Something must change

Or something will break very badly

Contempt is the number one predictor of divorce - it is the one emotion that you can rarely move beyond. You can get over anger, sadness, bitterness and more. You can forgive affairs and monetary crisis. Marriages can be remarkably resilient when both parties want them to survive but contempt - game over. Once one or other expresses that feeling - once they see that person as beneath even their consideration you know it is over.

That finding can be seen in every facet of human society. We have all worked in places where you suddenly walk in one day and think “The people running this place are complete idiots”. It is the moment when you check out mentally and usually start looking for a job. The vast majority of humans really can’t take having to engage with people who they see as beneath them.

This is not defined by some intelligence test where we think the person is stupid. Most people don’t hold a Mensa membership. We give and receive respect for a myriad of reasons. The tradesperson who comes to do work at our house, the friend who rings us when we are down - even the person who cleans the streets are given different forms of respect by people. Because we realise that worth is more than just the size of someone’s salary or whatever ridiculous credentials they have managed to acquire.

Contempt appears when people fail to live up to the our standards. It is the moment when all respect departs from the relationship and we truly begin to see someone as simply less than us. Not that they are less than human for we can only feel contempt for our fellow man. But they are ethically, morally or professionally less than us - normally a mixture of all three. Then we just want them gone from our lives for our time here is short and few want to engage with those who fail our most basic tests.

This is exactly how more and more people feel about our elites and more worryingly our institutions. Contempt tempered with more than a little revulsion. This has been growing for some time but it has now gone mainstream and it should scare everyone. For ideas and human psychology travel faster than any biological poison. This is no longer some howling political obsessives like me on the internet - no this is being discussed in pubs and homes around the country.

It is hardly a surprise after the lies and abuse piled on millions of people over the last couple of decades. They have been extremely patient in the face of a state which is visibly failing, institutions which seem disinterested in their actual responsibilities and elites who seem more obsessed in themselves and their pet projects than the public. I am not sure when it happened but we appear to have passed the event horizon whereby millions of people now more and more see the state, our political system and our elites in general as the enemy.

This is a very very dangerous moment as previously people would transfer their anger from party to party rather than the actual system and we have never had a moment when our broader institutions were questioned but we are getting there fast. The British public feels a general, pervasive and growing sense of contempt and disenfranchisement from the very systems of governance that have kept this country ticking over in varying forms for well over a thousand years.

I don’t say this lightly and I am not blaming Starmer and co. They may be taking the system to the end but this poison and corruption set in decades ago and has long since metastasized into a full blown cancer within the centre of our institutions. The public have watched them again and again fail us over years. From the Iraq war to the financial crisis to numerous press and media failings and that is before you get to Brexit, Covid, the Post Office scandal and the rape gangs. Again and again you see the rich and powerful simply shrug and move on because for them the system is functioning as expected.

That is before you get to the real day to day stuff like the fact that the hospitals are collapsing, the universities are now vectors for stupidity, indoctrination and anti Western / British propaganda. People don’t even bother to call the police as the chances are they won’t come and if they do they won’t do anything. The border force acts as a ferry service bringing illegal criminals into the country and we have a legal system which has long since decoupled from any sense of natural justice.

We are in a very serious moment and we desperately need politicians to actually listen and to produce some radical change and fast. For the Tories have left us dangerously exposed after running the country into the ground post 2010 and then failing to listen to the millions of people who have been screaming for decades and finally found a voice in 2016 with Brexit and with the 2019 election. They were given a clear mandate to start pulling the country together starting with reducing migration to a trickle and they instead stuck two fingers up to the public.

Something has broken and I am sorry but business as normal is not going to make the grade. Bleating on about the liberal world order and diversity to people who can see their country economically and socially decaying before their eyes whilst offering up mealy mouthed apologies and minor alterations to the failing status quo is not going to cut it. In fact it is doing the reverse it is actually enraging people as they have seen and heard it all before and know it for the political performance that it is.

This isn't a game though the political and media classes and their various flunkies don’t seem to get it. Watching them give each ribbons in the New Year Honours or jobs on reviews and QUANGO’s was once something that made the publics eyes roll. Now it simply underlines how arrogant and dangerously out of touch they are. People are very tired of it and it simply reinforces the view of them and us. With ‘them’ being the elites and ‘us’ being the general public who are now sharpening pitch forks and working out where to string the nooses.

This is for keeps for people - this is not a usual moment or political cycle. I am not writing this as a rant - I am writing this as a warning. To the political classes especially I implore you to realise the graveness and urgency of the situation. Do your jobs properly by asking questions but act with the speed and seriousness that this moment demands. You don’t have years to tweak a system in the hopes that a miracle happens. You need to radically change the status quo and re-empower the public and start pulling this country up out of the nose dive it is in.

To my fellow citizens I can only ask and implore that you get involved in every way you can. Find a political party however imperfect and do what you can. Write to your MP, scream at the media for attention. Use how you spend your money to drive change. But just don’t give into apathy and anger at the system. Yes it is failing, yes I blame the elites as well but yes it is on us. We put most of them there - we don’t act as citizens but absentee landlords who occasionally turn up and look shocked the tenants have wrecked the place. Democracy is more than just a vote - it is about education, attention and involvement.

I see sunlight ahead - I know the trends and they are moving in our direction. Across the West people are pushing back in their countries against similarly dysfunctional elites and broken institutions. But they like us must fight, we have to get up and refuse to be cowed by the authoritarian liberals who make up our elites and demand change. This is especially true of people like me who are comfortably middle class for we know how the system works and how to battle it.

Whatever happens next just remember that politics is a system created to drag decision making out of the streets to allow power to transfer peacefully. I would rather we kept it that way but I fear if we don’t change soon then it won’t. So step up - this is our home and we must fight for it.

“England expects that every man will do his duty” Horatio Nelson