I’m British, so I simply don’t believe a word the BBC says.
It’s all spin — every word, every image, the disempowering tone & natural submission to authority that automatically flows from the presenters’ subjugated speech patterns.
Subjugated by their salaries. The Principle Agent Problem. Conflicts of interest. They’re maximising what is good for themselves, at no small cost to the country.
Run an emotional audit on the facial expressions and tone of voice on the BBC Breakfast couch.
Look out for what’s not said.
They have mood managers instructing them through their ear pieces. Who are they? What is their agenda? It’s all secret. Hotly guarded stuff. Strategic Ignorance.
So who are the knowers and who are the unknowners?
We can’t say exactly but we live inside their work. They call real journalists “The reality-based community” They engineer our perceptions of reality. This used to be called Public Opinion. It is also referred to as Agenda Setting. The Former Soviets have a natural advantage in this field as they researched it and applied the principles during the seventy year duration of the USSR.
They’re spreading negative knowledge units. Spreading amnesia. Unknowledge. Spin. False news. Distortion. Distraction.
But they do it in the trusting tone. They’re salespeople. Selling Corporatism. Human rights violations. Fake empathy. Corruption. Fascism. Everyday fascism.
Patronage. Oligarchy. Finance “Capitalism”.
Pretending to adhere to a set of principles. But permanently happy to go outside every code in order to get the job done ie preventing truth & justice from ever getting to the places that need it most.
En el casa del herrero cuchillo de palo — At the home of the blacksmith, the knife is made of wood.
Those who appear to be the most trustworthy in public life are front people for the biggest lies. Actors. In a soap opera called Social Engineering.
For some reason Brit personalities like to go round lecturing everyone on corruption.
But as former Private Eye owner Peter Cook once said:
“You know, I go to the theatre to be entertained. I dont want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction…I can get all that at home.”
Peter Cook
There is an idea that the BBC may be trustworthy. But its propaganda is so transparently infantilising that trust levels appear to be eroding at an accelerating rate.
Speaking of corruption:
I wanted to know what the latest was in relation to the Trump / Biden / Ukraine story.
After having seen the following image at 5am UK time:
Democrat Leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, recently decided to impeach Trump over a telephone call he made the new President of Ukraine, former TV star, Zelensky.
A whistleblower claimed that during this telephone call Trump threatened to withhold funds from Ukraine unless it launched full investigations into the sacking of a Ukrainian former prosecutor who was investigating corruption at a pro-Putin Ukrainian gas company — one of whose directors happened to be Hunter Biden, son of former US Vice President Joe Biden.
This tweet speaks for itself. Vicky Ward is leading the charge. Check out Kushner Inc and the video she did with Democracy Now earlier this year.
Joe Biden was filmed, as shown in the following BBC clip, showing off about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor sacked in exchange for aid money.
But why did Biden get the official sacked?
Is that even legal?
The US exerts its power in so many ways.
Just as the European Union doesn’t want to admit how powerful it is and how much corruption it enables, is this example of Biden using the US to feather his own nest just another one of those normal things that the powerful do that we aren’t supposed to talk about or frame as everyday corruption?
Do US rules require further proof of the link between the sacking of the official and the investigation into Biden’s son’s firm?
And should Biden even be visiting Ukraine when his son is a director in a pro-Putin gas firm?
Although this might have been legal at the time in Ukraine, it looks very bad in America and elsewhere.
#CrookedHillary, anyone?
Having a dad who is able to pull strings on a geo strategic level would be regarded, in some industries, as a game changing business asset.
Though this may look like prima facie nepotism to any normal person, to someone who wants to win a gas concession it is just getting things done.
Quicker.
And therefore cheaper.
In Britain, Boris Johnson and his cabinet keep going around saying “Get Brexit done”. Using force and bullying tones to hope that their Brexit deal is not scrutinised.
The EU does much of its work completely under the radar too.
So what are the rules around nepotism?
The noises I have heard coming out of the US say there are rules for nepotism in the US but that they don’t apply to the White House.
Though Trump is credited with helping people discover this, the Bidens may also have been well aware.
Have the Bidens been playing a regulatory arbitrage game?
US influence via Ukrainian Loopholes. Ewwww!
En français on dit “ça pue!”
Y en Castellano digamos “Huele Mal!”
What was legal in Ukraine, and practical for the Bidens in terms of US influence, despite looking like nepotism, allows corrupt practices to shift from being obviously corrupt to business as usual.
How is this politically possible? Is it Alchemy? Or is everything permitted?
David Whyte of University of Liverpool on the transition from Illegal to legal Corruption:
Just because it’s Biden this time, that’s not to say that Trump wouldn’t try something like this.
Maybe some of his kids are signed up to help steer US policy in various countries to suit foreign interests.
The names Ivanka and Chief of Staff Jared spring to mind!
Thinking back to the BBC video, I can’t help but think the report is a bit rushed.
The turning points are merely touched on and Mr Biden is given a fairly easy ride.
No questions are asked about whether any of what Biden has done is legal. And the fact that it is Pelosi who is impeaching Trump for looking into Biden’s corruption rather lets Biden and the Democrats off the hook.
The whole thing stinks and could backfire on the Democrats but I guess they were already in a desperate situation or they wouldn’t have picked this to be the issue with which to beat the President.
There is so much else going on, it looks like the Democrats only care about protecting Biden.
How many people spoke in the BBC news clip?
How long did each clip or person get?
Did anyone offer deep explanations? Or was much of the thrust basically conjecture? Was there a tone of powerlessness from the presenter? Is that not the usual British disgust at that which it doesn’t understand?
What the BBC expects its producers and presenters to tap into is their perceived primeval fear of the other.
Must have been very useful in the early days of the BBC and the final days of the empire.
But now it is merely a series of tricks that revolve around who is in power at any one place and time, and whatever the broadcasters’ Military Intelligence copywriters (script writers) happen to have been told about the latest short term objective.
Which is why only BBC employees and certain academics are allowed full access to iPlayer.
They don’t want people going through old issues of the 6 O’clock News. Or especially breaking news. The propaganda would be too transparent.
Here’s a relevant news item that has been systematically suppressed, but contains some clues about the draconian surveillance powers being exercised over iPlayer access. The Unknowers Spreading Amnesia.
Amol Rajan is back from paternity leave. Congratulations, old chap.
Personally I would love to go through all of the Amol Rajan tv reports since he has been the BBC’s Media Editor.
I’ve taped a couple of them, but most are inaccessible.
Down the memory hole. (Thanks Roger)
Rajan is incredibly incisive but equally distorting.
The BBC Media Editor job didn’t exist before and he appears to have been given it because he is super charismatic and a loyal part of the apparatus.
Having a decent address book and being a spook probably also helps.
From Phone Hacking and press intrusion to Big Tech, he has quite a wide beat.
And he manages to always steer things away from election rigging, patronage, and finance capitalism.
Full disclosure: I may be rather green eyed about this as he is younger and more successful than me. (enough of that, ed)
In 2013 when he was appointed editor of the Lebedev-owned Independent newspaper I sent him a congratulatory email and told him that Genetically Modified was back in the news and that I knew people who were influential and politically active on the topic.
His reply:
A deal has clearly been struck between Lebedev and Putin, and between Lebedev and the UK state, in whatever form.
Russian, Israeli, UK Military intelligence control our media. ‘Tis clear.
Luke Harding’s recent review of Alexander Lebedev’s biography revealed that he said NOTHING about Putin.
Bit weird, don’t you think?
Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend and alleged procurer Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert owned Pergamon Press and did plenty of business with the Soviets and Israel.
He released this book in the early 80s.
Alexander Lebedev’s father was a KGB agent in London before going onto become a banking, energy, and airlines billionaire.
Maybe he read it. Maybe he knew Maxwell. Who knows.
Epstein did business with Maxwell, Trump met him too.
Did Lebedev pick up the pieces in the oligarch’s orgy that followed Maxwell’s demise?
Maxwell was a go between between Soviet and western engineers and Israeli military intelligence in the construction and sales of databases with backdoors and of military technology.
