POLITICIANS, POLICE, PLEBS AND JOURNALISTS AND FOR GOOD MEASURE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Okay, what have all the above got in common with people who repair cars for a living? Yes you’ve guessed it! Generally speaking they’re liars. Liars who can’t help themselves no matter how hard they try!

But let me say immediately that my sympathy goes to the police. How dare David Cameron’s favourite Doberman, Andrew Mitchell, call one of them a pleb? The police may be into all kinds of generalised lying and violence but plebs and plebeian they’re certainly not! They are polis men, from the ancient Greek meaning men of the city state. Polis men are servants of the state as are their modern counterparts, policemen. In ancient times they served the patrician class, an aristocracy who governed the state and kept the plebeians and slaves in their place. The men of the polis indeed ran the state for their patrician masters. They were neither plebeians nor patricians. Neither a stick on a stick nor a cheesy on a stick but like the Liberal Democrats, something in between!

The police today occupy the same position. They serve the state but they’re certainly not plebs. They control the plebs. Spy on them, break up their strikes and demonstrations and lie about them where necessary like Hillsborough, but they’re certainly not patricians either. They just work for them, existing as an occupational strata mainly comprised of the lower middle class employed to uphold laws made by those above them.

This begs an important question. Why did an irritated Tory Chief Whip call one of them a pleb? How dare he? Who did he think he was… a patrician… a member of the Governing Classes? How on earth could he think that… being an elected politician whose position is determined by the choice of tens of thousands of unknown people… actually made him a patrician? No Mr Mitchell, you’re just another political creep who, like the police person whose status you denigrated, falls into the generalised category of liar. In the broadest sense you both tell lies for a living, something you both regard as telling the truth as you see it. Neither category of occupation sees itself as telling lies. Heavens above! That’s certainly not what we’re here to do. We’re here to tell you the truth… the true facts about the economy and what those other bastards did to stuff it up and make your lives harder… here to present the true facts of the case from our notebooks based on all the evidence we chose to select!    

Politicians and police then have this in common. They never do tell a lie. They simply disregard any evidence that detracts from the story they want to tell! A bit like being a journalist permanently on the sniff for dirt on behalf of the gutter press paper they work for. It’s easy enough to stretch the parameters of truth when you’ve spent months if not years of your life stretching words into suggestions, turning them from unsubstantiated notions into hard sleaze so that shouting at kids in the street becomes molestation. Members of Parliament and policemen just lie but gutter journalists go much further. They demean and humiliate. They’re into dehumanisation and destruction.

They often see their actions as justifiable. They’ve discovered something awful about someone and want to bring their conduct to public attention. Destroy them loudly. But what if their target is innocent? Unfortunately by then it’s too late. So much for the Sun newspaper, its editor, its headline for the Hillsborough Tragedy and its consideration for the families of the dead. Does a concern to expose truth permit journalists to commit criminal acts in order to do so? Does it licence them to hack mobiles, use data bases to defame, to lie? What gives journalists the right to play God with people’s lives?

Politicians, police, journalists… their conduct has too often become part of the generalised culture of lying. It wasn’t always this way old timers may lament. There was a time when you could go out for a walk and leave your front door open… Alas that’s only a piece of sanitised memory. In other words, bollocks! You could never, anywhere, any-time, go out for a walk and leave your front door open, not unless you were asking for trouble. Likewise, politicians, police and journalists tell a story the way they see it. Can’t have the cold hard truth getting in the way to complicate things... Make things more difficult for us... Why, if we think that’s the way the economy needs fixing then that’s the way we’ll fix it… If we think we need three addresses to live at, then that’s what we’ll claim taxpayer’s money for. We need those three addresses to live at because we’re shifting around, shifting around… so that’s what we’ll claim three mortgages on! It’s so we can do our work best. Serve our constituents, represent the people who voted for us in the best way we can. Oh, and because we are so concerned that taxpayer’s money is well spent we’ll rent out all the empty rooms. The money coming in will help us do our jobs better!

And of course, if you’re really smart, you can claim for a different partner in each house. It’s something you need to understand, readers. This is not lying. Not cheating the taxpayer! This is making sure that taxpayers get the best value for money… as Members of Parliament would see it. Similarly, stretching supposition about those you are investigating into hard evidence isn’t lying either. It’s only part of building up the wider picture. Turning an innocent man into a suspect.     

And all this to say nothing about the reasons why politicians, police and journalists do what they do. Manufacture, distort, manipulate and deceive. In a word lie. Why do they do these things? Maybe because it’s easy, because they have the power, and the checks on their conduct are minimal. Yes because it’s easy. Easier than searching for and telling the truth. Naturally, with a coalescence of such forces determining how we are meant to view each other and conduct our lives at a time of severe economic crisis it’s possible that we are inexorably sliding towards fascism.

