The Party’s Over

This article was written during the unfolding scandals involving the banking collapse, then the exposure of British Parliamentarians’ dipping their hands in the till and finally the revelation, that came as a surprise to no one, that journalists on a certain major newspaper regularly flouted law and decency to spy on large numbers of people in order to get their stories.

What is it about this phrase? It is dour and kill-joy, and it is grey-suited. It is adult in that sort of grey manner that we recognise as responsible, even if we also know that it is precisely such people who are responsible for the destruction of much of the biosphere. So when it is grey-suited killjoys who tell us that the party is over, then we must ask ourselves some serious questions.

For a start, these people never knew how to party in the first place; they are greyness itself, so how can they possibly call an end to a party? When bankers and financiers on the one hand and their moderately well paid political axe-carriers on the other hand are telling us that the party is over, what do they mean? They are telling us that our party is over, i.e. that we are in for some painful times, even if it is they who ought to be wearing sackcloth and ashes. And we have seen that the bankers really made a mess of things on a spectacular scale, which one well informed economist insists is an epochal once-in-centuries event, and yet their political courtesans take our money and give them an enormous amount of it, and oh yes, by the way, folks, the party is over. The political class are caught with their hands in the till, but I tell you what, the party is over.

Something is not quite right in this picture. In reality, for us it should just be beginning. The banking swindlers ought to be out of business, and I don’t mean they should have their bonuses cut, but bankers per se should be gone. All bankers are swindlers, not just those who abscond with others’ monies, for banking is essentially a swindle. The political class should be out of business, not with a few reforms that determine who gets to set their pay, because I have no doubt that it will continue to greatly outweigh my pay and yours. Rather, our being swindled of our parliamentary democracy must come to an end; the party that the political class have been having at our expense for these last centuries is over.

Swindled of our Democracy? Yes, because its aims are wonderfully exalted and we are cheated of its reality every time: the political class have given the monarch’s sovereign right to issue currency to bankers, which is created out of nothing, and then they charge us for the right to borrow from them; well, I’m sorry, but the party’s over.

And we have all seen that it is, but the third corner of this game, the media, is very busy trying to convince us that “there is a brief interruption in transmission and we should be back on the air, but meanwhile from our studios…” But, sorry, the party is definitely over, for now the media’s very own have shone a light on some of their activities and we have seen a large number of quite ugly cockroaches scurrying for the darkest dirtiest corner to hide in. Now that brings the score to three out of three: the three corners of the triumvirate, i.e. finance, politics and the media, have been shown to be rife with the corruption that we all knew was there, simply because it had percolated from them to every corner of the world. So that rather dirty party is over.

What a relief! If that was a party, then that it is over is an utter relief. I suspect that the trees, the oceans and all the world’s species will experience it like that too: Thank God, the party is over.

The truth is that these grey entities have no joy and don’t know how to celebrate. They take no holidays, because they have forgotten that a holiday is a holy day. Although they made it the national anthem of Europe they have forgotten that the words of Beethoven’s Ninth, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, are about joyous awareness of the Divine Presence and His mercy.

Goethe said: “böse Menschen haben keine Lieder – evil people have no songs,” and he said, “böse Menschen können nicht singen – evil people can’t sing.” Well, these dead grey figures who so bore us, whom we so distrust, about whom we have been so deceived by the compliant media who work endlessly to sell them to us, these people cannot sing. They have no songs. That is because they are too busy lying. From top to bottom, from right to left; they are too busy lying. No time for singing and songs.

We can say without exaggeration that one of the most fundamental aspects of a civilisation is how it parties, how it celebrates and how it goes on holy day. In the Middle Ages, Europeans had something like 150 saints’ days which were times of worship, pilgrimage, celebration and penitence, but not work, not this obsessive full-time, day and night work that modern man has. And he, she and we work because the equations of usury dictate that the money is worth less and less while fewer and fewer people have greater amounts, obscenely large amounts of it. This exponential equation is right now in the process of terminal collapse. It has reached the Detroit car-plant workers and it is on its way outwards to everyone else, but it hasn’t reached all of us yet.