Epstein travelled to Saudi using a fake Austrian passport.
I composed this a few weeks ago – it includes a sample from Facebook at a congressional hearing on social media and mass shootings before going into Whitney Webb who shines many lights on the mass shooting business model of big tech as well as Epstein and Israeli military intelligence.
You won’t hear pro-GM gatekeeper Amol Rajan saying that!
The big people have their money stashed away in Cayman, Panama, Luxembourg etc and they like shareholder value and Bilderberg style unscrutinised decision making.
So though we have this all pervading fascistic self-policing façade of equal ops and meritocracy, the only thing that counts is still patronage, influence and who you know.
The Guardian is obviously pro-GM like Lebedev.
But this is all part of the omertà code.
Nothing written down but everyone that matters knows the rules.
Clearly the EU would be doing the same if they could get away with it.
Look at the deregulatory deal they just gave the UK.
This permanently unfolding coup, in which the power to discuss things openly is repeatedly taken away from us and so heavily policed, deplatformed, and infiltrated as to become meaningless, creates a strong feeling of mistrust but also the need to rebel.
And if that need is not met using the means that our imaginations find least adventurous, then people will become more creative in their descriptions of their own powerlessness and in their attempts at structural change.
I used to feel sorry for the Saudi Princes that have all this wealth and no power. But now that Saudi are buying stakes in Goldman-backed Babylon Health which is gobbling up NHS Business along with UnitedHealth and Google Health formerly known as Deep Mind, I can see that the holes in Saudi’s deep pockets are gutting the UK Welfare state in order to pay for a new suit.
I used to live in Spain and everywhere I went I would hear people say “My Taylor is Rich”. I began to realise that this may have had something to do with the way in which people were taught english back then.
Eddie Izzard used to do a great sketch about how he could never use the language he was taught at school in his everyday life. “The Monkey is in the Tree” didn’t really work that well at the airport.
It turns out the audio-lingual approach to language learning that emphasises rote learning was favoured by the Assimil method of Learning English without difficulty.
And the full quote, taken from the first line of the book is: My Tailor is Rich but My English is Poor.
If my tailor is rich and my english poor then maybe my tailor is my banker and my media and he is prospering from rinsing my mind as well as my wallet.
The web of financialised influence which allows international finance capital to bob in and out of our public services like a yo-yo is really something to behold.
Rather than going into it now, let me deposit some primary source documentation.
This piece is explosive from Amol Rajan. He is an insider to all this stuff so you have to wonder about conflicts of interest and revolving door.
The last media secretary Jeremy Wright issued a public interest intervention because of the Saudi stake in Lebedev Holdings.
The court ruled this August that the Media and Culture Department had taken far too long to launch proceedings.
The only person to report on this was Jim Waterson of the Guardian.
This followed FT pieces in early 2019 speculating as to the identity of the mystery Saudi investors.
But Amol Rajan had told us about it back in 2017.
We just didn’t notice.
And he intimated the Prince in question was basically the Saudi state.
Lebedev previously employed Amol Rajan and current Today programme editor Sarah Sands.
Both blatant Tories.
So the Government court case against a Tory press baron was timed to fail.
Financial Adviser and Bank Confidential whistleblower protection campaigner Steve Middleton has spoken about the way banks “buy precedent” by choosing which fraud cases to lose in order to control the law and set precedents that suit their long term interests.
I call this “falling with style”.
More Lebedev links:
He must be tight with Jared Kushner. Jared owned the New York Observer and used it to conduct Agenda Setting operations, like his father in law’s mentor Roy Cohn.
The whole Epstein / MBS / Weinsten / Prince Andrew thing is in play.
Babylon is doing business with chinese surveillance capitalists Tencent
190802-Babylon-Funding-AnnouncementI’m guessing these documents show that Babylon, like WeWork and Uber is a loss making Private Equity unicorn vehicle designed to grab market share while Goldman and Morgan Stanley let their mates at Vostok capital fill their boots.
Look at Vostok’s ownership. It’s Russian with a Swedish CEO.