Fascism British style will not mean a military takeover. Its form will be different and see an ever increasing presence of police intervention in and regulation of public life and personal conduct. The process has already begun with the kettling of demonstrators and pepper spraying and shooting of civilians. Soon it may be further facilitated by journalists manipulating public attitudes and sentiment, it’s path being assisted by the corroborative cowardice of will and conscience by the leadership of the labour movement and whatever liberal politicians remain. A matter which brings me finally to that other lying species of being, the Liberal Democrats.

The Liberal Democrats, bless their little yellow socks, have just had their party conference which, as many of them would like to have us think, was of such world-shattering significance that the Russians and Chinese if not the entire Arab World must have been hanging on every word and policy speech that came out of the beloved leader’s mouth. And that’s to say nothing of Angela Merkel quaking in her shoes over his fighting talk, joke-joke! Could such a powerful populist upset the whole European apple cart?

Talk it up! Talk it up! From the conference you got a real sense of the Liberal Democrats’ power, influence and independence in Government. Yes they were the ones controlling the direction of their partnership with the Tories. Yes they were the ones pulling David Cameron’s strings. If it wasn’t for them it would all be far worse. It was the Liberal Democrats who were preparing the bright future and in time people would see that what they doing to control the Tory rednecks was heroic! Yes the Liberal Democrats in Government were heroic. Sacrificing themselves on the anvil of short term public scorn and contempt so that one day everyone would understand how right, how courageous, how noble they’d been!

If you weren’t already mind-boggled by the bare-faced cheek of it all you’d be laughing your head off in sheer disbelief at such brazen bullshit. Let’s look at Vince Cable’s ‘peoples’ Investment Bank wheeze, funded by a billion capital from the Government. Well where do you think the money’s coming from? I’ll tell you where. It’s from all the cuts in public spending, primarily welfare, that they’ve helped their Tory Coalition partners pass through Parliament. That’s cuts to disability benefits, cuts to the NHS, cuts to payments of child benefit and hardship for the unemployed. And who are the beneficiaries? Small and medium businesses of course. In short, money gained in taxes from the many is taken from the poor and needy and put into the hands of the few. How very liberal. How very democratic. No wonder the Tories are so keen to help.

But that’s the Liberal Democrats for you. Business before Welfare. Then there was all that talk about taxing the rich, taxing millionaire pensioners! Taxing the rich. Sounded great. So very Liberal Democrat. Anything for a cheap headline, yet as everyone knows they’ve only recently helped cut the tax rate for the rich from 50 to 45%. And all those cheesy looking people clustered round Nick Clegg during his final speech looking up at him with glassy eyes! Seriously squirmy! Even when they all know his rating is so low in the opinion polls that he’s even more unpopular than Labour’s former monkey on everyone’s shoulder, the Grim and Grisly Gordon Brown. No, Nick Clegg’s detested for the liar he was with his phoney promises at the last election and the shamefaced master of bullshit he is today.

So, do tell us Nick, what’s the Liberal Democrats’ great masterstroke for winning back popularity? Could it be any more meaningless Green Chit Chat? Could it be the Vince Cable appeal, i.e. the nation’s favourite old uncle put out by the press as caring with your money for voters daft enough to believe he’s anything more than George Osborne’s Raggy with his attacks on the hard won rights of workers. Or could it be Simon Hughes with his anti-Israel views, so pleasing to the anti-Semitic left. Such a cheap shot really at a people who have suffered so much and are now attacked on all sides. But far more than all this is their claim to be honourable. They are sure that people will understand in time that they believed they were honourable! That they’re doing the right thing. Rescuing the economy while acting as a break on Tory excesses.

Well hasn’t that served as a justification for so many? Believed they were doing the right thing. Think of all the nasties who’ve said it. Couldn’t think of anything more honest to say because they wanted to be up there in the public eye basking in the glory of their self-righteousness. The righteousness they gave themselves before selling it to the public. Passing it on to anyone who’d listen.

So how stupid, how gullible can the British public be? The Liberal Democrats are really banking on it. Meanwhile they can promise this and promise that, knowing they don’t have to deliver because if everything fails they can blame it all on the Tories. Now that’s a real special kind of lying. But then they’ve been conniving to get into the hot seat of power for years. They’re opportunists. Political schemers by nature in a world of adventure where lying is the natural order of things. Where lying is life. In journalism, in squeezing every little extra out of motor vehicle repairs, in political conduct, in the habitual application of personal power… All these things are open to the distortion of reality. To the distortion of truth. It only requires a conduit, a means of facilitation. Lying, therefore, isn’t a black art itself, only the servant of evil intention.

ALL THESE THINGS ARE BOUND BY THE SAME COVENANT.     

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS.