Weimar Britain
Unhappy countries, it seems, may face unhappiness in the same general way. I was struck by a thought walking over the bridge this morning, that British and other European polities are coming more and more to resemble that of the failed state in the North of Ireland.
It's a whim, I know, but what are the BNP but a bigger-state version of the DUP without the iron morality of Dr Paisley to stop them being completely mad? The Exile has a piece on their aspirant-working class 'Essex man' vote today, detailing rumours he's heard of police and intelligence surveillance of the largely criminal BNP, which made me think of the stahlhelm on the Bann.
As in Northern Ireland, the Labour, Liberal and Conservative leaderships are all fairly much drawn from the same pool and fixated, with a few exceptions, on their own interests. What we lack is a viable Muslim or socialist outfit, as the Germans now have, to complete the set. Die Linke seem to me a variant on the Scottish socialists, with the additional element of a good few of the gaolers, torturers and repressers who survived the collapse of East Germany.
The strangest opinions are becoming mainstream; the loudest voices are shouting in whispers.
Really, this all bodes for trouble. There cannot be any sense to the increasingly frantic attempt by the media and salaried economists to sense success and the end of the recession in everything. The dollar is on the edge of an unprecedented fall; unemployment is accelerating around the Atlantic rim; money lending is contracting so badly it could be counteracting government stimuli; and people are beginning to sense the inflationary effect of quantitative easing, and commodity price rises. Criminals are deserting the credit card industry, largely because, I think, that there is little credit around, and even the boosters are beginning to sense that stock markets are overvalued.
Put this political breakdown, which is largely underground or unacknowledged in public, together with the long, ratcheting economic crisis and you can see depression ahead.
On we go....
Unhappy countries, it seems, may face unhappiness in the same general way. I was struck by a thought walking over the bridge this morning, that British and other European polities are coming more and more to resemble that of the failed state in the North of Ireland.
It's a whim, I know, but what are the BNP but a bigger-state version of the DUP without the iron morality of Dr Paisley to stop them being completely mad? The Exile has a piece on their aspirant-working class 'Essex man' vote today, detailing rumours he's heard of police and intelligence surveillance of the largely criminal BNP, which made me think of the stahlhelm on the Bann.
As in Northern Ireland, the Labour, Liberal and Conservative leaderships are all fairly much drawn from the same pool and fixated, with a few exceptions, on their own interests. What we lack is a viable Muslim or socialist outfit, as the Germans now have, to complete the set. Die Linke seem to me a variant on the Scottish socialists, with the additional element of a good few of the gaolers, torturers and repressers who survived the collapse of East Germany.
The strangest opinions are becoming mainstream; the loudest voices are shouting in whispers.
Really, this all bodes for trouble. There cannot be any sense to the increasingly frantic attempt by the media and salaried economists to sense success and the end of the recession in everything. The dollar is on the edge of an unprecedented fall; unemployment is accelerating around the Atlantic rim; money lending is contracting so badly it could be counteracting government stimuli; and people are beginning to sense the inflationary effect of quantitative easing, and commodity price rises. Criminals are deserting the credit card industry, largely because, I think, that there is little credit around, and even the boosters are beginning to sense that stock markets are overvalued.
Put this political breakdown, which is largely underground or unacknowledged in public, together with the long, ratcheting economic crisis and you can see depression ahead.
On we go....
Comments