Ideology 101

Nationalism: Everything is the fault of Foreigners.

Feminism: Everything is the fault of Men.

Anarchism: Everything is the fault of the Government.

Socialism: Everything is the fault of the Rich.

Capitalism: Everything is the fault of the Lazy.

Liberalism: Everything is the fault of the Heartless.

Conservatism: Everything is the fault of the New.

Environmentalism: Everything is the fault of the People.


Because... like all good fiction, Ideology needs a Villain.

The One Percent

The Rich getting richer and the Poor getting poorer, and it's about time the rich were made to pay - that's the usual refrain. But here's a fact for you: much is made of the 1% who own most of the wealth, and most of you reading this will imagine that you are one of the 99% who are being cheated. The truth, however, is that if you take the 1% stat and apply it GLOBALLY, (as it was meant to be), then anybody earning over £25,000 a year becomes one of the global elite. That's nurses, bus drivers, factory workers, etc. The fact is, compared to most of the world, most of us in Britain (and the rest of the West) are rich. See those migrants dying as they try to cross the mediterranean? That's how desperate they are to live the life you live. Now imagine that most of the world's poor had the political power to have your money redistributed to them, taken straight from your salary. Imagine that they were no longer happy with your charity offerings and public gestures. Imagine if they had the power to force you to hand over your house, your caravan, your clothes from Next and H&N, your Ford Mondeo and your football season ticket. How would it feel? Well, that's what this poster is promoting, if you think about it. It's great fun to bash the greed of the rich - but wait till it's your turn.

Anti-austerity

The Anti-Austerity movements are little more than nostalgic attempts to hang on to a past that has begun to wane.

The Truth About Immigration

It's election season in the UK, and the issue of immigration has crept reluctantly into the debates. It's not an issue that politicians like to discuss much, and there's a reason why. Here are some truths about immigration that many involved in the debate would rather you didn't know or think about. They are simple truths.

Small scale immigration is easy for a society to assimilate, and causes no problems. Large scale immigration causes problems for every society that experiences it.

When people complain about immigration, they are not complaining about immigration per se, but about large scale immigration.

The contemporary obsession with racism means that immigration is often treated as a moral issue, rather than an economic one. This is how it is taught in schools today: It's cool to be okay with immigration, and racist not to be okay with it, because the Nazis were racist and they're evil, and it's not cool to be evil.

Immigration before World War II was statistically insignificant. It rose significantly in the 50s and 60s. Immigration in the late 90s and after 2000 is two to three times higher than it was in the 50s and 60s. Immigration in the past twenty years is higher than at any time in UK history.

Population growth in the UK recently is entirely due to immigration. Without large scale immigration, the UK population would have shrunk.

In the southeast of England, schools are overcrowded, and councils have introduced arbitrary rules to cope with parental demand. In the rest of England, rural councils are closing small schools because there are not enough children to fill the necessary places.

The majority of recent immigrants live in the southeast of England.

Overcrowding in the southeast of England puts pressure on housing, raising the prices. It puts pressure on the NHS, increasing waiting times. It puts pressure on any infrastructure that has not been improved in time to cope with it.

The southeast of England is the economic powerhouse of the country. Whatever happens there affects the rest of the country. This is why house prices remain high, even after the 2007 credit crunch.

Indigenous UK born white people are not having enough babies to sustain their numbers. UK born black and Asian people whose parents arrived in the 60's are not having as many babies as their parents did.

The elderly population is growing, with more old people in the UK than ever before.

The majority of immigrants are young. The ones that stay will grow old some day.

Large scale immigration into cities creates enclaves of foreign born nationals who do not assimilate into UK society. They bring their home cultures with them instead.

Multicultural societies are not harmonious. The boundaries between the sub-cultures are a constant source of tension. When times are hard, these tensions easily become violent.

Austria used to be a multicultural empire. When it collapsed after World War I, it disintegrated into numerous nationalist and fascist states.

Yugoslavia used to be a multicultural country. When it collapsed, it disintegrated into numerous nationalist and fascist states.

