It seems all very clever and calculating. The problem is that it is now clear to all but the slow and the ideological that the contract between government and governed is now broken.

We have to stop hiding truths - because it doesn’t fit government or MSM agendas! The cover ups are unforgivable (if they are indeed cover ups – they are more likely something much worse, relating to a complete transformation of the polity and the fundamental relation between government and governed: more on this later). Starmer needs to explain to the country what he knew about the Southport attack - and when he knew it. Hard realities are being covered up by authorities, and the public - who are confronted by those realities - know they are being gaslit. I believe that a renaissance of honesty will come out of this pandemic of life. Trust is being destroyed - trust in governing institutions, trust between people. A return to the virtues of truth, goodness, and beauty will come as a relief.

Lies continue to be told at a greater rate than they are exposed, with political statements being works of fiction. People are accepting politics as a systematic lying, and yet continue to ‘debate’ political platforms as if its main protagonists are advancing truth claims. It’s like professional wrestling. For years people suspected it was fake, and yet kept on watching; and then it was revealed to be fake, and people kept on watching. Because they had lost the taste and capacity for the real thing.

Politics is about lies and deception, and people participate in the pretence. But whilst reality can be denied and perceptions of it distorted, it never ever goes way. To sustain the lies, governments engage in censorship, repression, and authoritarianism. They are the crudest of tools. For all the sophisticated technologies that are available, they are mere means of control and manipulation. I was once on a masters’ programme in Industrial Relations and Human Resources Management. During break in the first week, the course leader came over to me, pointing his thumb at the board, frowning, shaking his head, saying ‘all this, it’s all just fancy talk for carrot and stick.’ And when we start to run out of carrots – especially when the rich and powerful start to claim an ever greater share of carrots – there is nothing left but to employ an ever bigger stick.

I could say that we have witnessed one of the worst cover-ups in modern British history, perpetrated in public view. The lying and the deceit took place in broad daylight in front of our very eyes. It is so bad as not to be a cover up at all, but something much more fundamental – a systematic transformation of the polity, placing citizens in subordinate position as subjects of the authoritarian state. Every group that we are taught to trust are engaged in a coordinated deception – which points to a transformation bringing democracy and notions of a sovereign people to an end.

The government and political class, the police, the mainstream media, the justice system are all part of a systematic, coordinated, interwoven strategy to mislead the population about a crime so heinous that it involves death, frankly murder. The lives of ‘ordinary’ people count for nothing to official society. People are of no account. Those with a responsibility to serve the great public care nothing at all about the members of that public. It sounds like a nightmare, a conspiracy, but it happened. And in its aftermath, the organs of state did everything and continue to do everything possible to prevent people revealing the anatomy of the system’s inhumanism. We all knew that something was wrong and that the official narrative not only didn’t add up, but was a blatant lie.

I’m talking about the Hillsborough Disaster of April 1989, which I saw unfold firsthand in the pens of Leppings Lane. It was the most filmed and reported disaster in history, and yet the establishment closed ranks around a pack of lies, and did so so effectively as to invert truth and falsehood in the cause of denying justice. We knew the truth from the very first. There was no struggle to uncover the truth, the truth was bare. The struggle was to dispel the establishment’s lies, which were bare-faced. And to establish justice. It took the best part of three decades to have the truth recognised and officially accepted. Justice continued to be denied. This is officially sanctioned murder. As a survivor of Leppings Lane, I learned that the establishment care nothing for truth and justice, only power and control, and will resort to lies and deception to maintain both.

I could be talking about other tragedies, including recent ones. There is a list of them. Which makes it surprising that people can still be so shocked and upset, turning to anger and protest. I feel desperately sorry for those poor Southport girls and teachers and their families and friends. But whilst I feel disgust at government, police, and media for the way they have acted, there is no shock and surprise on my part, no anger, no sadness, nothing.

I have no expectations of ‘the authorities,’ except the worst. I expected no justice as a survivor of the Leppings Lane pens of 1989, and, for all that the truth is known, there has been no justice. Perhaps the saddest, and most revealing, comment of all is that that pessimistic view of my youthful self has been proven right. But I could be talking about any number of cover ups and scandals – Grenfel, Post Office, oh, and whatever you do, don’t mention ‘grooming gangs.’ The lives of ‘ordinary’ people count for nothing, they are disposable, expendable. And to injury is added the constant, systematic insult of establishment lies and deception. The political class and the media class – and large sections of the activist class – wrongly inform the great public, and maintain the lies, checking truth-tellers at every turn, subjecting them to abuse and repression. It is a constant process of deception and distortion.

People cleaving to truth and justice – and the downright decency of normality – ask questions in search of answers, only to be starved of information, fed familiar ‘tropes’ and denials. For weeks people were assured that there was nothing to see. They knew they were being deceived. In their anger and frustration they filled in the gaps.

The discovery of the information sought was made ‘in the past few weeks.’ We need to know precisely when. The crime was just weeks ago. The calculated vagueness of the phrasing is a continuation of the deception, inviting speculation. Speculation will be ended with exact details. The government will have known just after the police knew. When? Forget claims of ‘past few weeks,’ if police and government only knew a ‘few weeks’ after the crime, then that in itself is incompetence of the highest order. The searches would have taken place immediately. Instead, we get the continuation of dishonest claims, continued deception, inviting speculation with respect to conspiracy. Everything done by official society here has been done not to expose the truth, but to hide it in an attempt to manage and manipulate the public. The public are being treated like fools, children, servants, serfs, not citizens. This is not politics in the sense of citizens associating together to determine the terms on which the common life proceeds, its not even PR – it is public management and manipulation. No taxation without representation? People are being taxed to the hilt, with repression replacing representation. The perpetrators of crime go free as the people protesting the crimes go behind bars. The strategically timed announcement of new information discovered ‘in the past few weeks’ was designed to be immediately eclipsed by the budget.

This is news management of the most cynical kind. They don’t want people to talk about this. The authorities are shutting down conversation. I hope now that people can see what the Hillsborough survivors and their families could see back in 1989 and in the years after, that this is a cover-up that has its tentacles running throughout the entire establishment. That’s what the ruling class does. It manages and manipulates the public and curtails democracy. It denies the democratic will of the people. It turns people against one another. It murders, it lies, it deceives, it represses. People are expressing shock and anger at finally coming to understand how much ‘our own government’ and the machinery behind it hate us. It’s not ‘our government,’ it only pretends to be, and now they don’t even do a good job at pretending.

And, to repeat, this is not a cover-up and a conspiracy – but reveals the profound transformation in the polity and its workings that is now underway across the Western world.

The aftermath of the summer protests revealed the authoritarian instincts and intentions of our political leaders. This isn’t particular to the UK, the traits are shared in common across the Western world. This indicates the existence of a transnational political class that seeks to take control away from the sovereign people, imposing a top-down regime which seeks to subject every aspect of social life to regulation and surveillance. Where formerly it was government that was to be subject to the scrutiny of the governed, now the governed are to be scrutinized by government.

Labelling all those who disagree as ‘far right’ and ‘fascist,’ the game plan is very clear: close down the public square, suppress centres of social interaction, shut down social media. Contrary views are to be stigmatised. This constitutes a direct threat to democracy and to liberty – to the freedoms of the members of the demos. It is there in the denigration of ‘populism,’ a phrase of Latin origins, the counterpart of the Greek democracy. These people are anti-democratic. They are authoritarians.

The infantilisation of the citizenry.

The police and government knew that the slaughter of three girls under the age of ten at a dance school in Southport is an emotive matter for the general public. It is the sort of thing we do not like. And so because the public cannot be trusted with facts the authorities seem to have once again decided that the public must not be given the facts. The only problem with which is that the public is not as stupid as the authorities seem to think. (Douglas Murray).

‘We’re worried there may be a riot.’

‘That sounds awful! What’re you going to do?’

‘Don’t worry, people are thick, we just won’t tell them anything.’

...

‘How did managing it go?’

‘We caused a riot.’

‘Oh dear what’ll you do now?’

‘We’ll blame the Far Right and put people in jail.’

We are ‘governed’ not by an elite, but by a kakistocracy that treats adults as children to be managed from above by those who claim to know better. Except that those above patently do not know better, as they stumble from one calamity to the next. When they persist in doing it, we are entitled to conclude that there is more going on here than an incompetence born of the dismal paternalist view of democracy. This is a systematic destruction of democracy. It is neither a cock-up nor cover-up, it is deliberate and sustained. It is part of a long-term trend that is away from democracy. Politics is being re-rigged and rewired.

The businessman who tore the Southport attacker off from the girls he was attacking said at the time that the riots have a cause and central to it is the withholding of information. We are seeing the deliberate shutdown on information. People are being treated as children, on the assumption that they can’t handle the truth. That assumption is itself based on the authorities’ realisation that the truth is indeed so abhorrent as to incite a strong reaction quite naturally. It is an attempt to suppress natural emotions, to deaden the emotions. This is not merely de-democratising, it is dehumanising. The authorities have taken the view that both people and information are to be managed and manipulated – as little as possible is to be made public, and then only indirectly, in instalments. When people can see the problem, for the reason they face it daily, that approach is guaranteed to inflame the situation. People know that the authorities are not levelling with them. And when people see that the authorities are being less than honest, it takes nothing for them to conclude that the authorities are dishonest. The breakdown of trust between government and governed continues apace, and the result will be the end of responsible government by consent. The breakdown of trust and the rise of mutual mistrust paves the way for anarchy and/or authoritarianism.

Accusations of a cover-up only touch the surface of the problem. Indeed, if this was merely a cover-up, things would not be nearly as bad as they are. A cover up implies that existing institutions are still fit for purpose and functioning as they ought. Something else is going on here. Such events indicate a deliberate alteration in the way in which our polity functions, one that fundamentally changes relations between political rulers and the represented, shifting power away from the latter into the hands of the former. The roots of this go back decades, with a deliberate attempt at removing affairs from parliamentary scrutiny and democratic control. Sovereign power is being shifted deliberately into the hands of unelected and unaccountable bodies and authorities. All of them are designed to withstand and resist public intervention, scrutiny, check, and control.

This idea that we must remain silence in order not to prejudice the fair trial of the Southport murderer is the plainest hogwash in this context. Statements made by politicians and police with respect to the riots were made in open and direct contempt of court. Before the rioters were tried – before many of them were even arrested – the authorities, Prime Minister Starmer and Home Secretary Cooper included, declared them to be Far Right thugs and criminals. They claimed to know motivations prior to arrest, interrogation, trial. That’s prejudice. That’s politics, not law. It isn’t hypocrisy, though, it is something much more sinister: it is the open assertion of a two-tier standard that transgresses the very notion of equality before the law. This is not conspiracy and cover-up: it is the open enforcement of a double-standard that is now written into law. Nothing about this double standard is being concealed. That double-standard has been designed into the legal and political system, protecting minorities favoured by the ruling class against the majority. This is deliberately and systematically anti-democratic. And openly so.

We can respect the legal parameters with regard to the release of information, but the more information comes out, the more this Southport case stinks. As with other recent events, it should make the citizenry vigilant with respect to power, noting how ingrained in those running the state to see the public as a threat who can’t be trusted to be told the truth, not merely because they may riot and protest but most of all they may come to act as conscious and knowledgeable citizens in light of that information. Sometimes, a righteous anger accompanied by demands for effective action is justified. The state in its present incarnation and prospective evolution does not have our interests at heart.

When something shocking occurs, people seek answers. Who? What? Where? When? That’s a natural instinct, which we are being coerced into suppressing. It is also the practice of a vigilant citizenry, which governments also seek to curtail. The failure to provide meaningful answers, whilst supplying very questionable information, creates a vacuum into which any answer will manifest. People cannot tolerate lies, prevarication, or disingenuousness. The common citizenry can handle the truth; it is the authorities who cannot.

After years of abuse by incompetent and craven politicians, this country no longer knows itself. People have had enough of being managed and manipulated from above from people who claim to know better, but in truth know only their own agenda. People have had enough of being drip-fed information that fits the officially approved narrative. People want truth. The ruling class, patently, fear the truth.

None of this could ever have come as a surprise to anyone who had been through the Hell of Hillsborough and the decades of cover-up that followed in order to deny justice for the victims of that tragedy. People still presume that because the truth about Hillsborough is now out and known and officially recognised that there has been justice: there has been no justice and hence no closure. We who were at Hillsborough learned the truth about government, police, media, and judiciary, and saw through the illusions of the universal interest in the hands of the establishment. I don’t trust government. Hand over power to government at your peril. Government will take sovereign power, and never voluntarily relinquish it; it will abuse any power it obtains; and you cannot comply your way out of the authoritarian stranglehold of alien power. Marx called for the restitution of power to the social body of sovereign individuals from which it derived; the contemporary world is going in precisely the opposite direction, centralising alien power and seeking to manage a subject population. Good government is not merely representative government, it is essentially self-government. Representation is being denied and the means of self-governance destroyed.

The cover-up is so systemic in character as to be a deliberate transformation. The issue involves more than a succession of one-off events, but indicates a drive that is integrated into the bureaucracy, including the police. Their responsibilities are social or sociological: to manage social impact rather than to tell the truth, control and curtail the democratic will, not express it. And in this, the bureaucracy is closely aligned to the government. Their priorities are the same; they speak the same language. Rather than serving the public, the entire operation is about managing and manipulating the public. The precise nature of the orchestration between state and government over information release with respect to Southport remains to be seen. I suspect it will be clouded in technical, legalistic language, in talk of the priority of maintaining ‘community cohesion’ etc. And then there are the NGOs, the Think Tanks, and all those who adopt the ‘See no Evil’ approach to maintain the fiction of government serving the universal interest. You can waste the next quarter of a century searching for precise answers. We did precisely that as Hillsborough campaigners for justice – we unearthed the evidence and unravelled the conspiracies and established the truth – and yet were still denied justice. Basically, your politics is rotten.

I can remember when Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister described the miners as ‘the enemy within.’ Coming from a coal mining town, with family members who were coal miners, and a grandfather who went to an early grave with a lung condition grace of a lifetime spent down the pit, it struck me that my family and I were being identified as enemies of the state. And as ‘ordinary’ working class people, we were. The state and capital exist in symbiotic relation. (The political Left once knew this, but has now forgotten, a consequence of its abandonment of the working class). This is class war from above. To the ruling class, ‘ordinary’ people with power are always the enemy, possessing the power that poses a threat their control. Once you understand that, discarding idealistic notions of service, care, and protection, all the supposed anomalies and hypocrisies suddenly make perfect sense. The ruling class is waging class war from above through all the various media available to it. The tragedy is that people shy away from such language, as a result of the corruption of socialism in the hands of its activist vanguards this past century. Few people have much faith in socialism and notions of class struggle, having seen where they have led in the past. They cling to the idea that they are citizens of the state, and continue to lament the fact that government consistently fails to serve the interests of the people. You have had long enough to have detected a pattern and drawn a conclusion. Failure to do so will lead you right into the totalitarian prisons you are seeking to avoid.

It is difficult not to conclude that the ruling class see the public as a bigger threat to counter and control than any of the real threats to the nation’s security. The members of the ‘elite’ who continue to rage against Brexit say nothing about Southport, other than to rage against those who protested. The authorities withheld information, shut down debate, and then embarked on a national crackdown when the public protested. And people are starting to see in this suppression of dissenting voices that they, ‘we the people,’ are being seen and treated as the enemy, not those committing the crimes.

The security services would have known within hours of retrieving materials from the residence what the score was. Enquiries need to be made and tests need to be done. There is no obligation to release all information immediately. Starmer rushed the charging of people and trials, though. What did he know and when did he know it? Those are the two key questions. And he needs to be made to answer them. Forget protests. It is pointless protesting in the attempt to hold authorities to standards they care nothing for. You are going to have to learn to channel your natural and righteous anger. And box clever. The key thing is to ask – and keep asking - the pertinent questions that expose the authorities for what they are.

Did the judges who gave heavy sentences to the rioters know? Would they have been told? It’s like the layers of an onion and you don’t who’s on which layer.

Enough. I’ve known since the Hillsborough disaster that the establishment is nothing but an institutionalised lying. People who protest and demonstrate presume ‘the authorities’ can be held to certain standards on truth and justice. I found out years ago that they don’t give a damn. And it makes me sick to see the same cold-blooded deceit. Over and again. The same complaints and laments from people who still had faith in the people who purport to serve them. I last voted for any of the mainstream parties at any level in 1992, and did so even then with reluctance, just thirty minutes short of the close of poll.

The key charges are these:

You withheld vital information.

You misled the public.

You called people far-right thugs.

Don’t waste time asking for apologies.

Instead, call for answers and demand accountability.

We need to know what Starmer knew and, most of all, when he knew it.

Did he know before or after people were fast-tracked the courts?

The police would have been onto it immediately (if they weren’t, then questions need to be asked there). The security services would have known within hours of retrieving materials from the residence what the score was. There would have been further enquiries and tests. We don’t know and to speculate allows those seeking to dampen anger down to tarnish those with criticisms with claims of conspiracy and disinformation. Keep your powder dry, play the long game, and take as long as you need. Most of all, keep questioning. As the Hillsborough campaigners did. Don’t give up and go away in face of the authorities’ stonewalling.

The key questions are what did Prime Minister Starmer and Home Secretary Cooper know and when did they know it. The killer’s home would have been searched immediately. There would have been subsequent lines of enquiry, such as the forensic to establish what the substance found was. Establishing what and when does not prejudice the trial, it relates to establishing precisely when the government came to know the information that has now been revealed, the information relating to the charges. To claim that this prejudices the trial is clear evasion.

If denial continues, we may surmise that Starmer and Cooper chose to keep crucial information under wraps and mislead the public, inviting speculation in order to punishing the protests they knew would arise. Did they know what we now know when they were insisting on fast track prosecutions of people (many of whom were saying things that we now know to be true)? Did they know this at the time? This raises serious questions about accountability and transparency. Merseyside Police chief, Serena Kennedy, must also be held to account.

Two attacks in a week, one on an army officer, the other resulting in the death of children. Riots in Harehill with police running away, attacks on armed airport officers in Manchester, with a female officer receiving a broken nose. An unpopular and frankly incompetent government had no idea how to handle the situation. Rather than deal with the horror, they created an alternative monster to hate, coming down hard on protestors whilst placating the perpetrators. The army officer isn’t even mentioned anymore. Will the same thing happen to the little girls of Southport? This is precisely what the authorities attempted to do with the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. We never let it drop and never went away. We never received justice but we established the truth. And we exposed the establishment for what it is. It’s going to take an entire country to do this.

We should recall that the riots (based on speculation) would not have happened had the authorities promptly released what they knew. The public strongly suspected they had something to hide. And it turns out they did. And we’ve had to wait months to find out why. We are being deliberately manipulated and kept in the dark. And the timing seems significant - just before the Budget that will take all the headlines and attention.

So there you have it. Questions. We must always ask questions and never ever believe the deceitful people in charge. They don’t care about us. Against the assertions of the Crown Prosecution Service - publishing timelines of when ministers were made aware of the nature of evidence that is now in the public domain would not prejudice any trial. When did Cooper & Starmer know about the ricin and the Al Quaeda manual at Rudakubana's home?

Let’s get the facts straight from the start. The manual in question is not an actual Al-Qaeda manual, it is a US military study into jihadis and Al-Qaeda. It’s the kind of thing of interest to experts or those looking to increase their expertise, for whatever reason. Some are downplaying its significance. You can download it from the US Maxwell Air Force base in Alabama where it was written.

So why is the police treating it as terror-related? Why has the Southport attacker been charged with a terrorism offence for being in possession of this? But, to be clear, the attacker has not been charged with terrorism and the attack is not being treated as a terrorist attack.

Police “Possessing information, namely a pdf file entitled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual” of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, contrary to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000.”

This can be left for the trial. And those are questions that we need to ask of the government. And there’s only the two questions we need to ask: ‘What’ did they know and ‘when.’ Those questions may lead to other questions - or answer them without their needing to be asked. Establishing what the authorities knew answers other questions: Did ‘the authorities’ lie? Did they make people plead guilty knowing that they lied? Did they know and hence knowingly misled the public? Did the judges who gave heavy sentences to the rioters know? Would they have been told? The two questions ‘what’ and ‘when’ will give the answers to the other questions.

If the truth was hid from public, and people rushed to prison for filling in the gaps, then those culpable should be held to account. Politicians, lawyers, judges – ‘the authorities.’ From the top, down. Except, as I learned the hard way with Hillsborough, they will not be. It’s like the layers of an onion and you don’t who’s on which layer, only that they are all interconnected, and to take one down you will have to take them all down. Which is why I laugh contemptuously at the controversy over two-tier justice – there is no justice when power has its way. And if you think that only power can defeat power, then you are a fool.

It makes me sick seeing the same cold-blooded deceit again. Sick, not because I expected more from ‘the authorities’ (I have learned to expect nothing less), but because people, with a touching faith in standards of truth and justice, still haven’t learned, and are still expressing outrage and upset.

The Taylor Swift themed Southport event, her own concerts, the stabbing of the little Australian girl in a Taylor Swift t-shirt in London.... Swift and the girls at her events epitomise everything joyous about life – and everything death-cults hate. (Although, I have to confess I have yet to hear any Taylor Swift song. At the same time, I can see people getting some enjoyment out of her music. If I’m a Swifty, then that’s in admiration of Jonathan rather than Taylor. Whichever way you find pleasure). The unbridled joy of children, and especially girls is an anathema to a death cult. In addition, it’s the power of the act - a society so easily demonstrated to not be able to protect its girls is broken, and nothing strikes terror more.

If it is the case that the politicians have been using little girls attacked and murdered as political pawns in their assault on the great British public, then .. Power is best preserved by being concealed. The broken contract between government and governed would now be in clear sight.

With the answers to questions we will come to know whether the authorities hid the truth in order to allow rumours replace facts, enabling them to curb and cow an angry and upset public. People feel as though they are on the receiving end of a heavy-handed government that taxes them to the hilt and gives nothing but austerity and repression in return. The largesse is distributed elsewhere, to pet causes. Forget protests - protests are based on the authorities sharing the same standards of truth and justice. They do not. Ask the right questions, and you will learn that lesson. And start reorganising to reclaim your sovereign power from those that abuse it.

The Southport attacker has been charged under the terrorism act and the biological weapons act. A search of his home uncovered an Al Quaeda terror book and ricin. With every outrage, the authorities insist that members of the public avoid speculation and wait until the evidence is clear. When the evidence is clear, the authorities insist that the members of the public desist from commentary lest any trial be prejudiced. The survivors and families of the Hillsborough disaster had decades of this endless postponement. And when the time finally arrives for comment and judgement, we are told that justice has been done and the matter is closed.

Except that with respect to Hillsborough there was no justice. We were engaged in an endless war of attrition until those demanding justice were exhausted and the public were either bored or overcome by trials of their own. ‘They’ll wear you down,’ family and friends told the mother of a Hillsborough victim, Anne Williams. ‘We’ll wear them down,’ she said in response. That is what it will take, and it will take as long as it takes. There is no need to rush to protest. There is no need to engage in set-piece battles with the authorities – they are prepared, and are preparing further repression in response. Don’t take the bait.

It is worth noting that the authorities now demanding that people avoid speculating in the absence of information were quick to release information that now turns out to be somewhat less than truthful. Overnight, the Southport attacker has gone from being a Welsh Christian choir boy with an ‘autism spectrum disorder diagnosis’ to what many thought he was from the first: a child-murdering, UK-hating, radicalised Islamist terrorist. People saw through the images of the young boy published immediately.

Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it experience, but people saw through the news management and manipulation immediately. The photos of the young boy accompanying the story fooled no-one. And maybe we are past attempts at fooling the public – the manipulation is now so blatant as to be a provocation. People observe, remember, see patterns, and judge. I would say the authorities are taking people for fools, except the management and manipulation is now so crude as hardly to constitute an attempt at concealment at all. It is so bare-faced as to be an assertion of the right to impose lies as truth from above. People still on nodding terms with their senses – not to mention decency and honesty – smelled a rat immediately, herds of them. Those who got over-excited in their outrage ended up in prison. They took the bait, and their punishment is meant to cow and intimidate everyone else into going along with the denial of reality, truth, and morality.

Knowing what we now know, we may be inclined to see a pattern and form a judgement. We are wise to trust our instincts, and when information is being managed and manipulated, we have no option so to do. It would appear that the great public, the people that politicians are supposed to represent and the authorities are supposed to serve, are seen as a problem, even a potential threat, to be managed and manipulated. The release of information and its timing seems to have been an operational decision. But truth will out. Two further questions need to be asked: ‘what’ did the government know and ‘when’ did they know it. These questions and their answers do not prejudice the case.

The fact that the authorities and their apologists are already saying it does indicates that answers to those fundamental questions will not be forthcoming, on account of being ‘inconvenient’ to those in power pursuing agendas.

Starmer and his servants were quick to judge and act, condemning protestors as ‘Far Right’ Islamophobes, threatening them with the full force of the law. How revealing it was to see how many of those who had been so silent on the attack on the little girls suddenly became so vocal in condemning those who protested in Southport and elsewhere. Now that the truth is known, do they now have an opinion? Or are they back in their ‘don’t look back in anger’ mode? Or postponing comment until the usual platitudes and pieties can be uttered after the trial. Such people will seize on any reason offered from above to cover their basic cowardice, anything that allows them to carry on avoiding having to confront power. They will find a safe cause that they can support which costs them nothing.

Many people were fast-tracked into prison, with one now dead by suicide. The police authorities were highly visible and vocal in promising that protestors/rioters would feel the full force of the law. But whilst it seems that they were as good as their word, the very opposite is true. This is not the law that is being used, but a law that has been politicised, corrupted, and weaponised, which is no law at all. Those who say the law is now being used against the white working class need to read the history books – it was ever thus. Read socialist and trade union history, read on the struggles of working class people for justice, and you will see how such a law works. It was called class war, back in the days when ‘progressives’ thought the working class a promising vehicle for them to ride into power. Those days are gone, and the working class is now held in contempt.

We are far removed from the common law in which all were seen and treated as equals, with an expectation of consistency in the resolution of disputes. The law now serves as a control and punishment mechanism wielded by a politicized police and judiciary. This, of course, is no law at all, merely tyranny. The judges were as good as instructed to punish people severely and fast track their imprisonment. The people who are daily pointing out the anomalies and hypocrisies are wasting their time and energy. There is no revelation here, the hypocrisy is flagrant and open, the establishment letting people know where they stand in the new hierarchy. Those pointing out hypocrisy in the attempt to reassert universal standards fail to register the truth that a revolution has happened and a new hierarchy has supplanted equality and pretensions to equality. Two-tier justice is an observable fact and, truth be told, an extension of the old class system.

People denied its existence in the past, just as they will deny it in the present. It saves them having to fight the class war from below in the attempt to establish equality. The punishments were a warning, an attempt to cow and intimidate people, inducing them to self-censor their speech, silence their protest, look away, go away – and accept their subordinate position as subjects, not citizens.

It seems that Tony Blair has been advising Keir Starmer. I have paid politics little attention since Blair. I filled notebooks with criticisms of Blair before he was even elected as Prime Minister. I drew an analogy with Harold Wilson’s value-free and vision-free pragmatism, exposing it as a dangerous political vacuum into which power floods. Blair’s assertion that what matters is ‘not ideology, but what works’ was the plainest ideology, in Marx’s critical sense of a set of ideas that conceals, preserves, and extends asymmetrical power relations. ‘What works’ in the here and now always tends towards the strongest power, abandoning the future and defaulting to the status quo.

By ‘ideology,’ Blair meant any politics based on values and ideals. Such as socialism. It was a technocratic vision. He wasn’t the first in advancing this. We could go back one hundred years to when Thorstein Veblen advocated the ‘revolt of the engineers’ instead of the proletariat, arguing for an organised system of top-down regulation as against Marx’s idea of associated workers. Max Weber warned that Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would take the form of the ‘dictatorship of the officials.’ Weber was proven correct, and the result was a dictatorship that was exercised in continuation of social relations of class and capital. ‘State socialism’ it was called, a term which anybody who understands socialism would consider an oxymoron. It is the institutionalisation of the symbiotic relation between the state and capital. I drew analogies between Blair and Wilson in their commitment to ‘modernisation,’ an utterly vacuous platform in that modernity is defined by its incessant modernisation. I quoted Ralph Miliband’s observation that Harold Wilson’s most common references were to ‘change’ and ‘modernisation.’ Likewise Blair. And now Starmer talks incessantly of ‘change,’ saying precisely nothing. It’s an evasion. And then there are the constant references to ‘tough decisions.’ Blair did precisely this in the 1990s, and Tony Benn pointed out the obvious that the target of such decisions were the weak and the vulnerable. They were not ‘tough decisions’ at all, Benn said, but the easiest decisions of all to take, being aimed against those too week to fight back. The same applies to Starmer. I made these criticisms before Blair was elected as Prime Minister, and was proven right. I have no intention to waste my time any further.

If people still can’t see a point that ought to have been obvious in the 1990s, and which came to be spelled out by critics as it was proven correct by hard experience, then they are beyond help. Resistance to the systematic de-democratisation underway requires that the members of the demos turn up and put a shift in themselves.

As a Hillsborough survivor I remember the promises for a new enquiry that Labour made in opposition, only to carry on with the cover up. ‘What’s the point?’ Blair asked Home Secretary Jack Straw when the issue of a new enquiry was raised. By which he meant, ‘what political gain is there for us?’ None. There is no political gain in truth and justice for these people. And they don’t care one jot for the people they purport to serve. People are now seeing what I saw back then. They can save themselves time and energy by cutting out the outrage, upset, and anger and instead start on the long road back in reclaiming sovereign power.

I had Blair decked before he even became Prime Minister. I remember him telling the most blatant, and pettiest of lies, as he sought to cultivate popularity before the General Election of 1997. At a time when football was all the range, and Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United were everybody’s second team, he told the story of how he saw Jackie Milburn as a youngster from the Gallowgate End. A simple fact check revealed that Blair would have been too young to have seen Milburn. Trying to portray himself as a bit of a character, and not the privileged ponce he was, Blair also told a story about attempting to be a stowaway on a flight to the Bahamas. It turned out that the airport in question had never served the Bahamas. It’s a long time ago, but I seem to remember the airport didn’t even exist. I don’t have either the time or the inclination to check any further. We should all now know what Blair is, by the fruits. It struck me at the time that any man who was willing to lie over such trivial and easily checkable matters would be capable of lying over the greatest matters of all. We know the rest: dodgier dossiers with a view to starting an illegal and immoral war, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a destroyed nation, lies to parliament, fast-tracking immigration ‘to rub our noses in diversity,’ accelerated deindustrialisation making wastelands of formerly thriving regions, PFI, making borrowed money reappear as profit, ruination of public finances, selling off our gold at rock bottom prices … on and endlessly on. But Blair would have counted it as a success, and hence those who follow in his footsteps would be inclined to take his advice. Take Blair’s response to repeated questions over the false claims he made to involve Britain in the invasion and destruction of Iraq: people, he repeated, can hold him to account at the next election.