Look at the interview with Ali Parsa on page 6 of the pdf above. He is talking to his biggest investors. He says Babylon is available in Saudi, Rwanda, Malaysia, China and UK. Think about the repressive nature of some of those regimes. Rwanda is run by Tony Blair Associates using their deliverology model. Bill and Melinda Gates are involved. Philanthrocapitalism replacing the World Bank and private banks.
The NHS is being torn to shreds by a Goldman & Google backed Russian Saudi Chinese surveillance capitalist private equity vampire and the BBC say hardly a word.
Although I’ve been blogging on and off for four years now, I think I’m finally hitting my stride. It’s nice to draw on previous wanderings and to channel an automatic structuring of unstructured information. If you are going to share this, please share it outside the UK as much as possible!
Thank You for your Time and Attention, and please do come back for more!
Ofcom Director of Communications Chris Wynn got in touch over Monday’s blogpost.
I just assumed this was spam. Later that day I got a reminder:
Not wanting to seem rude, I sent Chris a reply:
The next morning Chris took things up a notch:
Chris was now doing to me precisely what he was accusing me of doing to Lord Adonis. Ascribing a meaning that simply wasn’t there.
We were arguing over the use of the word “over”. At least that’s what I thought.
I was still hoping things could stay friendly.
Getting a bit repetitive.
And finally:
I managed a reply:
Can we finish this?
And back to square one:
Let me reiterate:
Chris Wynn has been at Ofcom for over ten years and used to be a journalist. Can’t think why he feels the need to play games.
www.prweek.com As Ofcom regulation of the BBC only started in 2017, there might still be teething issues.
Still doesn’t explain why Ofcom are turning a tiny blogpost into such a big deal.
It’s common knowledge that the BBC is biased and that Ofcom is a toothless regulator.
And Fake News is now part of the lexicon.
Corporatist voices and organised silence of Carbon Bubble, Clean Air and Climate Change are all classic symptoms of a captured media regulator.
How can Ofcom’s Director of Communications, Chris Wynn, deny that Ofcom, the BBC’s regulator, has a problem with collusive corruption?
The perception of bribery and corruption in UK business has been getting much worse over the last six years according to Big Four Audit firm Ernst and Young’s latest fraud survey.
Screenshot of the Executive Summary
BBC News – BBC climate change interview breached broadcasting standards https://t.co/ydBL8kfCoD
— Ranjan Balakumaran (@financialeyes) May 2, 2018
It is the first time Ofcom has found the BBC in breach since taking over regulation of the corporation in 2017.
So Ofcom took more than 7 months to find the BBC had breached their own broadcasting rules. From August 2017 to April 2018
That’s a long time to correct climate denier Brexiteer Nigel Lawson. Why so long?
And what have Ofcom got to say about the way the BBC legitimise deregulation, fracking and war?
BBC silence about the merging of corporate and state interests is consistent with collusive corruption and the dehumanising corporatist dismantling of public services.
BBC’s political presenters attack anyone with an ecological worldview even though it is widely understood our air is not clean and that pollution kills.
Ofcom is ok with Andrew Neil presenting BBC politics programmes while speaking at antisemitic Hungarian think tanks and chairing the Spectator whose assistant editor is racist Rod Liddle and whose culture critic is the openly fascist James Delingpole.
David Goodhart and several BBC commentators dismiss Windrush deportation cases as mere bureaucratic oversights. Imagine saying that about Nazi deportations? It was called a hostile environment. And Ofcom and the BBC did nothing to help report the illegal deportations as they happened
I wonder why.
Some of Ofcom’s top brass are very much on the gravy train. They are mainly ex-Treasury and audit people. The ones policing the content are mainly ex-BBC. So conformity is scripted. The type of culture change we need to get a progressive agenda at the BBC and other Public Broadcasters just doesn’t exist. There is too much co-operation with the old way of doing things.
This is Lord Burns. Crossbencher in the Lords but obviously a Tory.
the Guardian Terry Burns aka Teflon Terry, Lord Ubiquity, Lord Fixer (I’m not making this up) is on the Ofcom Board.
the Guardian Talk about safe pair of hands!
