When Jeremy met Bernie… the nightmare of the ‘utopian’ future

It is February 2021 and Comrade Jeremy, First Citizen of the Socialist Republic of Britain, is visiting US President Bernie at the White House for the first time. Victor Hill reflects on a nightmare.

Here is the news…

Continuity Announcer: Good morning. This is the Broadcasting Corporation of the Socialist Republic of Britain. It is 06:00 hours on Wednesday, the third of February 2021. The news this morning is read by Citizen Sam. Under recent equality and diversity legislation it is no longer permitted to use surnames. The pronoun by which listeners should refer to Sam is “they”. Listeners are reminded that if they do not use the correct pronoun, even in private, they could be prosecuted.

Citizen Sam: Good morning. Last night First Citizen Comrade Jeremy met with the newly inaugurated President Bernie of the United States at the White House. The leaders were said to have had very cordial discussions. President Bernie congratulated Comrade Jeremy on the destruction of Britain’s elitist and classist education system and its replacement by the concept of compulsory equal citizenship. The President confirmed that the United States would not permit the operation of so-called public schools in exile on US territory. The President also expressed the view that the UK’s offer to the Russian Federation to hand over its aircraft carriers was a positive step for world peace. Both leaders underlined their support for the Taliban government of Afghanistan and condemned press coverage of the Taliban regime in the United States as biased. At a press conference at the White House after their meeting, both leaders were able to confirm their determination to bring to an end the evil era of casino capitalism.

*Sound clip*

Journalist 1: I’m Laura from the BCSRB. First of all, could I thank Comrade Jeremy for sending me on his excellent Journalists’ Re-education Programme which hugely raised my awareness of inequalities in our country, which his radical government seeks to address. I’d like to ask Comrade Jeremy, if I may, his reaction to the proposed visit of the Pretender King to the United States later this month from his exile in Canada. Is it not time to pressure our Canadian and Australian friends to become republics and to cease to indulge rampant feudalism?

President Bernie: If I may interrupt – I have assured the Prime Minister – sorry, the First Citizen – that if this individual crosses into the United States he will be arrested and handed over to British authorities.

Comrade Jeremy: I am grateful to the President for his co-operation and support in this matter. Monarchy and feudalism are the past and it is high time that the so-called royal family desisted from their feudalist antics in Canada and Australia – which, as Citizen Laura suggests, should bite the bullet and become republics themselves.

Journalist 2: Thank you, Mr President, Comrade Jeremy. Adam from New Sky News. May I also say that Comrade Jeremy’s Journalists’ Re-education Programme has been most illuminating. I would like to ask the two leaders to explain the difference in the treatment of ex-President Trump and ex-Prime Minister Johnson? While the former US president is enjoying the luxury of house arrest his Mar-a-Lago resort, Mr Johnson is languishing in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Wormwood Scrubs. Should not the ex-president also be in a prison cell?


President Bernie: The ex-President has had his Twitter-feed removed as he has been classified as mentally unstable. He is not in a position to do any more harm.

Comrade Jeremy: Correction, Comrade Adam. Correctional Citizen Boris is not in solitary confinement. He is obliged to share a cell with Mr Gove – sorry, Correctional Citizen Michael. The constitutional crimes of which they have both been convicted are grave indeed and I am sure they will have much opportunity to reflect on them together. Comrade Diane will be making a further statement on the former prime minister’s re-education shortly.

Journalist 3: Thank you so much, Mr President and Comrade Jeremy. Citizen Owen of the National Guardian. May I congratulate the two leaders on their initiation of a new era in world history. And may I thank the First Citizen for nationalising The Guardian newspaper and funding it so generously, thus ushering in an era where fake populist-fascist news is extirpated.

President Bernie: What is your question?

Journalist 3: No question. I just wanted to say how wonderfully things are turning out.

President Bernie: May we have a question from an American journalist?

Journalist 4: Christine from CNN Plus. I’d like to ask the First Citizen of the British Republic what exactly is his policy on Brexit? From here in the US it looks pretty confusing.

Comrade Jeremy: Now come, come Christine. I have made our Brexit policy perfectly clear. Under the protocol signed with the EU the British Republic has a permanent rolling extension to its EU membership so that the exit date is perpetually set for one year from today, or from tomorrow, if you prefer. In the meantime, Comrade Emily has negotiated a new Withdrawal Agreement which we have no intention of implementing since when and if we decide to have a second referendum on EU membership we shall campaign against it in favour of Remain, though I shall, of course, remain neutral…

*End of sound clip*

Comrade Sam: And now the sports news. Australia has retained the Women’s Ashes. Next up on BCSRB Radio: Why Britain should hang its head in shame, episode 953…

***

I wrote the above passage only half in jest. The constitutional crisis around the Brexit issue in the UK is now so severe that the risk of a political meltdown of some kind is rising rapidly. In that scenario all kinds of unexpected outcomes become possible. At the same time, across the Pond, anti-Trump forces are coalescing around a message which is not so dissimilar to Mr Corbyn’s. This is that populist politics – and both Mr Trump and Mr Johnson are perceived to be populists by their opponents – is the enemy of social equality and justice. Therefore, all minorities, as defined by ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and gender (i.e. women – even though women are the majority in the US and the UK, but never mind), the underprivileged, the disconsolate, the homeless etc. should unite around the anti-populist agenda.