He was re-elected. The voters who voted Blair and Labour back in bear a heavy responsibility (the same with respect to those who voted for Thatcher’s second and third terms in office). Blair seemed to think that people had only a two-second memory. One event, one crisis, one abomination, one calumny over, power served and preserved, and people will move on to the next serving of fish and chips, discarding the newspaper they are wrapped in. That’s the cynical view of the demos held by members of the elite. It is for the people to prove them wrong, and make democracy a living and breathing thing. Governments are as bad as the governed allow them to be.

Memory holing is only possible because too many people do indeed move on. This has happened time and again. I’m still waiting for a reckoning over Orgreave in ’84 and Hillsborough in ’89. The Hillsborough campaigners for justice pushed as long and as hard as anyone could have done, and still they did not receive justice. The establishment got away with it then, and have kept on getting away with it since. The Blair government lied its way into an illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.

That country was destroyed, countless numbers of Iraqis killed (they considered of no account, so there was no count). But there was no victory – these same people are destroying the countries they misrule. And they keep getting away with it.

That point applies to all who are inclined to keep going along in order to get along. They refuse to challenge and contest, telling themselves that a lesser evil is better than a greater one, and that no matter how bad Labour are, at least they are not the Conservatives. The reasoning was fallacious in the 1990s and brought us Blair and all that he inflicted on the nation – the lies that lead to war, PFI, mass immigration. And the supposed ‘lesser evils’ of the past have plunged us in the greater evil of today.

One thing that Blair was good at was burying bad news. He was caught out when his press secretary Jo Moore was discovered sending an email advising him that the bombing of the World Trade Centre on September 11th was a good day to get bad news to be buried out. Politicians lie and are immoral. Politics is demoralised. It’s been a long while since I saw the film, so I am going from memory. But as Thomas More admonished Thomas Cromwell over the systematic lying that had secured More’s conviction for treason: ‘first a man will deny his conscience, finally he will have no conscience. I pity the people whose statesmen tread your path.’ Blair was mired in smoke and mirrors and downright lying. That’s politics, say some; that’s the end of politics, say I, defining politics in the ancient sense of a systematic concern with the human good.

It seems clever. Those accustomed to a corrupted politics may still be inclined to think Blair to have had a successful career. The same with respect to Thatcher before him. The damage that both wrought on people and reality is palpable. The ‘deaths of despair’ in deindustrialised wastelands tell a truth that ‘progressives’ continue to ignore. Political management on these terms always backfires for the reason that the political class are not nearly as clever as they think themselves to be, just as the common folk are nowhere near stupid as the supposed elites take themselves to be. When information and knowledge is lacking – and deliberately skewed and/or withheld, most people remain on nodding terms with their innate intelligence, instincts, and plain and simple good sense and moral decency.

Starmer knew what the people – starved of information – could only guess – that the Southport attacker possessed an Al Quaeda handbook and was creating a biological weapon. It is worth comparing and contrasting the different responses of Starmer and the common folk. People protested the assault on the class of little girls, which resulted in the murder of three of them; Starmer paid a brief visit, put his flowers down, and left quickly without a word, before going on the front foot against those expressing upset and anger. Rather than express disgust, I will advise people to observe, reflect, form a judgement, and act appropriately and accordingly (I haven’t voted for Labour at any level since the 1992 election, never voted for any of the other main parties, and argue the need to re-establish the conditions for doing politics well to make political choices at the top level meaningful. I have been doing this for thirty years. I saw the collapse to come).

Is it credible that Starmer could not have known the information about the Southport attacker until after the persecution of the protestors? We need precise answers to the ‘what’ and ‘when’ questions to be definite here. The words used in the press release - ‘past few weeks’ – would suggest that any answers here will not be forthcoming. And in the absence of information we have no option but to exercise judgement. Starmer must have known for some time. The police will have searched the attacker’s home immediately, and informed Starmer of their findings in short order. A day? A week? The answer here depends on how competent we think the police are. It is a fair assumption to think that Starmer will have been in possession of the relevant information all through his high-minded, heavy-handed demonization and punishment of protestors, all through the threats he issued to one and all who may dare to contest the official narrative and demand answers.

I have attended just two demonstrations my entire life, and one of those was one that united most members of the national community (to keep the pits open in 1992). I don’t care for demonstrations and protests; they are easily hi-jacked and quickly get over-heated, with actual issues coming to be lost in the heat of battle. I don’t care for street politics – it is war between tribes. I caution people against protests and seek to channel them into an effective politics geared to long-term transformation. The work of construction is far more radical than any protests and pitch-battles.

But the instincts of the protestors was correct: this was not the random and accidental ‘event’ the authorities were determined to portray it as. In other words, the protestors who were starved of information expressed a moral and political judgement was that fundamentally correct as against the authorities who had the information. The people were right in all essentials: the people in authority are mired in lies and deceit. The evidence is that there will be much more of this, as our politics, culture, and society is transitioned to a corporate order. The ruling class will seek to control and manipulate information, engage in a war of attrition from above, withholding information and skewing information released to play with the emotions and expectations of people. People need to trust their instincts, and trust their mistrust of the ruling class and its minions. And not get involved in the endless antagonism of the ideologues, the tools and fools who think themselves on the winning side, when in truth they are being used by those prosecuting bigger agendas. These supposed Leftists fighting the culture war excite themselves in the destruction of the old order, little realising that they are being used as the battering rams of the corporate form. For all of the very excited dreams they entertain over the socialist paradise to come, the extension and entrenchment of corporate power is the end game. But, maybe, many of them will find a place for themselves as apparatchiks of the new order. What else are they fit for?

The mainstream media insisted that the child-killer was Welsh, and a Christian to boot, and had nothing to do with immigration, Islam, or terrorism. And the usual suspects in the activist class were happy to sing from the mainstream hymn sheet. Forget apologies, will they ever learn that they are the tools and fools of corporate power? Do they care, if they are earning out of it? (No). Now the truth is out, those who have been caught out will retreat behind the defence that their views were based on what was known at the time. Which is convenient since what is known at any one time is dependent on the information revealed, not the information deliberately withheld to create a false impression, a false impression news outlets reinforce by repetition.

Smoke and mirrors, and lies and deception. The entire establishment is mired in it.

But many people knew at the time that they were being lied to. Yet again. Not for the first time. As usual. Comme d’habitude. Such is politics in the modern world. You should have learned by now not to take governments at their word. Tony Blair took his stand on the office of Prime Minister when he assured us that he had evidence that he couldn’t reveal that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was a big claim that, in public, was lacking in evidence.

People were asked to take it on the authority of the highest office in the land that the evidence existed. And it was a lie, a lie that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The non-obscurantist would call that murder. I can remember the excitement of elections coming up in the years that followed. People would ask me who I was voting for. And I would reply by saying that not until Blair and his cohorts are up in front of the Hague for war crimes would I be bothering to vote. Blair called people’s bluff, saying that he can be held to account at the next election. He should have been blown away. Instead, the people blew it.

I have watched the disregard for human life increase in my lifetime, I would say directly in proportion to the decline of ‘traditional’ ethics and faith in God. We now have a ‘whatever’ society that is inured to the barbarism and inhumanity. I’m only glad that my mum and both grannies are not here to see it. Or my granddad who fought in the war. Standards have slipped. It came from the top. I notice it all the more because I remember when things were not this way. And I know, too, that faith in God or a god or any good at all can also lead to disregard for human life, killing righteously in a good cause. Human beings are rational animals who kill for causes. Beware the idolness of ends. Blair was big on God and faith. Others likewise. Hate trumps love very easily. The converse, much less so.

The only reassuring thing about this sorry tale is the awareness that there is such a thing as reality, and reality is always greater and more enduring than power. The lying and the deceit always backfires in the end because reality continues to exist and cannot be spun away in perpetuity. by the spinners who infest politics and culture. The truth-spinners are annoying and irritating, and it is easy to get drawn into the endless war they wage. It is so easy to keep insisting that 2 + 2 = 4, but a waste of time and energy. The danger lies in giving up in exhaustion. The lie then prevails. The gambit seems to be that citizens live only in the immediate. The lies take you through so that when the truth is known, people have forgotten and moved on to the next set of lies.

If the political class is nowhere near as clever as they take themselves to be, the citizen body is nowhere near as stupid as the political class take them to be. The former is detached from reality in a way that the latter is not. What the political class is concerned to hide from us is the hard reality of the future they have in store for us. What they're not hiding from us, is that they don't care. Their contempt is very clear.

But I knew all of this from Hillsborough.

The release of information was all planned and timed. The release of the information, confirming the views of the protestors, was delayed until the budget, disappearing down the news schedules. And the people, the authorities calculate, in being stupid and short-termist in their attention spans, would forget and move on. As much as anything, the whole cynical manoeuvre should tell you just what the political class think of the people they purport to represent – nothing, they hold people in contempt.

The deeper analysis relates such politics to the continued extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, rewiring and re-rigging the institutional, cultural, and social fabric accordingly. Briefly, the privatisation strategies of the 1980s were instrumental in the corporatisation of public life and private business. Economic liberalisation and the marketization of society went hand-in-hand with the globalisation of economic relations, the principal agents of which were the transnational corporations and corporate finance. The economic libertarianism of the Right entailed the destruction of the old Social Left, with the Left re-emerging as a Cultural Left, whose cultural libertarianism formed the counterpart of economic libertarianism. That libertarianism was acidic in destroying the old order, the socialised politics of the old Left, the national symbols and communities of the old Right, paving the way for recentralisation around the corporate form.

The ‘old’ is demonized, deconstructed, and destroyed. The ‘British people’ are to be taken apart, broken down, and dissolved. The process began with the white working class. In fighting back, they were demonized as ‘the enemy within,’ portrayed as the brutes and bully-boys of the union ‘barons,’ plunging the nation into the ‘winter of discontent,’ leaving the dead unburied along uncollected rubbish. Thatcher was cheered as she waged class war from above. The victory ripped the heart and soul out of a now fractured and atomised society, and reduced the nation to dependence on a low-skill, low-productivity, low-growth economy unable to compete at the high-value added end of the market. Mass immigration under the auspices of the corporate class is the continuation of that approach. Those who once cheered are now wailing.