He’s not on the Gravy Train. He is the Gravy Train.
There’ll be no interesting decisions under him.
Then there’s Baroness Noakes.
Jim Waterson of Guardian Media says that though Noakes is a card-carrying Tory, like others on the Ofcom Board, she can’t be done for bias because there is no business decision that she has taken that can be seen to be influenced by her political position.
This is because Noakes deals with finance and not content. But funnily enough, I can’t find any minutes of what she has actually said in any meeting. So it looks like we can’t know.
Do she, or the other Tory directors, have any say in choosing who regulates the BBC? .
It’s still altogether wrong that Noakes retweets Brexiteers, Privatisers, the Israeli Ambassador and Climate Deniers while chairing top committees at Ofcom and RBS. She’s also on an EU Lords Subcommittee.
It’s plain wrong to act as though she has no authority. She has. How is she using it? We deserve to know.
It’s a common perception that the BBC is super biased.
How can Noakes get away with being at the top of Ofcom and voting with the Government, but never get questioned over conflict of interest?
Noakes was contacted over 50 times regarding market abuse, file falsification, abuse of death certificates etc etc all ignored on her watch. Now that is some risk committee 🙈🙈. It seems Nelson is now making the same grave mistake #DejaVu #RBS #GRG
— InTheKnow (@Nat_Worst) February 25, 2018
Sheila Noakes is also a non-executive director of RBS and was part of the failed whitewash of the GRG scandal https://t.co/y0m51I4Dzz
— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) April 29, 2018
Fat cat RBS non-executive directors — Brendan Nelson, Sir Sandy Crombie, Robert Gillespie, Baroness Noakes, Penny Hughes — are being paid up to £30,000-a-year EXTRA to “review” GRG scandal for which they’ve been blamed. My Scottish MoS piece w/ @laneyk91 pic.twitter.com/GSKuWr2zo8
— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) February 25, 2018
Same Execs who were central to the biggest cover up in recent banking history, perpetrated by Chris Sullivan of @santanderuk when he was the @RBS puppet master. Noakes & Nelson are a disgrace to the banking profession and @BankConfidenti1 has the evidence to prove so! @Ian_Fraser
— stephen middleton (@stevemiddi1) February 25, 2018
RBS non-execs handed up to £78,000 extra since May’15 to “oversee” GRG (= limit payouts to customers; water down S166 report?!): Brendan Nelson & Sheila Noakes (ex KPMG), Sandy Crombie (ex Standard Life), Robert Gillespie (ex UBS), Penny Hughes (ex Coke) https://t.co/2NQiJuacgJ
— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) February 26, 2018
What can I say as far as Noakes and Nelson are concerned, the @RBS whistleblowers are coming for you, as the movie saying goes; ‘be afraid, be very afraid…!’ @BankConfidenti1 @efgbricklayer @HeenanGray @laneyk91
— stephen middleton (@stevemiddi1) February 27, 2018
Ian the information we have & evidence of the most substantial cover up at RBS involving Nelson, Noakes, Hester, Hampton etc. will stun you. We just can’t expose this yet, every tweet we put out is monitored by @TheFCA and we need to give them the opportunity to come clean first!
— stephen middleton (@stevemiddi1) February 25, 2018
And when this government goes?
Ofcom will still be staffed by Lords and Baronesses on the Boards of several other firms.
IT’S NOT RIGHT.
I question Ofcom’s impartiality.
UK media regulators are as corrupt as UK banking regulators. http://t.co/nz62LjYlxn— Max Keiser (@maxkeiser) March 2, 2015
In 2016 former Minister for Culture, Karen Bradley kicked former editor of the Economist Bill Emmott, off the Ofcom content and main board for being too pro-EU.
But Noakes is allowed to stay because her politics don’t actually affect her ability to be on the board.