Liberal society encourages immigration. Immigrant enclaves are socially conservative, and often suspicious of, if not hostile to, liberal norms.

Large scale immigration changes the nature of societies.

Most immigrants arrive as poorly paid manual workers and live in the poorest areas. They increase the number of poor people in a city, and compete with them for jobs, housing, school places and health care.

Liberal values are middle class values. Most immigrants do not live in middle class areas, nor take middle class jobs in sufficient numbers to drive down wages. This is why the middle classes are not threatened by the thought of immigration.

Most inner city teachers do not live in the same areas as their inner city pupils.

A nation's prosperity is entirely dependent on its population. A large, dense population is necessary for a thriving economy, even in the internet age.

An industrialised nation needs enough young people coming into the system to remain productive.

Elderly people in a society are a cost that is paid for by the work of the young.

The costs to the NHS of an aging society are huge. The costs to the country, with regard to pensions is huge. These costs are larger than at any time in UK history.

The indigenous population in the UK is growing older and is not having enough babies.

Among the middle classes, babies are seen as a lifestyle choice. Nobody sees them as vital to the nation's integrity. Nobody thinks like that anymore.

Mass immigration is a Capitalist phenomenon. Capitalism is about the liberal breaking down of boundaries. Money can now travel freely around the world, investing in whatever country it likes. Jobs can now travel freely around the world, with companies moving their offices and factories to where the wage level is cheaper. Now, with immigration, cheap workers can cross boundaries too.

Corporations love mass immigration, for the same reasons that they love other aspects of capitalism. Cheaper workers and lowered wages mean less cost and more profit. For managers of companies, it's simply a matter of economics.

The NHS needs immigrant nurses and doctors to cope with the aging, sicker society it serves.

Without a big influx of immigrant dentists in the last decade, NHS dentistry would have collapsed.

The UK has been in decline since the end of World War I. The two world wars bankrupted the country and destroyed its empire. The post-war influx of immigrants helped stave off a chronic shortage of workers for a while, but it could not prevent the economy from going into free fall during the seventies. Prosperity arrived in the eighties only because of the massive inflow of East Asian credit into the Western economies. It was a temporary solution.

In the nineties, the UK economy was still weak. Its industry was gone, its population continued to age, and its costs continued to rise. As did its debt, because it could only borrow its way out of trouble. This was unsustainable.

From the late nineties onwards, UK governments have quietly opened the door to mass immigration like never before, as a way of saving the economy.

Every nation in Europe suffers from an aging population. Only Germany has a strong industrial base. The rest are struggling to balance their books. Some seem stuck in permanent recession. Greece is bankrupt.

The only reason the UK seems to be doing so well economically compared to the rest of Europe is not because of the strength of its Pound, or its brilliant approach to business and innovation. These are fictions. The only reason it is doing so well is because of the number of young immigrants keeping our economy afloat and churning.

Immigrants travel the length of Europe to get to the UK. They pass through perfectly civilised nations to get to us. Clearly there is something about the UK they like.

It is illegal, under EU law, to discriminate against immigrants. Many EU countries, however, manage to circumvent these laws, placing administrative barriers to immigrants entering their health care systems, housing or welfare schemes. The UK is attractive to immigrants because these barriers are reduced or non-existent.

The UK is an island. Its borders are easily sealed, if the government really wanted that. Instead, our government quietly encourages that border's infiltration. They publicly posture against the issue of asylum seekers (a tiny number compared to other immigrants) to appease public unease, and pretend to be concerned about the UK working class's concerns.

But the truth is, if mass immigration were to be stopped now, then in less than a generation we would become like Greece. In other words, we would be in serious economic trouble.

Immigration is eroding and splintering UK society. It is also the only thing holding it up.

Behind the scenes, the UK economy has been in decline for a long time, and mass immigration is just one of the sticking plasters being used to hold it together.

Like all sticking plasters, it's a temporary solution that won't last.

"Yes we can!"