Mass immigration is a cheap labour strategy, all part of dismantling nation states and re-rigging polity and culture within the global corporate form. I argued this in my 1995 economics masters thesis. I see no reason to avoid advancing disquieting views now that they have been proven correct. The thing that strikes me most about the past thirty years are lengths to which people will go to avoid having to draw the right conclusions. They prefer instead the reassuring certainties of their chosen political identities. And they will keep on repeating their tired old slogans, however void of meaning and content. The end will come soon enough. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels speculated on the possibility of the common ruination of the contending classes if lessons are not learned.

In waging class war against the old industrial working class, identifying all social centres of resistance to the market as socialist, the neoliberal Right not only brought down socialism, they brought down society and, as a result, they brought down the nation. Socialism was the first to be wiped out, now it is the turn of a conservatism rooted in patriotism and the collective national memory to fall. And the white working class continue to be demonized in order to be destroyed. To economic neoliberals (miscalled conservatives) I say this: if there is no society, then there is no nation and no conservatism; to cultural neoliberals (miscalled socialists) I say this: if there is no nation, then there is no society and no socialism. Your health and welfare systems are nationally bounded: remove national borders and they will fall.

The big money is coming in from outside the polity, taking over all cultural areas, from media and education to sport. That comes with a political clout that the common people are lacking. The political class treat ‘ordinary’ folk with contempt because they know they can, and think there is nothing the common folk can do about it, except protest and be punished, to be beaten into silence and submission. There is no commitment or loyalty on the part of the political class to the common folk. The political leaders and their minions are mere puppets, of course, mediocre midwit managers serving a greater power. Many will be paid well for their treachery, moving on to places and positions among the acronym gang seeking to rule the world. The mere mediocrities will be discarded having served their purpose, even then being over-rewarded for their miniscule talent,

It’s not so much law and order as war and disorder that the political class is imposing. That I first uttered that line in 1990 should tell you something about how long this degeneration has been coming. It’s not new and it’s not accidental. I know too much to be outraged, upset, and angry. There are people who benefit from war and disorder, those who retain control of resources, and who use that control to acquire more resources. The calculators and controllers think themselves clever enough to be able to hold the reins throughout the coming conflict and chaos. They may even envisage reducing the global population in numbers, bringing the survivors under their control – as resources.

Things fall apart.

In 1995 I wrote on the global corporate form in my economics masters. Idealistically, and optimistically, I felt that people committed to democracy, equality, fairness, and individual liberty would be able to identify the signs of the corporatisation of public and private life and act accordingly to check the encroachment of corporate power. I underestimated the extent to which increasing numbers of people would become so drawn into the orbit of dependency within the corporate form as to align with it rather than against it. Many who think themselves Leftist or merely liberal will find themselves no more than passive ‘progressive’ agents of forces that lie outside of them. In more recent times, having come to appreciate how ensconced people are within layers of dependency – with concomitant levels of cowardice and complicity – I have written a series of books on the tyrannous deformation to come – on Tolkien, on Lewis Mumford, on techno-bureaucratic managerialism, on authoritarianism. Too many books of too great a length to be read by enough people to make a difference. But I already knew that it was too late, that too many people respond to the shadows of immediacy as they flicker in front of them, and too few read, and fewer still think and understand, to have a positive practical effect in the struggles of the times. I write to set the record straight for whosoever may come after, should the instinct for liberty, truth, and goodness survive. I wrote on the Scouring of the Shire in the Tolkien book. I dedicated the book to decent people in the hard times that were sure to come. It hardly constituted a prediction, seeing as the hard times were already here and have been here for decades.

I’m done with giving people cheery messages that, ultimately, promise a way out, if people are prepared to turn up and put a shift in. In my experience, people take the promise as the reassurance that the bad times will pass without them having to do anything to move them on.

When it comes to finding the way out, it is always someone else somewhere else who is to do the heavy lifting. The bad news for people who think this way is that no one is coming to save you. And the idea that you can select these saviours ready-made off the shelf is for the birds (the Red Wall voters that voted for Boris Johnson learned a hard lesson. They should know that none of the main parties want the votes of working class people, working class people are of no count. And we live in times in which the functioning of the polity is being transformed to remove ‘ordinary’ folk from politics entirely). If something should be done by somebody, then you are that somebody, and you need to do that something by joining with like-minded others. The marketization of society has replaced citizens with free-riders, people who take care of their own interest first and foremost on the presumption that somebody somewhere will be doing as all ought. You can carry on free-riding. You don’t have to act; you don’t have to survive.

Being somewhat detached from society, living on the margins, I was able to see where society was heading a long time ago. I wasn’t so much part of anything as to be committed to going along with things, in the vague hope it would all turn out well in the end. Being on the outside of things, I could see the trajectory very clearly. And I saw how everything was collapsing on the inside. I saw how institutions were increasingly less fit for purpose, were running on empty, useless in resolving issues, staffed by place-sitters committed to nothing but their own survival. That was the 1980s and 1990s. The awareness motivated me into studying for a masters and then a PhD. Things were not as they ought to be, the times were heading in the wrong direction, and the foundations were rotting away. That was 1995-2001. That my worst fears are being realised indicates that the decline is a chronic condition. Instead of remedying the defects I noted a quarter of a century ago, people involved in politics seem hell-bent on making them worse. I don’t know if politics makes people stupid, or only stupid people go into politics, but there are none so blind as those who can only see through political filters.

I warned. And now we are here. Little did I know at the time that we would be approaching this state of affairs so quickly. Indeed, had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near university, spending my time doing something else. You only get the one life. People who write books are optimists. Not only do they presume that someone will read what they write, they think they will understand it and act on it. I spent years reading and writing. I would have been happier, and probably healthier and wealthier, doing something else.

I remember a Phil Lynott song from 1982, Ode to Liberty, which has these lines:

I would dearly love to return

Through a mirror in twenty years

And learn what the future has in store for us

And if I learned that we lost

And there was no hope

For those that think

I would turn to drink

Or turn to whatever soothes the pain, or offers a transitory pleasure that shuts out the reality. Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll or their equivalents according to preference. It seems that that is precisely what many did. Lynott himself went to an early death just four years later. The hedonism of the eighties always seemed to be founded on a sense of hopelessness. I condemned it at the time, but knowing what I now know, should maybe have joined in. I bought the Phil Lynott Album which contained Ode to Liberty at the time, and pondered those lines about our reactions to coming to learn of the futility of our actions. The song was written in 1982, which brings the mirror into the future to 2002, a year after I was awarded a PhD. Things were so bad that I was moved to study the roots and causes of the myriad crises engulfing us. I did a good job. But had I been able to avail myself of this same mirror into the future in 1995-2001, I would have done something different. All those years of researching and writing, of social isolation and dedication. For what? A turn to drink would have been about as effective, and no less destructive. I won’t say that there is no hope, but the evidence of the past forty years of predictable, avoidable decline is not encouraging.

We are now engulfed in what may be called hyper-pluralism. The old liberal presumption was that the free interplay of different groups would issue in, if not a harmony of interests exactly, then a broad and viable commonality. The problem with the notion is that it reduces the public realm and the common good to a mere compromise – should compromise be possible - and no more than a sum or aggregate achieved being contending parties.

When each is asserting a particular interest against other interests, with none committed to the public good, sooner or later there is no public realm left. The public degenerates into mere anarchy, in the sense of a chaos caused by congeries of competing groups.

The problem is that when all are making claims on the public realm and none are making a contribution, there is no public left. In this respect, the activist class are tools of deconstruction and destruction, undermining stability, uprooting all things and people to turn everything into mere tumbleweed to be blown hither and thither according to ever more entrenched power. The members of the activist class may see themselves as being effective in advancing their causes. In truth, they are being used as unwitting agents of a greater destruction, the end-game being the extension and entrenchment of corporate power. Why else are they so indulged by the authorities? Real threats to power are targeted by the control and punishment mechanisms of police and law. The daily war of attrition to which politics has been reduced is intensifying to become an all-pervasive war, totalising conflict as a step in the direction of a totalising control.

The political activists and ideologues of Left and Right and all points in between have never truly understood the extent to which human beings don’t much like one another, even hate one another when they are on rival sides. It’s a curious blind spot. That people engaged in politics don’t see the hatred indicates the extent to which they are thoroughly absorbed in the conflictual terrain, thinking themselves motivated only by the highest motives with respect to the good of all ‘humanity.’ People preserve the pretensions of love as against the realities of hate by persuading themselves that they are motivated by higher ideals – unlike all those who stand in their way … Protest, outrage, anger, and indignation are the most salient characteristics of political ‘debate’ in the contemporary world for the very reason that, lacking universal standards grounded in notions of an objective reality, there is no possibility of rational argument and agreement. All that there can be in a world without commonly accepted foundations is an endless and destructive cycle of assertion and counter-assertion, which soon degenerates into a cycle of abuse and counter-abuse. Politics thus becomes a sphere of conflict, assertion, imposition, and coercion – provoking outrage and protest, and paving the way for repression. The capacity for mediation and self-governance is being eroded and lost. Political arguments are not merely endless but increasingly loud and angry.

Because there are no rational means by which rival individuals and groups can persuade one another, since there is no notion of a good shared in common, politics becomes ‘civil war carried on by other means’ (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 1984 [1981] p.253). The problem is that once pluralism intensifies to take the form of a hyperpluralism, politics becomes less and less able to perform the role of mediation – none of the competing groups is prepared to accept compromise in order to preserve the civil peace. The losers end up losing so badly so often that there is nothing to keep them playing the game; the winners start to win so much, they see no need to keep playing the game at all, since they can take it all, without fear of sanction.