Let’s first consider how the forces of political correctness are changing the shape of politics in the USA.

USA: political correctness gone sad

The city of San Francisco has recently introduced a new sanitized language to talk about criminals. Franciscans are no longer supposed to say “convicted felon,” “delinquent,” “drug addict”, “offender” or even “addict.” Instead of “convicted felon,” they are now supposed to say justice-involved person.

And just across the Bay in Berkeley, the words manpower and manhole have been outlawed. Instead, one must say workforce and maintenance hole. In July the City Council unanimously passed the measure to replace more than two dozen commonly used terms[i]. Similarly, Colorado State University (CSU) has published an Inclusive Language Guide which essentially bans the use of about 50 words and phrases. Instead of handicap parking, the university wants people to say accessible parking. Instead of freshman, people should say first-year. Male and female are discouraged in favour of man and woman. The word war, students are warned, could create a hostile environment.

Commentators like the billionaire guru Doug Casey regard this trend as evidence for the accelerating collapse of civilization itself. I am not sure that I would go that far. But it certainly shows that, just like in George Orwell’s 1984, the ruling elite are seeking to control the way people think by controlling what they say. As Doug Casey wrote recently: “The degradation of language is very important. It’s not a question of just being able to express yourself. Language facilitates your ability to think.”


This new emphasis on correct language is happening everywhere but is especially persistent in almost all universities and colleges across the USA and increasingly across the UK too. That is why Doug Casey now thinks that a college or university education is a disadvantage and that young people would be better off not racking up around $250,000 of debt in the USA. Rather, they should go straight into the workplace after school.

That is an extreme view: but I have to say that whereas I once thought that our university system was a place where young people learnt how to learn and to think – such that they could apply thinking skills thereafter in the world of work and in life generally – I now suspect that universities are places where they learn how not to think. So shielded are students from anything that might offend them that they shy away from awkward questions.

I remember that one of the questions in my Moral Philosophy paper in my Oxford finals was: “Why is eating babies wrong?” I think I argued that that which is intuitively disgusting is usually rooted in deep instincts engineered by our evolutionary psychology which have been valorised over time – spiders, after all, have no compunction about eating their young… (Whatever – I got a decent grade.) But I doubt that the philosophy dons of today would be permitted to set such a question on the grounds that it might distress students.

(Just in case there is any possible ambiguity in the above paragraph let me affirm that I think that eating babies should be vigorously discouraged.)

But why have the university authorities pandered to the easily offended and easily distressed young? Because they are overwhelmingly controlled by what Doug Casey and others call cultural Marxists who wish to indoctrinate the young in a particular view of the world. Of course, there is nothing new about that. Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, famously said: Give me the child… and I will give you the man[ii].

And it’s not just universities which are right-on “woke”. Many corporations are adopting highly prescriptive policies with regard to the use of both written and spoken language. Where is all this leading in terms of the political domain? Doug Casey thinks that the election of Donald Trump was actually the “last hurrah” for traditional America. Casey is often described as conservative but he self-identifies as a libertarian and is not a fan of Mr Trump for three main reasons:

His foreign policies are generally warlike and dangerous. His monetary policy of endorsing zero interest rates, more debt, and money printing is idiotic. His fiscal policy of running trillion-dollar deficits is disastrous.

Ordinary Americans voted for Mr Trump in their millions because he was nota politician – and because he was not Hilary Clinton, in fact he was the Anti-Clinton and his campaign was cleverly configured around that idea. That notwithstanding, the 2016 presidential election was a very close-run thing (Hilary actually polled more votes than Donald). In 2020 there will be a lot more young people voting and many more migrants. Both demographics hold very negative perceptions of Mr Trump.

To give some historical perspective to all this, there was a similar cultural revolution back in the 1960s which started in the universities and then manifested itself on the streets. This was the so-called Generation Gap – a polarity of outlooks as between the wartime generation and their children. This found voice in the hippy movement, flower-power, psychedelic drugs and the rise of popular music (NB Woodstock) on the one hand; but also in the anti-Vietnam protests that convulsed America and les évènementsin the streets of Paris (May 1968) which ultimately brought down the government of General de Gaulle.