Link: Syriza Dumps Marx For Blair


The Blairite revolution is an increasingly common phenomenon in politics today. It involves secretly dumping the old affiliations of left and right whilst pretending to be an inclusive movement 'for the people'. Ideology is dead, and what is important now is to be seen to be young, fresh and populist. Politics is replaced by PR. Liberal pieties and collectivist slogans are waved as crowd pleasing flags, while behind the stage curtain, neo-liberalism is pursued with ever greater vengeance in order to desperately grab as much money as possible from the shrinking western economies. Obama represents the same trend in the US: a handsome, charismatic speaker who appeals to young student activists still in thrall to radical left-wing 60's ideals who then, once elected, does the opposite of what the idealists wanted. Syriza is another such party - a party that is actually just a small clique of PR men with no real political conviction. They have just returned from negotiations with the EU bankers with little to show for their apparent effort. They were filmed looking defiant and rebellious prior to this, yet they were also commited to staying in the Euro, and commited to the same European integration dream. As a result, their bargaining position was weak. They could have threatened to turn towards Russia and China for the money they needed, but instead they accepted US demands to maintain sanctions against Russia, and they begged the EU for more money. Everyone thought they would herald a revolution in European politics, changing the western capitalist landscape for ever, but the truth is they never wanted to leave that landscape at all. All they wanted was a bit more spare change. In Spain, the new political party of Podemos (We Can), which is also seen as fresh and revolutionary, will likely turn out to be the same - pretty boys with winning smiles, consultant-designed slogans and faded Karl Marx T-shirts underneath their smooth new suits. Politics is dead, and ideology is just a cloak to hide the fact that we have had no new ideas since the 19th Century. PRolitics is now the name of the game, funded by the same wealthy backers that these people pretend to despise.

Individualism vs Community Responsibility

"The truth is, for most of human history, women have been devising ways to pull men away from individualism and into family and community. This is an absolute priority for women when children come along – men are needed to protect and provide. The reality is men can get along pretty well on their own, and that is as true now as it ever was."

Laura Perrins



Perhaps it is no surprise that prominent men during the Enlightenment advocated personal liberty and turned it into an attractive philosophy. It is natural, though perhaps ironic, that women came to demand liberty too, further freeing men from the constraints and responsibility of family-centred culture. Women demanded the freedom to have sex whenever they wanted without the social tutting, and demanded the right to raise children alone without the social shame. This too has suited men who get to have it both ways and who no longer feel the social pressure to 'settle down' and 'do the right thing'. The State has taken over the position of providing for women now, but that is so impersonal and disatisfying that women are perhaps beginning to feel the loss.

Women get to do well out of classical liberalism and feminism - provided they live like men.

Markets follow - they do not lead.

"First, we believed in the theology of development, only to see development founder on corruption and the incapacity of weak state structures to develop honest government and equitable programmes for growth.

"Then we told ourselves globalisation itself - capitalism's sheer voracious dynamism - would bring prosperity and order in its wake. But markets alone cannot create order: markets require order if they are to function efficiently, and the only reliable provider of order - law, procedure, safety and security - is the state.

"A globalised economy cannot function without this structure of authority and coercive power, and where it breaks down markets break down, and crime, chaos and terror take root in the rotten, unpoliced interstices.

"Prophets of the benefits of global market integration have been foolish enough to envisage a future world that does away with the need for the state. But large corporations will not patrol the street corners. They will not provide the schools, roads and hospitals that distinguish society from the jungle. Only states can provide these goods."

Michael Ignatieff
Empire Lite (2003)

Middle Class Hypocrisy

Guderian is in danger of becoming my favourite commenter. Here's another gem from a Spiked article:

Dear Tim

I see you are a bit bewildered by the ways of the modern world. Let me see if I can help you understand 

You see, when the Guardian says something, we call this an "opinion" but when the Daily Mail says something, we call this "being judgemental". That's because Guardian readers are being insightful whereas Daily Mail readers are being prejudiced.

Money is also different, £7.45 an hour is shitty money to most people, but Guardianistas call that "living wage".