What does the rest of the country think? Most people will never know as our media keeps this type of thing quiet.
the Guardian
Makes sense of @Ofcom‘s ‘fit and proper’ shambles over Murdoch’s Sky bid. Baroness Noakes still tweeting #BrexitCentral Darren Grimes despite all the parliamentary evidence. And eminent Economist editor @bill_emmott gets sacked for supporting Remain.
She should step down too. https://t.co/X8E9PRuoHP
— Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) May 1, 2018
Even former staff say it’s corrupt at the highest levels.
By Ranjan Balakumaran
The deputy head of Ofcom – the BBC’s regulator – Baroness Noakes, has been done for anti-Labour tweeting in the past.
the Guardian She has consistently voted with the Government for Brexit in the Lords and is therefore too biased to regulate the BBC.
She shouldn’t be allowed to back the Government in the Lords as well as in our living rooms.
Separate questions about her role overseeing the re-appropriation of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of small and medium sized businesses’s assets at the Royal Bank of Scotland also cast doubt on whether she possesses the probity and good judgment required of a media regulator.
Here she is, only last week, retweeting the most controversial of characters, Darren Grimes of Vote Leave.
This young man took hundreds of thousands of pounds from Vote Leave to launder money and the youth vote for the corrupt Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the Brexit Vote.
As a gay man and ardent Brexiteer, this is bollocks. Our equality, non-discrimination and family rights were hard fought for over many years by parliamentarians in the UK. The idea we’ll become intolerant of minorities without the EU is nonsense on stilts. https://t.co/tXnqGWHyQ6
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) April 22, 2018
Noakes is a Non Executive Director at the Royal Bank of Scotland where she chairs the the Board Risk Committee and sits on the Group Audit Committee and the GRG oversight Committee!
For those who are new to the scandal plagued RBS GRG unit, this has been described as an “abattoir” for small businesses and that it may be the “biggest theft ever”.
The bank, state-owned at the time, stole millions from innocent small business customers in what became known as the dash for cash:
BuzzFeed This cases are just the tip of the iceberg as so much remains covered up.
This from February:
That’s right, this woman is deeply involved in one of the biggest banking scandals of all time.
Noakes was once described as the country’s top accountant and has lots of experience in PFI both for the government, the audit firms as well as in the private sector.
But sadly, it looks as thought our BBC has been entrusted to a card-carrying Tory Brexit propagandist.
John Mann sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Bank of England about former Deputy Governor Paul Tucker’s role in getting Barclays to readjust their LIBOR submissions during the crash in 2008. Mann was on the Treasury Select Committee and so the FOI was treated as urgent and replied to swiftly.
I suggest that a Labour member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee or the Shadow Minister for Culture, Tom Watson, send in an FOI to Ofcom asking to see whether Baroness Noakes membership of the House Lords has ever been considered a potential conflict of interest.
.@tom_watson should FOI @Ofcom re: @1svn‘s conflicts of interests then raise with #ToryRemainers @MattHancock & @DamianCollins. She’s bringing the house of lords, ofcom, bbc and brexit all into disrepute! #ladynoakes
— Ranjan Balakumaran (@financialeyes) April 29, 2018
Certainly all of Noakes’s correspondence on the subject of Brexit during the run up to the referendum and ever since are highly relevant at this time. Perhaps a group of Remainer MPs on the DCMS select committee, including Damian Collins, would like to start asking Ofcom these crucial questions.
Anything less would demonstrate a high degree of collusive corruption.
I asked David Whyte if the UK is a corrupt country in the run up to last year’s election:
For in the hand of Yahweh there is a cup, full of foaming wine mixed with spices. He pours it out. Indeed the wicked of the earth drink and drink it to its very dregs.
A friend and I recently agreed that Naomi Klein’s latest book No is not Enough appeals less to Brits than North Americans.
We have other things going on like Corbyn and Brexit.
I like how the American media are so upfront. They openly discuss their administration’s white nationalism and deregulatory stance on health insurance, tax, guns, & net neutrality.
Here in the UK our deregulation is not so much spoon-fed as subliminal.
Just like with shadow banking, we know it’s naughty, we know it’s happening, but we act as though everything’s above board.