The difference between then and now is that, unlike in 1968, almost all youngsters go to college these days in the US and Europe; and radical thinking starts at a younger age. Just consider the “strikes” by school children in the UK over the climate emergency issue. (A form of truancy which has been entirely indulged by the teaching profession.)


Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent/Democrat, Vermont) and Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York) have literally millions of supporters across the USA now. The membership of the Democratic Socialist Party of America has risen five-fold over the last two years. Doug Casey thinks that there is nothing that can be done to reverse the trend amongst the young towards utopian-socialist ideals and that it is only a matter of time before America gets a socialist president.

Mr Sanders, your hour has come.

UK: political correctness goes from silly to nasty

Recently Goldsmiths College (part of the University of London) announced its intention to ban beef burgers as part of its fight against climate change. This from an institution 40 of whose academics wrote to The Guardian in support of Mr Corbyn under the banner Stop Jeremy Corbyn’s trial by media over anti-Semitism.

Last year Goldsmith’s LGBTQ+ society made headlines by tweeting its opposition to Trans-exclusionary radical feminists. A number of academics have found their careers under threat for speaking out on trans issues. The Government, as part of a widespread consultation, asked Professor Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, whether the law should be changed such that gender identity should be a matter of self-identification rather than biology. (Next year’s UK census will allow people to choose which gender they feel they are!)

Professor Stock expressed the view that self-identification of gender is unsound. For so doing she became the object of demonstrations and of online abuse. Very few fellow academics came to her defence for fear that they might receive the same treatment. In the meantime, children are being taught in schools that there are dozens of genders – not just the two that I and most of my readers were bought up with. (I suspect there are thousands of teachers out there who are just too afraid to dissent.)

The same Goldsmith Twitter account then went to try to defend the Soviet system of penitential gulags. But if Soviet Russia is to be forgiven its excesses, Britain and other western states are never to be forgiven their role in the slave trade. Cambridge University has initiated an inquiry into the university’s role in slavery. In August, Glasgow University announced that it would pay £20 million in “reparations” in view of its having benefited from sugar plantations in the West Indies in the 18th century. The fact that Britain banned the slave trade in the 1830s and disrupted the export of slaves from West Africa is rarely celebrated.

Implications for investors

It’s one thing to be passionate about social justice for minorities and to stand up against environmental degradation, of which climate change is an undoubted part. But what has happened is that all these causes, often justifiable in themselves, have now been wrapped up by a fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-business agenda. Capitalists – “the rich” – are deemed as, by their very nature, exploitative and cruel, and opposed to all progressive causes. Further, the New Left believes that capitalism is responsible for climate change. Conservationists are conservatives; but greens are now reds.

This leads to some curious perversions of ideology. Because America is still the emblem of capitalism, the woke are normally anti-American; but because Israel is joined at the hip with America, and supposedly represses Palestinians, there has been a disturbing rise in so-called anti-Zionism, which, in turn, morphs into old fashioned anti-Semitism. All this is happening at a moment when the younger generation, which has no memory of the disaster of Soviet communism or the tyranny of Maoist China, is seeking an alternative model.

But if the City can contemplate life under a Corbyn-McDonnell government, why can’t investors? Let’s think it through.

Labour’s plans for worker democracy would involve the confiscation of shares worth around £300 billion in almost 7,000 companies according to law firm Clifford Chance. Labour’s wide-ranging programme of nationalisation at less-than-market prices would also hurt investors. And, under a so-called right-to-buy scheme private landlords would be obliged to sell properties to tenants at a discount, potentially devastating thousands of small-time landlords.


Labour would abolish the charitable status of private schools which exempts them from VAT – for ideological reasons. Obviously, private schools are not businesses. This could be in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights which states that governments must allow parents to educate their children in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Corporation tax would be increased from 19 percent to 26 percent just as our competitors in the EU are cutting theirs. The top tax rate would be increased with possibly a cap on executive pay. But that is only the beginning. Once a state rides roughshod over private property rights there is no end to what it might do. Labour would effectively inaugurate a planned economy. No foreign investor would want to touch an economy where assets can be filched by the government at any moment. Thus exchange controls would probably have to be imposed early-on which, ironically, would become possible once free of EU rules.

Labour will make us poorer – no question. But try telling that to the young.

***

Gold has now topped $1,500 for the first time since 2013. How high can it go? With geopolitical tensions rising in the Gulf, I’ll ponder that question shortly.

[i] See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/berkeley-california-to-ban-gendered-language-like-manhole-manpower-and-firemen/

[ii] This often-repeated quotation may have been mischievously attributed to Loyola by Voltaire.