The anarchy of the rich and powerful makes the hatred manifest. The mutual indifference with respect to rival gods and goods, which had been the normal state of play, explodes into a mutual hostility when interests and idols are brought into collision. We may well be saying goodbye to love, with a selfish self-regard holding all the trump cards against any other-regarding goods. If love is disappearing from the world, then our indifference to one another, developed and reinforced over decades of egoistic self-assertion, will intensify to become an increasingly contemptuous hatred of one another’s objects of loyalty, reverence, and commitment. Solidarity breaks down, and autonomy becomes anarchy. Hatred is a powerful force, and when driven by fear and terror overpowers love to a factor of a thousand and more. When resources are scarce – and they are never abundant – selfish self-regard trumps other-regarding ideals and commitments time and again. And when the public realm can no longer be mediated by shared values, commitments, loyalties, and solidarities, rivalry breeds fear and resentment, so that the normal stuff of politics issues in hatred. A mutual indifference in peace rests on a universal antagonism that, under stress, explodes into a mutual hatred. In the main, selfishness prevails over love. The truth may be unpalatable. But I can only report what I have learned from a lifetime spent on the frontier.

This is what I saw coming all those decades ago. It may seem surprising that the political activists and ideologues couldn’t see the same thing, but isn’t. Those with a dog in the fight have a tendency to presume that it is only the others who are the fighting dogs, whilst they are motivated by the highest ideals and seek only peace. Any problems are always caused by others. They are gods, the others are dogs. Same letters, same thing. It is the nature of ideology to dress up particular interests as the general interest of all, which all would surely appreciate if only they were so rational as the ideologue.

Particular preferences and prejudices are dressed up as the common good of all, to be imposed on all righteously, and repressively, if need be. A righteous repression. Which is something all-too-familiar in political and religious history:

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing 'the good'] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. (C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics).

The nature and power of ideology is such that ideologues are unable to see the extent to which hate trumps love, not least because they see their own acts as acts of love. In an act of inversion, hate becomes love, so that ideologues are free to hate anyone who doesn’t think like them and doesn’t agree with them. People Like Us affirm a love of all ‘humanity’ in the abstract, and not only don’t care for People Like Them, they openly despise them, proceeding inexorably to actively hating them should they ever have the temerity to disagree, stand in the way, fight back. The evidence of that is all over politics and social media politicking. There is never reasonable and legitimate grounds for disagreement – others are always motivated by evil. ‘Fascists’ and ‘communists,’ each and all. Their tolerance was a jagged tether to constrain everyone into conformity. Which is to say that they have known hatred all along, it’s just that in their righteousness they took it to be love.

The activists and ideologues demand the liquidation of everything that is stable and rooted, of law and order, since that order was iniquitous. Instead of walking the hard yards of the work of reconstruction, they take the short-cut of anarchic destruction. The naifs among them hold that such destruction would pave the way to a new creation. They express a naïve belief in the existence of an underlying natural order that had been repressed and distorted by power-laden institutions, systems, and structures.

Remove those institutions, systems, and structures, and the natural reasonableness and sociability of human beings will freely emerge. They think themselves Left when advancing such a view, little realising that they are expressing an individualism which originates in the naivest of eighteenth century pieties. They feel themselves motivated by love, when in truth they were driven by hate; they felt themselves to be innocent of power, but in targeting power, they made power their goal. If you think that view overly cynical, then see how they argue when challenged and checked by others, and identify the end-game in their rational prescriptions. They felt that through the destruction of artificial institutions a natural reasonableness and sociability and love would emerge.

Those were the idealists. The architects were openly out to destabilize, demoralise, desocialise and destroy, reduce all people and things to me tumbleweed to be blown away. These were open in their hatred and had no recourse to love, peace, and reason. And they have had considerable success.

Politics has been an organised looting from above for a long time, now. We have been living through the greatest transfer of resources to the rich – now superrich – in history. The only thing that has trickled down is the immoral example set by the ruling class and its ideologues. Liberty has become the licence to loot, and for those with the power so to do to predate on others. It may even have become an obligation to loot: one accumulates or is accumulated, a perfectly Hobbesian image. Civil society has degenerated into a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, with each seeing in others mere means to be used to personal ends, all becoming instruments of alien power as a result. Once everything has been looted and stolen, there remains only one another to use and abuse, or merely turn on and tear apart in an impotent rage and fury. As the public realm implodes, civil society becomes the site of an ongoing civil war, with rival groups fighting pitched battles, in the absence of possibilities of political mediation; the civil economy also becomes a civil war fought between gangs seeking control of the drugs trade and prostitution, these being the biggest economy by far in light of a destroyed domestic economy, the only growth areas, so long as human beings continue to exist. Which may not be for too long. The rejoinder of ‘all lives matter’ to Black Lives Matter is soon drawn into the pervasive mutual cancellation and annihilation underway so that in the end no lives matter. The commitment to assisted living, always tentative, half-hearted, and under-resourced in the best of times, was slowly but surely withdrawn over a period of decades, culminating with an air of inevitability in Assisted Dying, a state-sanctioned and increasingly enforced obligation on the part of the ‘useless,’ the unwanted, the unexploitable, and the unyielding to die.

And everywhere the shadow of fear, death, and destruction

The authorities seem paralyzed to remedy the social ills of the age. That this is say may well be because they are complicit in their causing and their continuation. The centres of authority have rotted within. They have ceased functioning and lost sense of any original purpose. Having failed to read the writing on every wall, or pretended not to see it, knowing they couldn’t act on the warning, the authorities were taken by surprise by groups of all sides, or were simply taken, lacking the vitality to express any kind of emotion, other than relief at finally being put out of their misery. Their impotence and uselessness has been apparent for decades, in myriad mounting failures. They have been overwhelmed by the demands arising from a society collapsing from within.

Society disintegrated into factions, and people who cared for survival either joined one or the other, or just simply gave up in the futility of it all and died. Any hardware left was stolen and redistributed among the few ‘winners.’ Who lived to carry on fighting to no end. 

The climate of fear created to ‘nudge’ a supposedly stupid and inert population to ‘do good’ had succeeded all too well, not in disposing people towards doing good, but in instilling neurosis to incite feelings of hatred so extreme as to finally overpower an always already overburdened love.

Lockdown strengthened the privatism of the age, with people retreating from the public realm, where once they associated in common cause in the attempt to secure political remedy for shared troubles. Finally realising that the idea that freedom and happiness could be purchased as goods on the market, ‘the people’ dissolved into self-seeking, self-serving atoms, and thereby rendered politically impotent, ostensibly ‘free’ individuals withdrew into their homes, in the hope that the virus would pass. Instead, it destroyed many of them. In truth, they were already destroyed, enfeebled, weak, divided – and dead within. They had been destroyed by a consumptive illness, losing the productive orientation to the world to passively receive goods from the outside. When the goods dried up, they remained passive and therefore died. As the body count rose, all the major institutions collapsed. And healthcare, law and order, all commitments, loyalties, and solidarities in service to the common good fell and disappeared. Along with trust in institutions, the trust that people once had in each other disappeared, too.

The days in which people could believe in the possibility of good governance were over. Governance survived only as command and control over resources. And people were now resources. The useful and exploitable were maintained and cultivated, the useless and unexploitable were culled. The working class was no more, supplanted by the paid and liveried hardcore who were servants of the superrich. Protectors and enforcers. Creating and sustaining the infernal City of Dis instead of the New Jerusalem.

Cover Up?

People issuing warnings and calling on people to ‘wake up’ claim that we are sleepwalking into disaster. It would be more true to say that we are being ‘put to sleep.’ There is a drip-drip normalisation of extreme events that is designed to breed resignation. It is the death of a polity and a people through despair.

We now learn, three months on, that the individual charged with committing the atrocities in Southport was in possession of an Al Quaeda training manual, in contravention of the terrorism act, and ricin, a biological weapon, in contravention of the biological warfare act.

If we didn’t know it already – and if governments are too scared, too paralysed, and frankly too culpable to admit it – we have entered an era of terror, intimidation, and mass murder. We should know it. Western governments are reaping what they have sown. They have been practising these very things abroad, and are now practising them at home in an attempt to manage the escalating crises they have caused. We have entered, too, an era in which politics is replaced by police – the constant management and manipulation of populations. Rather than governments being held accountable, the governed will be put under surveillance and made to account for themselves to the government. And know, too, that these governments are doing the bidding of the corporate class that now strides the world.

We live in a different country now. With a different politics, culture, and society. Past forms have been destroyed and are now in the process of being redesigned around the corporate form. The revolution has happened, we now need restitution and restoration. But who are the agents? Different people have no sense of what is to be restored. Restitution and restoration was always the socialist case against the capital system – the practical reappropriation and democratic reorganisation of the social power alienated to state and capital.

We may prefer different or new nomenclature, but the solution is fundamentally the same. Which makes clear the sheer futility of appealing to governments to govern as they ought. These governments are constituted in the sphere of alien power: that power needs to be reclaimed.

Spare a thought for all those people who are now languishing in prison for intemperate words and actions. We live in intemperate times, and the fact that this is so can be attributed entirely to the political class and the corporate power it serves. The cowards who seize on every rationalisation as they excuse they need to look away, or turn on those with spirit and optimism left to protest, are also complicit. We knew their kind in the Hillsborough campaign for justice, the people who persistently said that justice had been done, the truth was known, and it was time to draw a line under events. We took their abuse and carried on to establish the truth. That justice still hasn’t been done tells us all we need to know about the establishment and those who fail to hold it to account.

There is such a thing as righteous anger. People are in prison on account of expressing a righteous anger in an intemperate way. If the murder of little children doesn’t cause a loss of temper then you are dead inside. People are human beings, not robots. But governments seem to want to cultivate an automaton conformity among a subject population. The government and the media portrayed this as prejudice and bigotry. The people now serving time in prison expressed anger at things they thought were happening – they thought they knew the truth before the truth had been established. That is indeed prejudice. It was also a judgement in light of experience and instinct, a judgement forced by the deliberate withholding of information. At some point still to be determined precisely, the government knew exactly what happened. And yet people still went to prison, labelled criminals, racists and Far Right thugs before trial. The government is not telling us what they knew and when they knew it, hiding behind the claim that it will prejudice the trial. They cared nothing about prejudicing the trials of those who were subject to fast-track justice. This was plainly an attempt to cow and intimidate the population and nip a popular revolt in the bud. They will find that they have compounded an initial error with greater error. In succeeding in the first instance they have created further problems for which they will be held accountable. The government strategy now will be to bury the issue.

It’s like looking at Hillsborough and its aftermath all over again. I have spend my entire adult life confronting the inhumanism of the authorities. The information and the way it was revealed brought home the corruption of the establishment yet again. It’s all I have known my entire adult life, starting with the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985.

