It is no good. I can’t just publicise my own activities at this time. What is going on the Russian border and in the Middle East, as well as in the Sudan and elsewhere, demands to be addressed. I will be eighty this year. 2024 was most definitely the worst year I have ever experienced in terms of the state of the world. Yes, I have known worse years in terms of personal tragedy, but as far as I am concerned the world itself is in the most pitiful condition that I have ever known (and that includes the years that brought the destruction of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq). Most of these tragedies are caused by the West. Both the USA and the UK are run by a two party system where there is actually very little difference between the two blocs.
How do we rescue genuine democracy from the deep state that enforces a uniparty upon us, however we vote? Politics has become a career that you embark upon if you wish to become a billionaire. In my view, things will only get worse unless we refuse compromise. Vote for Reform if you must, or vote for the Workers Party of Britain. But for heaven’s sake let’s get rid of the two smug middle-of-road entities which force a corrupt establishment regime upon us. To vote either for the Tories or for Labour is to cement to status quo that has got us into this mess. Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer – Yah Boo Sucks!
The Liberal Democrats were wont to occupy the middle ground between the Labour and Conservative parties. They always attracted far fewer votes than the two ‘main parties’. And yet today, it is precisely that middle ground that both Labour and the Conservatives seek to occupy. The theory, if you can call it that, is that unless you resemble the opposing party as far as you possibly can, so as to attract their swing voters, you haven’t a chance of getting into power. But if that is the case, why were the Lib Dems not the biggest party? To aim strategically for the middle ground leads to a form of communism by statistics. When dissatisfied, we kick the buggars out and get the other buggars and the same policies.
First-past-the-post democracy works best when there is a radical difference between the two major parties. This suggests that democracy should be a risky business. A genuine left gets in and implements genuine left-wing policies. Should these go too far, in the opinion of the majority, then, at the next election, the genuine right gets in and reverses the more unpopular policies, and then it may well implement right-wing policies, some of which may prove unpopular. And so it swings, between ideologies at variance with each other. Risky as it is, this is how it should be. It reminds me of Robert Graves’ wonderful poem, Flying Crooked:
The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Forever relying on caution and compromise renders democracy innocuous. A beltway elite, or a Westminster mob, get accustomed to running the show, installing their civil service apparatchiks and going hand-in-glove with shady security services. Matters rapidly become corrupt. On either side, they know that they are playing the same game. I say, avoid all persuasion that would have you vote strategically. Vote with your heart, however small the number of like-minded people may be who choose to vote the way you do. This is democracy’s only chance. Uniparty democracy is one colossal sham.
anthonyhowelljournal 
I think it all comes down to economics. I’ve just discovered the videos of Gary Stevenson on Youtube that make a lot of things clear. If you’ve not heard of him, he grew up poor in Ilford, and after LSE became a very successful trader at Citibank, one year making 35m pounds for his employer, and 2m for himself. Eventually he resigned because he was unhappy making financial bets that made the poor poorer and the rich richer. He now explains economics from a left-wing perspective.
Parties of both the left and right have constraints. The country needs to borrow money to survive and provide the services that people want (and especially if it is a left wing government, it actually wants to provide those services). A party of the left needs to borrow on the bond markets to do this, which is constrained by financiers willingness to lend. There are all sorts of limitations on this, which Gary explains in the video “Is the UK government bankrupt?”. These constraints lead to a left-wing party becoming centrist and unadventurous like Starmer and Reeves. On the other hand, a right wing party wants to give more and more power to the very very rich (Murdoch, Musk, etc). The very rich want more power because they can dominate the legislature and get laws passed in their favour that will make them even richer. The end result of this will be a very few mega-rich oligarchs, a small number of reasonably paid professionals providing services to them (like medical services) and the rest of the population scratching along just above or in the poverty line – like lots of third world countries today.
The solution (if there is one) is to reduce the power of the rich, and to tax them much harder. Left wing governments in the UK are terrified of the right-wing press (Daily Mail, Express, etc) run by right-wing oligarchs who are capable of causing panic in the population by gutter tactics, so the government daren’t take them on. This is a continual constraint on governments of the left. We had an example of this about 10 years ago in Australia, when the govt wanted to introduce increased taxes on oil and gas exports. There was an enormous campaign in the Murdoch-owned media, and the government caved in. Now the international fossil fuel companies export vast amounts of oil and gas, and the Australian people get very little for it (Australia exports more gas than Qatar, but Qatar gets 20x the revenue that we do) – the power of the rich. They also profit-shift, so they pay very little taxes in Australia. Some very successful businesses never pay tax – because they say they never make a profit. In which case, why are they doing business here, if it’s not profitable? Either kick them out (which they should be happy with, as they say they’re not profitable here) or tax them harder.
Once the economics is sorted out, the politics will follow – then you will have parties of the people, that act for the people, rather than for the financial markets and the very rich.
Jim.
LikeLike