BREXIT: Britain To Get on Her Knees Before The Gods Of Extreme Capitalism

By Graham Vanbergen: Society in the democratic West, especially in my home country of Britain is irrevocably crumbling. It is no secret that liberal democracy is imploding right in front of our eyes through the fault lines of an international capitalist arrangement on which it has been based since the last world war. Neoliberalism went too far and left too many people behind – for too long. For nearly half the population in Britain, there is little more left than the crisis of daily life. But worse is to come.

 

Brexit partially came about as a result of this extreme form of capitalism and I can’t blame anyone for having voted for it. There were so many reasons for evicting an unelected, out of touch political class in Europe whose own interests they put at the heart of a self-serving project with failure magnified no better than the recent divisive musings of Barnier and Juncker. These people will soon become hate-figures in Britain and they will horrify many Europeans, just as they did with the pauperisation of Greece.

There are huge challenges ahead for Britain. Not least is to defend herself against the coming coup d’état that American corporations, in particular, have almost secured. Some MP’s are worried. The FT reported just two weeks ago that “the backlash against unfettered international capitalism continues” and that tighter controls were needed to protect British industry and national security in the face of a post-Brexit world.

This is the last stage of a system that will see Britain savaged and it will ruin our country – just as it has ruined America. The United States is a husk of its former glory, now clinging on to its empire using threats and thuggery as its modus operandi. With a penchant for endless wars and killing which has become the centrepiece of American entertainment culture, she is now also bathed in hypocrisy, corruption and treachery and fast approaching its own end-game – that of a fascist police state to stave off a society so divided even the federal government thinks civil war is to be prepared for.

Britain, is, unfortunately, about to fall to its knees as it haphazardly sails between leaving a subjugating EU and being subjugated by something much worse. It is now on a guided trajectory – plotting a similar path to that of the USA. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn and their non-stop political infighting have adequately demonstrated that they are not the right people to defend Britain in the face of such an enormous threat. Their ideologies, extreme capitalism and extreme socialism have failed us before and they are failing right now. More interested in their own political prospects than that of the nation-state – not so many years ago, much of this pompous, self-absorbed rotten parliament with its stench of corruption would have been arrested and tried for treason.

The Tories drove us straight into this mess and New Labour’s huge transformative opportunity was missed in the quagmire of suicidal foreign policy decisions. It started with Thatcher’s dream of an unrestrained free-market Britain which has ended in disaster. This collaboration with Reaganism and the ‘financial services’ industry has been catastrophic. The unravelling of this disaster is soon to be laid bare with its dreadful consequences.

Trouble is coming – Brexit, the coming credit squeeze, even greater levels of brutality through austerity, a new recession harsher than the last one, crumbling councils and local authorities, social services and finally civil society itself. But then again, Thatcher, lionised by the right-wing – openly stated she did not believe in society. This is a bleak forecast but every day it becomes more real with the daily headlines we read in the press.

 

We need a new story, a new dream – a new way.

We need capitalism to function properly. We need innovation and investors and we need to compete both domestically and internationally. We don’t need a banking industry that flouts the law with impunity and expects the taxpayer to cough up when they screw-up. They still owe Britain dearly.

We don’t need corporations like Apple, Google and Amazon to have unrestrained access to our market, act as predators and then contribute nothing to the society on which it parasitically feeds.

We also need to look after the genuinely vulnerable – but do not need to support those who would take advantage. We need to look after ourselves, how we feed ourselves, nurture our young and care for our elderly and of course, we need to look after our environment.

Look at the society that both Labour and the Conservatives have built for us and look where it is going.

We have a housing crisis, a health care crisis, a social care crisis, a council funding crisis, with Brexit – a constitutional crisis leading to a political crisis. Britain now has an alarming poverty crisis, a household debt crisis and a pension crisis. Inequality is now rampant. At what point does society say enough is enough. So toxic is the political arena, both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are neck and neck in the polls. How is that even possible?

What is a government for if it can’t even house its own people, or reassure us and guide us through disconcerting times?

In survey after survey around 80 per cent of people in Britain don’t trust their politicians. Why would you buy into their vision of the future if they are not to be trusted on any measure?

Britain promotes in its school curriculum a country with “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs” – in reality, the political class no longer practices any of those values and has deliberately fostered a divided society for its own gain – divide and rule is back.