On that exponential part of the curve, partying became manic. It had a desperate quality: eat, drink and be merry… It was forced. For increasing numbers of people it meant to get as quickly out of their heads as possible by whatever combination of alcohol, drugs, music and sex it could be achieved by. Then after paying the bill, back to the treadmill.

Nevertheless, the act of exposing our MPs’ dipping their hands in the till was a serious attack on our institutions and designed merely to mask the much more serious crime of the bankers’ theft of countless billions. One source reported that the total of our public representatives’ excesses may amount to as much as £5 million. Now, deplorable as some of this behaviour is, most of it is utterly trivial. Let us ask the Telegraph, Guardian, Independent et al to publish their own directors’ expenses claims. The MPs’ claims merely mirror what is common coin among the professional classes: charge it to expenses, and oh, while you’re at it, get my accountant to make sure the taxman gets none of my earnings by locating me in the Cayman Islands or perhaps Jersey.

But what has been demonstrated here is the unbelievable power of the media in our time to elevate trash to celebrityhood and to denigrate and ultimately destroy anyone they wish, at will. And can it be accidental that it is at precisely the moment when bankers’ actions are taking us down the rocky descent to a point far below the 30’s depression? Clearly the heat was becoming too much for our financial wizards, and talk by our elected representatives of regulating the financial sector and tougher laws got a bit out of hand and they had to be reminded of how vulnerable they are. And again, the media themselves, of whom the political class are so terrified, have been caught in their own headlights and stand transfixed in their own terror. That the corruption of one tabloid was exposed by other sections of the media does nothing to lessen our disquiet about their standards in general. The bullies being bullied? Is nothing sacred?

This bullying by the media of the political class, of which the most recent manifestation was merely the most extreme version of something that is everyday reality, seriously undermines our hard-won democratic rights. The media have become a power unto themselves, making and breaking others at will. This is very far from the political theory underlying our current structures. The role of the media is, or ought to be, as honest voices informing the masses and speaking the truth to power. But how can that work when they are themselves beholden to the third element of the dominant triumvirate of power: finance, the real power, to which they never tell the truth? How can it be, when political power, as represented by our hapless MPs, whose only hope of wealth is to be given a nice appointment with Goldman Sachs at the end of a long career of public service (ahem), is utterly powerless? How can the media speak truth to power, if the apparent hub of the power nexus is vacant, the seat unoccupied?

No, the political class are hapless whipping boys while the guilty ones slink away in the bank-ground. And yet our political class are not to be pitied, because they are hand-in-glove with banking and finance. They have actively colluded over generations with people who have effectively abolished our economic freedom while politicians talked to us about vacuous political freedoms until today they are in the process of abolishing what little political freedom is left. What use freedom of speech if the one thing that matters cannot be said and is never said and if it is said, is howled down? What use the right to vote if I am so tied down by basic things such as paying bills that I don’t even have time to seriously consider the issues involved? Almost none of the electorate really understand any of the issues involved in any election or referendum simply because we have no time to do so and our education didn’t equip us to think.

Yet that triumvirate of finance, politics and media and their sometimes uneasy relationships, the shifting alliances and treacheries, is not as solid as it presents itself to be. Beware the Ides of March, MPs, but I am afraid I’m too late with that warning. The political class are definitely the bottom of the heap, and they have been shown very definitely that is the case.

In a recent documentary on the spectacular banking collapse the narrator said that bankers who were earning £250,000 a year felt pretty smug until they met hedge fund managers who were taking home a billion. Now our public representatives are not even invited to dinner at that table except under very strict conditions, and if they are invited, they are sure to be on their very best behaviour and listen very attentively when spoken to.

