Opinion: The United Kingdom could be sleepwalking into socialism.

Thank you to Truth Reporter for submitting this Opinion piece.

COVID-19 continues to throw spanners into our works at an alarming rate.  Just when you thought things were bad, we get the worrying news that Boris Johnson has been admitted to intensive care. All the while the hysteria mounts, helped greatly by the mainstream media who seem to have a mawkish joy in reporting bad news. 

You have to have respect for the great British public, communities are doing their best to pull together and the way that people have put aside political differences to wish Mr Johnson a rapid recovery is gratifying to see. Despite the stiff upper lip there is a worrying trend developing in the tone of the social media chit chat – an undercurrent of dependence and self-policing that speaks to an earlier, darker era.

The public can be forgiven for not noticing their slow descent into self-imposed tyranny. The British public have never before been herded quite as cynically and quite as intensely as they are at the moment. Their supposedly unbiased and objective public service broadcasters do nothing except manipulate the narrative to cajole people into compliance and shape thinking. Reithian objectives of inform, educate and entertain have long since been consigned to history.

Social media amalgamates the sum total of all the anguish, uncertainty and hopelessness and reflects it back at the population. You only have to look at the local community social media pages to get a feel of the current mood.  People bickering if they’re seen doing something which others perceive to be transgressing the rules, others endlessly virtue signalling and tacitly pressing their peers into whatever is the current trend. 

Societies have been here before, and not so long ago. You only need to look at Soviet Russia and Germany under national socialism to find precisely the kind of social herding, self-regulation and mass propaganda that we are currently being asked to accept as the new norm. 

The worst aspect of this whole situation is that people are surrendering their liberty and freedoms for a phantom goal. The ‘lockdown’ is strangling small businesses up and down the country, the lifeblood of the economy is the army of small traders and artisans who perform a myriad of functions driving growth and forming the foundation of our prosperity.

With Mr Johnson in his sickbed who will have the courage to call a halt to this destructive lockdown? The safety of inaction and groupthink is likely to lead to a continuation of the toxic status quo which is forcing more and more of the productive and industrious into dependency and debt. 

There is something acutely sad about a person who earns their living through their skill or craftsmanship being forced to apply to a government scheme for a subsistence payment. Worse still is that once that person is absorbed into the blob, what guarantee is there that they can return to productivity?

The all-encompassing state is a central theme of socialist thinking.  The central idea of Marxism is that the people (state) own the means of production. When the government has to start issuing massive loans to keep businesses afloat what guarantees will be required? What terms will the government impose on those who take the money on offer?

Without wishing to resort to extreme rhetoric, this pandemic is a golden opportunity for socialists and socialism to advance their agenda on a grand scale. People in financial distress will sign up to pretty much anything if the survival of their business or livelihood is at stake.  We could be sleepwalking into government taking a stake in huge chunks of the productive small and medium enterprise sector using money they create from nothing with the touch of a few keys on a computer terminal. 

Imagine for a moment the small business owner faced with the choice of the loss of their income and the work they have put into their business over the years and signing for a government loan, the choice will be simple but the long term implications of accepting the government as a silent partner in your business could be significant. 

The worrying aspect of this whole situation is the lack of real critical thinking in governments, after the example of Wuhan lockdown became the only game in town despite the catastrophic effects on the economy. The economy might sound like just numbers and graphs on the screen but the economy is the lifeblood of our society and in a high debt, highly leveraged economy such as ours that blood must keep circulating otherwise the patient expires.

Other alternatives existed besides lockdown, if the UK had acted on the actual evidence from China rather than the propaganda from the WHO then the response could have been more nuanced, targeted and stratified according to risk instead of these blanket measures that are grinding the country to a halt. 

At this time all I can do is join in the wishes that Mr Johnson recovers, his incapacitation has exposed his cabinet as the collection of lightweights and chancers that I always suspected they were. We need him back. 

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