We are told that to talk about the details would be to prejudice the trial. We are told that we are not allowed to discuss a case that is ongoing. That didn’t prevent Yvette Cooper and others talking about Far Right thuggery and criminals before trials had happened and convictions had happened for the protestors. We have the police saying don’t speak about this when they referred to protestors as criminals. The lack of consistency in the approach of the authorities indicates the extent to which we are talking politics and not justice. There are preferences being expressed here.

Establishing what the government knew and when it knew it doesn’t prejudice the trial. We know the answer to the ‘what’ question, we just need an answer to the ‘when’ question. That answer has no bearing on the charges faced by the Southport child killer. And questions of prejudicing trials didn’t worry the authorities involved in instituting fast-track justice, identifying people as criminals who would feel the full force of the law, employing words which presumed guilt and conviction before trial.

The reactions of many people have been ones of upset and anger. I am beyond such emotional response, and expect nothing else from the authorities. I saw it during the Miners’ Strike, when the government used the full resources of the state to crush the Miners’ union, destroy the mining industry, break the back of the trade union movement, disempower the collective identity of the working class, kill socialism. It succeeded, and it shows in the empty, dispirited, despairing country we now inhabit. The only solution these cretins have to the problem they created here is mass immigration as a cheap labour strategy, a quantitative human easing that creates even greater problems in the future. Cheap economics and a tawdry politics. I have contempt for government, and for all those who still play the politics of the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’ as if it matters. But my low expectations here mean I am beyond anger and upset. I know the beast too well to have expected otherwise.

I didn’t join the campaign for justice in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. As a young man in my early twenties I had no faith whatsoever in the authorities and no expectation of justice. And the saddest, and most telling comment of all, is that I was to be proven right – despite truth now being known and officially recognised, there has been no justice. That this is so is a question for the citizens of this country. The Hillsborough campaign for justice set an example for the citizens of the nation to follow. People need to open their eyes and have the guts to see the institutions governing them for what they are.

The precise details on Southport have yet to be established – and never will be if the government is allowed to avoid questions. Again, we are forced to exercise judgement in the absence of evidence. We are being drawn into a game in which government controls information, withholding information that – we may presume - is contrary to the official narrative, being bullied into silence lest we be accused of prejudice and misinformation. That in itself forces a judgement call – what kind of government does that kind of thing? A government with something to hide. It beggars belief to think that the government knew nothing until the past week or so.

As for misinformation … We were first told that the Southport attacker was a Cardiff born Welshman. People on social media suggested, with zero evidence, that the attacker was an immigrant. So this was checked with the story of Welsh origins and northern England residence. Then it emerged that he was a second generation immigrant and that he was a Rwandan. This still made him British in the eyes of those grinding their political axes – a home-grown terrorist, they claimed, without check, if terrorist he is. In the attempts to deflect and divert, the ideologues did an even deeper hole for themselves – in the determination to claim that Britain made this character what he is, the failures of integration were laid bare. People online suggested that the attacker was a Muslim; Yvette Cooper then told us that this was nothing to do with Islam, and the chorus joined in to say that anyone who said it was so were guilty of Islamophobia.

We were told that the attack was not terror related and that there was no evidence that it was - it was and there was.

The more evidence comes to light, the more it is clear that the public were being deliberately misled.

And the question is why. To what extent were the facts withheld and why? To keep a lid on an incendiary situation in which people have every right to be angry? To try to keep control of events caused by the policies of successive governments, and which government now can do nothing about? A war to cow and coerce the population and bring them under control? The government and the police would have known the facts sooner rather than later, the question is how soon? Did the authorities know when they are accusing people of being Far Right thugs and jailing protestors? What can we conclude from the fact that government is refusing to answer the single question: when precisely did they know the information they have just released with respect to the possession of terrorist manuals and ricin?

Most striking was the extent to which many people were more than happy to join in the pile-on against the ‘Far Right.’ ‘Ordinary’ people and their concerns were demonized by the authorities, and leftist liberals and progressives joined in. They are ‘useful idiots.’ We know. These people are available to be mobilised on every cause that advances the corporate agenda, and are too blinded and bigoted to see what tools and fools they are. Giving them a monster to hate allows them to direct their fevered energies on a safe target, away from the real target, allowing them to soothe their disquiet. On my social media pages I had the ‘intelligentsia’ sneering in their condemnation of the looters of Gregg’s the bakers. They uttered not a word of sorrow or sympathy for the little girls attacked and murdered in Southport. Such people are gutless. With reality staring them starkly in the face, contradicting their every wish-fantasy, they go silent in the hope bad things will pass, becoming vocal and proactive only when invited to join in the condemnation of those prepared to protest the facts of death, decline, and destruction. Such people were happy to claim that prejudice motivated protestors to associate the attack with certain ‘issues,’ people instinctively knew, and knew by experience, that something was ‘off.’ People are being bullied out of their instincts and intuitions, being coerced into suppressing their emotions.

There will be no fast track justice for the attacker. Nor should there be. Fast track justice is politically motivated.

The release of the information was timed to diminish its impact and bury it - the day before the budget. That should tell you all you need to know about the calibre of people governing us. Callous, cynical, and indifferent. They hold the people they purport to serve in complete and utter contempt. And judging by the perfunctory way in which flowers for the murdered children of Southport were laid, they don’t even take care to conceal it. It is as if our rulers are now out to provoke people into a fight for which they have draconian measures prepared. People protesting the murders were labelled Far Right thugs and many were put in prison in short order. The approach has been very different in the treatment of others.

People instinctively knew that something was not tallying in the official story. And they were proven right. Upset in the first instance, people were angry at the manipulation that occurred in the aftermath of the killings. This stinks to the high heavens. I’ve seen it before with Hillsborough. All that garbage about lessons being learned. The authorities learn nothing, in that their behaviour doesn’t change. Their first and last and only concern is the preservation of power. Acts of public contrition are to give the impression that lessons have been learned and we can now move on.

And then it is back to normal. One reason I knew that there would never be justice over Hillsborough was because, in addition to the initial crime, there was the establishment-wide cover up that became an even greater crime. It became impossible to select just one or half a dozen to stand trial – the entire establishment, including government and politicians, were in this to the hilt. The whole lot is corrupt, the whole lot need to be taken out. Nothing has changed. On the contrary, things have gotten much worse. In a declining society and economy, the British state is becoming ever more a failed state, its functionaries being concerned most of all to protect a weak and corrupt establishment against popular protest.

The scale of the possible cover up is extensive. There are efforts being made now to suppress what the government knew and when it knew. Again, I saw it all over Hillsborough. The key question to ask here is this: when did the Prime Minister first know about the Al Quaeda manual and the ricin? It would seem obvious that the house of a suspected terrorist is searched immediately. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Al Quaeda manual and the ricin would have been found early on. Then come the enquiries and forensics. The question is at what point did the authorities know the Southport attacker was going to be charged under the biological warfare act and the terrorism act. And did they know at the same time they were targeting protestors?

Harsh sentences were visited upon people who were motivated not by hatred and prejudice but by anger and upset at the murder of three little girls, and the attempted murder of others. It seems we are being deprived of information in order to whip up conflict, enabling the authorities to extend a punitive control mechanism over the nation. It figures. If governments know they are facing huge problems, as a result of their policies over decades, and know they lack solutions, it makes sense for them to strengthen their powers vis an increasingly revolting populace. This strikes right at the heart of public trust in the political class. Public trust in the authorities is low and falling, and it would seem that the governing class is doing everything it can to destroy that trust for good.

Whilst this could be mere incompetence, it is a condition that is currently afflicting every western government the same way at the same time. But the reasons for that may well be the fact that the West has been taking the same road to this oblivion. I can remember Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s claiming that ‘there is no alternative’ to her neoliberal economics, the privatisation of public goods being part of a free market, free trade strategy, undermining public purpose. This went hand-in-hand with the globalisation of economic relations, which we were told was the only game in town – and told by left-of-centre political leaders like Clinton and Blair, and their intellectual gurus.

Our rulers have been telling us to ‘suck it up’ for decades now. But we now see that their promises of better days to come were bogus. In my economics masters of 1995 I warned that a cheap labour strategy would supplant industrial strategy, creating a low-skill, low-productivity, low-growth profile for the economy. I also showed how privatisation, liberalisation, and globalisation would facilitate the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, rewiring polity, culture, society and national identity in the process. I was right. The claim – the faith of all progressives – was that this would lead us to the best of all possible worlds. We are seeing that it leads to the destruction of nations. Why are conservatives surprised? Socialists like me warned that it would lead to the destruction of social and civil ties in the 1980s, but were met with glee at the prospective destruction of socialism. Society was destroyed; now it is the turn of the nation. And you had better start diagnosing the problem properly whilst there is still, just, time. Governments evidently think it too late and are openly preparing repression.

As for politicians. I read the leader of the Liberal Democrats claiming that people are airing their prejudices. People are right to be angry and concerned, all the more so given the cretinous nature of the politicians. People can see through the official narrative and know the playbook.

We are going to get flowers and poetry, and ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger.’ And then it is going to be memory holed. It is all carefully rehearsed. Morrissey is spot on, here: when we see murder on the streets, especially the murder of young girls, we have every right and every need to look back in anger, as a necessary condition of ensuring this continues no more. Those who do otherwise are complicit in the continuing rotting away of the polity and the nation. Morrissey claims that his new album has been ‘gagged’ over a song about the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. He has only sung the song live, because it has not been released on the album. He claims that every major label has refused to release the album over the provocative title Bonfire of the Teenagers.

Performing it live, Morrissey claimed that nobody sings about England and the plight of England. He understands that the English are being left behind, actively discarded in their own home. Why the controversy? Coming from a declining industrial town subject to deliberate deindustrialisation in the 1980s, I was saying precisely this decades ago. As were many others. We were labelled socialist and marginalised back then, told we were ‘Communists’ who need to ‘go to Russia.’ We are now labelled ‘Far Right’ and fascist and told to go to prison.

On May 23rd 2017 Morrissey wrote this:

Celebrating my birthday in Manchester as news of the Manchester Arena bomb broke.  The anger is monumental. 

For what reason will this ever stop?