This is catastrophic for our situation. There is no denying the long struggle of European and British people to come out from under the heel of arbitrary and despotic government, but we have done that only to find ourselves firmly under an even more totalitarian system which uniquely declares itself to be the opposite of what it is. This system says: we are bringing democracy. Translation: here come the chains.

So to absolve our errant public representatives in any way is probably too glib. After all, £5 million is little compared to the bankers’ depredations, but quite a lot compared to what the ordinary UK citizen will see on average. That such a culture of feeding at the trough should have become endemic in public life is intolerable, a trend started, as Adam Curtis showed in his compelling BBC documentary The Trap, in the era of Thatcher who espoused the ‘greed is good’ doctrine to an astonishing degree, aided by the cynical philosophy of James Buchanan who despised ‘zealots’, i.e. anyone who would like to do something good for other people.

Clearly the stables need a jolly good clear-out, particularly of the New Labourites, whose endeavours on behalf of ‘the people’ have mostly been to the benefit of themselves, and their leader who managed to sell our gold reserves when they were worth least.

It is a pernicious condition not only because of the corruption revealed in British public life, but because of the ‘trickle down’ effect in which values are eroded right across the society. If we look for the cause of much of the criminality that afflicts our country, how can we overlook the deleterious standards set by our public figures over recent decades?

Epoch making catastrophes call for epochal measures. The squalid era of banking, the real beginning of the age of the feeding frenzy which is drawing to such a disastrous close, was ushered in with a wide-ranging transformation of our political life, foremost among which was the retirement of the monarch to a largely ceremonial position. Nevertheless, constitutionally the monarch still has considerable power, and responsibility. The government is Her Majesty’s government and the opposition Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. It is time that the monarchy exercised its constitutional powers to effect some change at this critical juncture. Clearly only the most romantic of royalists could imagine a return to direct monarchic rule at this time, but it is equally clear that this culture of self-enrichment among MPs, which corresponds to their lax attitude to bankers and their thefts, and their complete failure to say anything as risqué as “boo” to them, must change.

The present hugely discredited government have no intention of letting go the reins of power, which have proven so lucrative to so many of them, but are just waiting until they are forcibly retired from public office to take up those banking directorships they have been promised. In such a situation it is only the monarch who can call them to account before that time and open the way to a general election, where the British public will certainly make known their displeasure with them.

It is time this disastrous epoch of bankism, which is now destroying itself before our eyes, was rounded off and true governance restored rather than the sham of two parties equally beholden to finance pretending to differ and argue over issues that make no sense.

In that there is no more thoroughgoing change that can be made than:

First, the recognition of the totally dishonest nature of usury finance and the very far-reaching extent of its penetration of our state, our businesses and our lives, foremost in which must be our understanding that the alteration in the nature of currency itself is the most extreme manifestation of this iniquity.

Second, the logical and practical corollary of the need for the restoration of non-usurious modes as a matter of the utmost urgency. It is only by restoration of currencies that hold real value, and do not merely represent it, and by the abolition of usurious practices that we will put an end to this disastrous age.

Third, and we could not have said this before the Prince of Wales gave his memorable Richard Dimbleby lecture, the restoration of monarchy, not as the autocratic and arbitrary rule of one person, but as the fulcrum of the contending forces at work in every society. The combined forces of banking, the media and the political class have worked to misrepresent the real nature of monarchic rule and to convince us that the only way is ‘forward’ even though it is clear to many of us that we only going forward down a long and slippery slope. What must be abandoned is the idea of either forwards and backwards because both concepts are redolent with the false dialectic of progress versus traditionalism.

This is not merely an issue that impinges on economics but is a matter of great moral, spiritual and psychological importance that has repercussions in most aspects of our lives. Who is there who does not know that it is economics that drives the greater part of our lives, and often to decisions and acts that we would have been better not to have made or done? By dealing with this, we deal with a host of issues at a stroke.

So the party is over. The last thing we want is a revolution, but rather a genuine restoration. A restoration of sanity, good governance, sound money and media that inform and educate and speak truth to power. Now that would be cause for a really good party.