by John Ward
The Great Barrington Reef may not sink SS Pharmafia, but a Brexit sellout will drown BoJo
…..AND THE RUMBLING ECONOMIC VOLCANO THAT SET OFF THE TSUNAMI WAVES IS NOT FAR AWAY. THE LONGER THE PRIME MINISTER DENIES REALITY, THE MORE CALAMITOUS HIS END WILL BE
Today, I want to be balanced but blunt about Boris Johnson’s chances of survival in a Governing Class context. Tomorrow, I will switch the emphasis towards how his almost inevitable failure to keep the confidence of “the State” in its myriad forms could result in the long-awaited destruction of Britain’s political duopoly for the common good…or something even worse.
It seems odd to me, having to make that distinction: back in the day in a proper free-speech democracy, the People voted (on the most contentious issues) for what they thought the best solution offered by the Parties available. Now they no longer really know what they’re voting for, because choosing the Big Swinging Members they will tolerate has become an Unelected Secret State monopoly. As time goes on, indeed, a senior politician’s ability to get the approval of unelected power becomes increasingly decisive – and this is, in a nutshell, the rot to be stopped.
In the States, from Carter onwards the Shadow State has conspired to undermine and fake anything and everything surrounding candidates it doesn’t want; this has never been more blatant than in the treatment of Donald Trump.
In the UK, banking firms, bourses and Murdoch sensed that Blair would do their bidding, and they chose well. In Cameron’s case, they chose badly. Following his disastrous gamble on the Brexit referendum, Call Me Dave was going to see it through on the Friday, and was gone by the following Tuesday. When the unelected brokers chose May, and Leadsome put up a highly credible challenge to her, she too was disappeared in very short order.
Both events stank of blackmail….what the stakeholders in the Shadow State want matters. They didn’t want Boris in 2019, and they don’t want him now. As Harold Macmillan wisely observed, “There will always be events” – and these have been used to trap Bojo in a permanent three-front war by every means imaginable.
These are the bum steer of hiding from Covid19, the attempt at every turn to undermine his Brexit position, and the anti-Covid strategy’s disastrous socio-economic effects…..which will, you can be sure, be blamed on first him and then Brexit.
For the first time in fifteen years of blogging, I signed an online petition yesterday from the Great Barrington group of medics worldwide. It was lamenting the hopelessly misguided Lockdown strategy of governments across the Globe, and forecast an economic disaster that would kill far more humans than Coronavirus ever could.
Perhaps at last, mobilising real medical practitioner opinion (as opposed to listening to a tiny Pharma-bribed group of theory-blinded élites) may accelerate the process of scales falling from the Sleeple’s eyes.
Then again, perhaps not. But either way, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is sailing merrily into a perfect triple-header of deep water and molten lava. Perhaps – ever the optimist – Bojo sees the whole thing as one giant free sauna. Oh dear.
We may have to wait a little longer for the realisation of utter Covid19 strategic balls-up to filter down to the electorate en masse, but there’s nowhere to hide on Brexit.
Waiting in the wings (and just gagging to say that the Brexit deal is a sellout) will be Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party. Nigel will have to say that, because if he doesn’t, then both he and his Party – as currently branded – will be reduced to a small footnote in chaotic 21st Century history.
I suspect most Brits will let BoJo have a bit of backsliding room for him to hype any Brexit deal….but if the fishing rights thing is fudged, he’ll be in serious trouble. And if, on the other hand, it’s No Deal….er, start recounting the MP numbers in the Commons with less regard to “Party loyalty”.
Such trouble will be enough to seal his fate if he ignores the growing unpopularity and professional rubbishing of the stubborn Manflu’s virus idiocy. But the biggy will be the top coming off the bubbling gdp and State finances magma.
The latest economic figures could be described as both unwelcome and inevitable: yet again, the Prime Minister’s ebullient optimism shrivels into denialiasm in the cold light of eonomic statistics as covered by the UK media today.
I’ll construct the real and ruinous cost of Contrick19 and Matt’s Meddlesome Modellers in more detail tomorrow: suffice it to record here that we are heading for an unemployment and gdp bloodbath that any halfway attentive Second Year Economics degree student could have predicted three months ago. Commenting in the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner writes:
‘By repeatedly locking down, we merely transfer the destructive powers of the virus from the biological to the economic. Denied the opportunity to let rip in the population, Covid instead lets rip in the public finances. Those of us who favour the first of these approaches are often accused of a heartless disregard for life. On Twitter, I’ve been repeatedly called “the guy who wants to kill my granddad”.’
Lucky you, Mr Warner: on Twitter, I’m the granddad who wants to kill all the eligible guys. On this occasion, Jeremy nails succinctly how Covidiots can’t grasp that lives lost to the neglect of other illnesses (and health budgets lost to falling tax income) are far more deadly than Coronavirus.
But like everyone at the Telegraph – and I shrink from prodding them with a sharp stick, because at least compared to most media monkeys they are at least raising doubts about the narrative – they won’t take the next step into reality: that first, the eligible guys are cases, not fatalities; and second, carefully myopic use of stats cannot in the end hide one simple fact – Covid19 is killing the same group of people in a different way….but net, it is not killing more people.
Time after time, the new breed of Wikistats Disinformation Agencies – the pushers of ‘such and such a régime has been vilified unfairly’, ‘Orban is a Nazi’ and now ‘The Covid plague threatens us all’ – either include artificially engorged Coronavirus “deaths” with deaths from all causes, or pluck raw numbers from their global context, using sheer volume to suggest universality.
A classic example yesterday on one Biden-supporting US site was that “people over seventy are thousands of times more likely to die from Covid19 than those under forty”. That gives the impression that death is inevitable for people like me….but it wilfully ignores the fact that to date, as a human cull, this novel Coronavirus is killing at the annualised overall rate of 0.0064%. In fact, I have four chances in a hundred of dying from this virus. At my age and with a lack of most other comorbordities, I happily accept those odds – especially living in a country where I can get HCQ administered the minute I know I’m infected.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand will suffer little more than three days in bed as a result of Covid19 infection. Only a fool destroys an economy supporting 75 million people for the sake of 1 in a thousand people who do not represent additional deaths to those of viruses in previous years.
Such represents madness in years of economic plenty. To do so after a pointless bout of self-inflicted income reduction in a year that looks forward to the challenge of final Brexit is beyond explanation other than that our leaders are paying obeisance to another agenda entirely…or are all mathematically illiterate.
Add to that conclusion the ghastly state of economies beyond ours, and the outlook seems positively apocalyptic. The collapse in crude oil prices, global trade imbalances, a looming downturn in sub-Saharan Africa, the basket case that is Italy, the EU facing life without cash-cow Britain, and the supreme madness of the Australian authorities are all adding to an economic Covid-shock that the World Economic Forum tells us is three times worse than the 2008 shambles.
And remember – the banking firms and bourses have persistently blocked or diluted all attempts at reform since that time…while the vast majority have a QE-inflated index of valuation that bears no relation whatsoever to reality.
Boris, my friends, is doomed. He is doomed because he is neither one of them, nor one of us.