Britain is a country being immersed in a new-norm of injustice. Its values have been infested with ‘Americanisation’ – an insidious form of ‘individualism’ that Thatcher venerated so much. This environment is captured no better than the recent revelation that the beating heart of government policy for the disabled over the last three decades was – denial of assistance, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. This deadly policy was written by American health care corporations and adopted by Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May alike. Today, thousands of the betrayed lay in burial grounds or suffer shattering life-changing consequences – a story so censored, we have not heard their cries of help.

Today, Britain is an endemic surveillance society, a paranoia emanating at the centre of a guilty government that killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle East. These same politicians are now shielding themselves from the residuum of their ghastly foreign policy decisions behind a stazi-state architecture that would have frightened Orwell himself. And our government has failed in its most primary duty. Dozens of Briton’s have been murdered by terrorists from the same countries we attacked. And if the security services are to be believed we are to be slaughtered in even greater numbers on our own streets in the years ahead and lose what remains of our privacy and civil liberty along the way – all in the name of ‘national security.’

Today, our government is muzzling the free press, suffocating free speech, stamping all over civil liberties and promised to rip apart protective human rights laws. Generations before us fought with their blood and suffering for these rights in wars and protest marches but we stand in the headlights of a distracting smartphone thinking nothing of it – literally. Why have we forgotten them or what they stood up for?

We have allowed the collapse of a system that worked for us through social and liberal democracy that we understood in Britain. We have allowed a political class to replace it with a toxic unstable and dangerous system that serves no-one except themselves and their corporate paymasters.

This political idyll will give heed to a new attitude of authoritarianism where injustice will be the benchmark of its success. And it’s coming folks. The Americans, armed with policies to free us from red tape, their version of ‘Freedom‘ as they like to call it, is used as the excuse for ripping down public protections on behalf of the very rich.

As George Monbiot put it: “When corporations free themselves from trade unions, they curtail the freedoms of their workers. When the very rich free themselves from tax, other people suffer through failing public services. When financiers are free to design exotic financial instruments, the rest of us pay for the crises they cause.”

Ripping down these public protections means the freedom for billionaires and corporations from the constraints of our democratic principles and values. The freedom we were promised through the so-called free-market, through privatisation, neoliberalism and Brexit was only the freedom of the very rich to exploit us all – and their dream is now closer than ever before. This metamorphic system of injustice will be a life-changing reality for all of society in due course.

It is said that if you neutral in situations of injustice then you have chosen the side of the oppressor. That is what we have chosen in Britain today, to become captive servants of a new-norm of oppression – mark my words. Look around you, did you not notice the Investigatory Powers Act (spying on you), Trade Union Bill (curtailing workers rights), the updated Public Order Act (curtailing free speech and protest), Closed Material Proceedings (secret courts), sweeping police powers and so many more bland sounding pieces of legislation designed to take away your rights for the coming takeover of our nation.

Did you notice a small bookseller morph into a rapacious high street exterminator and serial employment abuser? Did you notice a social media enterprise created to bring us closer together – that used military strategies to beat the principles of democracy in Britain? Or perhaps an inoffensive search engine constructed to democratise free speech – that turned into the worlds biggest censorship engine? Beware, this is a mission creep operation unravelling before your eyes. The gods of extreme capitalism already have you in their grasp.

We can’t deny that Brexit is about to happen – but obviously our politicians, our people and society have no stomach for the fight ahead. There’s no socially cohesive campaign to support Britain in one of the most challenging times in its long history – just warnings about the army to help distribute what meagre supplies the EU deems good enough for us next March. And in this environment, a deal will be struck with the USA – and we are then done for. We will have no rights, no national healthcare system and little in the way of real societal support – it’ll be about the have’s and have-nots, the fittest surviving – little more than little America.

In less than one hundred years the British empire, the largest empire in history has been lost and soon the country and its people will be subservient to another crumbling empire – that of America. Sure, we’ll have nice toys to play with and ever more ludicrous reality TV shows, sport and other aberrations of self-content. We’ll also have no civil liberty or self-respect.

Today, we can’t even stand up shoulder to shoulder in the common goal to save our homeland. What hope is there?

 

 

---