The Brexit vote of June 2016 was sold as the perfect opportunity to take back control of our borders, recover sovereignty and cut Red Tape.
Click the image below for the original Sun article.
But exactly which regulations we’ll be cutting remains to be seen.
After all we’ll still need to retain the right to trade with Europe.
We’ll also need to keep our rights at work, protect our food, and look after the environment.
Countries will only trade with us if they trust our regulatory standards.
How will that happen if we become a totally unregulated space?
As Tax Justice Campaigner Richard Murphy puts it:
“We need rules. Try playing football without any rules. It doesn’t work.”
The lack of clarity from our journalists and politicians may be part of the problem.
Academics like Daniela Gabor, Prem Sikka, David Graeber, Vickie Cooper, David Whyte, Steve Tombs, and commentators like Frances Coppola, Ann Pettifor, Nicholas Wilson, and Ian Fraser are all reliable.
But few out and out hacks are prepared to rock the boat by asking difficult questions.
Even fewer politicians make meaningful commitments, give straight answers, or admit mistakes.
In the midst of all this emerged Nigel Farage.
While the left and right were playing musical chairs in the centre, a gaping chasm opened up everywhere else.
All anyone had to do to occupy the space was point out the contradictions in the system.
So in a strange social experiment the British public briefly entered an age of demagoguery. One that can’t be undone.
Where Thatcher, Blair and even Cameron got their voters mildly excited, unelected Mr Farage got the nation to say “No” to the Establishment and replace it with — the Establishment!
The only problem with all this was that nobody ever thought that the Brexiteers could win. The Brexiteers themselves had no idea what they’d do once they won their coup.
As Hannah Arendt said of the British Empire:
It has often been said that the British acquired their empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, as consequence of automatic trends, yielding to what seemed possible and what was tempting, rather than as a result of deliberate policy. If this is true, then the road to hell may just as well be paved with no intentions as with the proverbial good ones.
In the following clip Nigel Farage strategically attacks ‘diversity’ before claiming that English is no longer spoken in many parts of the UK.
He’s our very own Donald Trump. The influence he’s projected over global politics is staggering.
By relentlessly attacking every MP in sight whilst having never been more than an MEP in Brussels, Farage has become the ultimate spectactor.
Like Lear’s Fool and Donald Trump, Farage has been able to speak populist truth to power without following any of the rules by which normal politicians are bound.
But just like Trump, he’s a vicious corporatist.
Earlier this year after asking if Trump’s an anarchist, I asked anthropologist David Graeber to distinguish between corporatists like Farage and fascists like Marine Le Pen.
Before the referendum I asked the BBC how frequently Farage had appeared on Newsnight, Question Time, and The Today Programme — they refused.
I assume someone like Rupert Murdoch was supporting him.
In the wake of the phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry James Harding moved to manage BBC News after having edited Murdoch’s Times for six years.
Maybe he was leaned on by Murdoch to include Farage on the BBC’s radio and televised debates.
Despite being a fully paid up member of the Metropolitan Elite and presumably a Remainer, Harding knows which way his bread’s buttered.
Though humouring his old boss would have been logical, what started out as a joke led to a constitutional crisis.
By attacking the EU and political correctness in the way that he has, Farage has managed to overturn forty years of food, employment, financial and environmental standards.
Farage is currently employed by Rupert Murdoch in the US and by LBC talk radio in the UK.
Neo-liberal economics was underpinned by a belief in the idea of infinite growth. But the rapid growth of the ‘left behinds’ who under Thatcher had been written off as the acceptable rate of unemployment led to a growing divide.
They had no way out of a life of austerity.
At the same time came the rise of the Metropolitan Elite with their skinny lattés and Polish plumbers
Plenty of newspapers also told their readers to vote for Brexit.
They weren’t all convinced by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and Michael Gove.
The Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph are all still fervent Brexiteers.
But according to those Brexiteers who aren’t in the Cabinet, the Government are making a hash of Brexit.
The potential benefits of a Brexit deal are fast disappearing as the Government commits to paying more and more money to the EU.
CityAM 
Bill Emmott 