Theresa May says such attacks “will not break us,” but her own life is lived in a bullet-proof bubble, and she evidently does not need to identify any young people today in Manchester morgues. Also, “will not break us” means that the tragedy will not break her, or her policies on immigration.  The young people of Manchester are already broken - thanks all the same, Theresa. Sadiq Khan says “London is united with Manchester,” but he does not condemn Islamic State - who have claimed responsibility for the bomb. The Queen receives absurd praise for her ‘strong words’ against the attack, yet she does not cancel today’s garden party at Buckingham Palace - for which no criticism is allowed in the Britain of free press. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an “extremist.”  An extreme what?  An extreme rabbit?

In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private.  Politicians tell us they are unafraid, but they are never the victims. How easy to be unafraid when one is protected from the line of fire. The people have no such protections. (Morrissey, 23 May 2017).

Morrissey strips the warm words and subterfuge away and cuts to the core – the Manchester Arena bombing was the direct result of successive governments’ policies on globalisation, immigration, and multiculturalism, and those pretending otherwise, either out of political preference or cowardice in face of owning the consequences of those preferences, share a large part of the responsibility for the continuation of these evils.

It is cowardice allied to coercion – people are not allowed anger and indignation at the massacre of the innocents. You are not allowed to protest it, discuss it, remember it, still less demand its ending. It is the ultimate humiliation. Any nation that cannot protect its weakest members, the vulnerable, cannot protect its children, is itself weak and feeble. Anyone with any ounce of character in them say ‘no,’ we will be angry when anger is appropriate. And with respect to the murder of children, anger is appropriate.

Bonfire of teenagers

Which is so high in May north-west sky

Oh, you should've seen her leave for the arena

On the way, she turned and waved and smiled: "Goodbye"

Goodbye

And the silly people sing: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

And the morons sing and sway: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

I can assure you I will look back in anger 'till the day I die

Bonfire of teenagers

Which is so high in May north-west sky

Oh, you should've seen her leave for the arena

Only to be vapourized

Vapourized

And the silly people sing: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”

And the morons swing and say: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”

I can assure you I will look back in anger ‘till the day I die

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer...

We mustn’t allow people to forget this. And we mustn’t allow the nice and kind and tolerant people who insist on compliance with the official narrative to silence protest and suppress anger. Such people are neither nice nor kind nor tolerant – they are bullies who turn a blind eye to the consequences of their own political preferences, consequences suffered by others, and express intolerance to the extent of cancellation and imprisonment vis those who refuse conformity and complicity. They are a corrupt regime’s lickspittles and apologists. And the result is a society that is being rent apart. Society is now so violent and so divided, with murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies happening so frequently and so quickly as to nail the lies of the ‘modernizers’ and ‘progressives’ once and for all. In making things better, these people have made things worse. They have been the architects of destruction, and it is for us to use this destruction as a catalyst for reconstruction. That I have been saying this very thing since the 1980s is hardly encouraging. But maybe now that the deleterious consequences are hitting broad sections of the public, people will be provoked not into protest but into diagnosing properly and acting accordingly – reconstituting the public realm around the sovereign power of the people. The politicians and the corporate class they serve are empty – hence the turn to lies and repression.

Every part of the establishment is implicated in this. And the media. The reason that the public no longer trusts the legacy media is that the media has been exposed as lying too many times to count. Mainstream media absolutely deserves the lack of respect and ridicule it gets.

The manipulation is off the scale. Incompetent in the extreme when it comes to governing for the public good, the politicians go to extreme lengths to manipulate perceptions and reactions. Take the photo of the cheery little schoolboy that is published every time the Southport attacker is mentioned in the news. Everyone else gets a mugshot, like Peter Lynch, the man who hanged himself in prison. This is a text-book case of manipulation, using signs and signifiers to shape perceptions. They are projecting innocence through a messaging that is relentless and systematic.

And you have to be as systematic and as relentless in fighting back. If you have the stomach for it. The authorities – and the activist class for that matter – are engaged in an endless war of attrition, on the assumption that people won’t have the time and the energy to be able to resist, giving up sooner rather than later. If you don’t fight back just as hard, and let the authorities frame this as a tragedy, an accident, without context, pattern, and motivation, then it will happen again and again.

As it has been. Call it what you like. The old socialist idiom would have had no difficulty in identifying a class war waged against the common people from above. Except that the new cultural Left, whilst still claiming to be socialist, have become part of the ‘above.’ They are a corporate Left. Again, there should be no surprise. The vanguardists and ‘party’ members past were all happy to become active members of the bureaucratic state collectivism that perverted the ideals of socialism into their very opposite. Such ‘socialists’ were more than happy to persecute, imprison, and murder socialists, not to mention ‘ordinary’ members of the public.

When they show the photo of the Southport attacker as a boy alongside the girls he murdered, the impression is given that he is of similar age. Think about the girls’ experience. They were not confronted, assaulted, and killed by a boy of their own age. We are being bullied into denying our emotions, deadened, resigning ourselves to being dehumanised, denying our instincts, suppressing our inner yes and no which is the bedrock of our freedom and free will. Killed within. It’s a dehumanisation. All part of the technocratic nihilism and inhumanism to come.

Every effort is being made here to ensure that the public are kept in the dark, to suppress anger, and deter questions, because the authorities know that the answers would cause a scandal that would rock the establishment to its rotten core. They don’t want people to get so angered because it will kick off again with the next incident, which they know will come.

The story has disappeared in the news. It’s gone. It’s gone in the cycle of 24 hours news. This says everything about our politics and culture. People are of no count. And that was the plan, to release it just before the budget and have it gone in the aftermath of the budget. And the media and those that consume it play ball. And people either forget, or find that they can’t raise it for fear of being labelled and persecuted.

They think if they drip feed the information it won’t seem as catastrophic.

It sums up the reality of where we at, the failure of immigration and integration.

The visceral feeling that, for all of their consistent denial, we have got them. They know it, hence the turn to repression to cow and intimidate. And the attempt to divert and deflect was utterly despicable. Claiming that the riots were started by misinformation allowed the authorities to completely ignore the true cause of the protests. Which means that the authorities are fully committed to a continuation of the destructive policies that brought the nation to this, or don’t have the first idea what to do in face of problems they have caused, and lack the guts to own the consequences. They are now being forced to face up to reality, just as the common folk have been facing this reality from the first. Their first instinct is not the protection of the public but self-preservation, seeking to sidestep the genuine concerns of the majority of people by blaming it all on misinformation and ‘Far Right.’

I can leave you with the lessons I learned from the Hillsborough campaign for justice – don’t let it go, don’t go away, silence neither your conscience nor your natural instincts nor your voice, be relentless, be angry, ask the right questions and pursue the answers. And ignore those who parrot the official narrative. We had them all through the Hillsborough campaign, the people sap hope and energy with claims that have been checked and rebutted time and again.

People are being gaslit by the ruling class. You can call them the liberal elite. I call them the corporate class and its servants and minions in politics, media, and culture. Instead of repeating that charge and responding to it, put that class on the backfoot with the equally relentless statement of fact. And persist and persevere. Remember that the turn to repression and propaganda is a sign of weakness. The authorities are empty and have nothing to offer. They have been able to bribe sufficient people in the past, but their resources are running out. The system they run is bereft. They now have to bully and lie. People know when they are being manipulated and don’t like it. And we are being lied to and manipulated on an industrial scale; we are being taken for fools. The repulsion at the abomination of the act is being compounded by the treatment of people who want answers to questions the authorities deem impertinent. The authorities know that. They are so blatant, so tone-deaf, so cack-handedly incompetent that it seems to be part of a deliberate strategy to provoke a civil war, which they see ending with the imposition of a full-blown regime of repression. They are out to break the spirit of the people and either have them give up on liberty, democracy, truth and justice, or provoke them into fighting one last battle for these ideas, ending in total suppression and surveillance.

It’s Hillsborough again. And Grenfel and the Post Office. And the Miners’ strike. And the grooming gangs. Hiding the reality. It’s an expression of weakness and fear on the part of the authorities, who seem genuinely scared and paralysed when it comes to problem-solving. They are privy to MI5 and GCHQ briefings and know the full scale of the problem the nation faces. They seem so daunted by the sheer scale of the problem confronting them that they just want everyone to do as they are doing and put their heads in their sand. They want people to give up as they have given up. If they are daunted by the problem they have caused, they are even more daunted by the prospect of being held to account for their failures. They cannot solve a problem they have caused and lack the guts to admit failure. They are to blame, and they live in fear of being held to account. If they hold their hands up for this then they have got to say, there is this other thing, this globalisation, privatisation, corporatisation, and mass immigration we have inflicted on you for the last few decades.

The authorities will never admit it, without thereby putting an end to their existence. So it is for the public to tell them that. Asking questions is futile to this extent, because the establishment can never give honest answers without thereby incriminating themselves. We know the questions and we know the answers. And since the authorities will not retire themselves, it needs ‘we the people’ to move them on to a well-deserved oblivion. That’s if we have the nous and the nerve. Governments are gambling that we don’t, and are preparing repression for the few that do.

It just shows how far we have fallen.

Keep an eye out for the daily outrage. Today, a 13 year old girl stabbed six times in the neck, six teenagers arrested for attempted murder. The latest in a long and continuing series of similar incidents. Normalise this, and you are a large part of the decline. This is not a police problem, but a social, moral, and psychological problem, a problem of human relations. But, as one highly educated person put it to me when I expressed this view a decade or more ago, is the idea of human nature even a meaningful concept? We have been blighted with too many muddled and confused ‘thinkers.’ And it shows.

Hillsborough 97 Never Forgotten.

We tell ourselves.

And in remembering the dead, we should never forget the injustice.

The Hillsborough families had the guts and the gumption to keep contesting the official narrative. Sadly, I remember them fighting alone for the longest of stretches, large sections of the country tiring of the issue and demanding the families draw a line under it and get on with their lives. The authorities bank on that reaction. And despite the entire establishment being exposed as involved in systematic, coordinated lying, the authorities won – there was no justice. In the piece I wrote on Hillsborough I put the question to the people – these are the institutions you allow to govern your lives, this is the way you are governed: are you happy with that? Because they don’t have your best interests at heart and it won’t end well.

Southport 2024 Never Forget. And in never forgetting, act, reorganise, reclaim your sovereign power and organise it democratically, disempower the alien systems of totalising power now ruling by remote control.

And the silly people sing: “Don't Look Back in Anger”

And the morons swing and say: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”

I can assure you I will look back in anger ‘till the day I die.

Don’t move on ‘till justice is done. Never forget. And never give in and never give up.