Same deal with food. A piece of beef in a bun is a "gourmet burger" in Guardianland but it's junk food when the working class eat it.

And finally sex. When the nice people have sex they are expressing their sublime love for each other but when my window cleaner does his wife he's just giving in to his animal instincts, treating her like an object and perpetuating some kind of macho crap.

So don't fret Tim, eventually you'll get the hang of it.

All the best

Get a grip

Some brilliant comments by Sinister-Dexter in an article about the comedian Russel Brand's call for a 'revolution of consciousness'. Here's S-D's take on modern trendy activism of the kind lauded by Brand:

Western activism over the past decade has descended into an ego stroking exercise. I often meet people who have flown into the country to attend a summit on climate change, when i question them on their usefulness I always get the same response: "We're raising awareness!" which is what people end up saying about Brand when it's pointed out he has no substance, no solutions, and his revolution doesn't even have an exit strategy! "Raising awareness" is for backslapping narcissists who want to believe they're saving the world but don't want to do any of the boring shit, like, actually saving the world. "I really care about the planet, y'know? That's why I've organised this Green event, we're going to have DJs, and people speaking about polar bears, and face painting, and it will all raise awareness!" No. You are useless, just like Brand, you're a distraction, a feel-good exercise. There are people doing hard work to actually solve such issues, intelligent, studious people working on solutions. Shitting on such people and shouting "let's burn it all down and rebuild it based on the principle of love, not money!" might make you feel good for an hour or so, but it draws attention away from the committed people who spend their entire lives working on solutions to these problems.

 And here he is on the 'disaffected youth' of today:

 And seriously, when has the youth not been disaffected? The youth aren't that fragile, disaffection is a phase, a natural part of growing up. I feel disaffected with the disaffected British youth, whereas the disaffected youth in other countries riot for political change, in the UK the disaffected youth riot for a new iPhone. Funny how you didn't see the disaffected youth in turkey or Egypt robbing JD Sports.

Cohesion

Cohesion requires an enemy.

Into the Sunset

I have examined liberalism in this blog, and recently I have mentioned socialism. I should mention that, while a diluted and increasingly warped form of liberalism still exists in modern life (in the West), socialism is but a forlorn looking phantom compared to its old self.

If you are reading this in the US, you may perhaps think that socialism still exists in the UK, or at least in Europe. I cannot speak for continental Europe, but here in the UK socialism is like a small church with a dwindling congregation. There may be some earnest discussion among believers during the coffee morning, but the church roof is leaking and, with the grassroots gone, there is neither the money nor the expertise to fix it.

In fact, if it wasn't for its virulent atheism, British socialism would probably look like the Church of England, also mired in unfashionability and irrelevance.

As it is, both of them can walk hand in hand into the sunset together. Considering that they both sprang from the same root, it would perhaps be a fitting end.

And as conservatism is also a tired ideology preaching in an equally empty and drafty chapel, then maybe they can make it a threesome.

The rule of law

"The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is their own adversaries who are being prosecuted."

George Orwell, 1945, 'Freedom of the Park'.

Socialism

"Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has "never had a chance". This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries–Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France–the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism.... These parties have, in practice, at every historical test–and there have been many–either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come."

 George Orwell, 'James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution'.

How equal? How radical?

It shouldn't surprise me, but it does. This excerpt from the Education Secretary Michael Gove's speech to Brighton College does make me wonder what has happened to the working classes, who flooded into public life after WW2. They've even been kicked out of their own institutions by the upper middle classes, who then claim to speak on their behalf.

It's not just the Socialist Worker's Party that's a sham then.


Excerpt:
"It is remarkable how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated.

Around the Cabinet table – a majority – including myself – were privately educated.

Around the Shadow Cabinet table the Deputy Leader, the Shadow Chancellor, the Shadow Business Secretary, the Shadow Olympics Secretary, the Shadow Welsh Secretary and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development were all educated at independent schools.
On the bench of our supreme court, in the precincts of the bar, in our medical schools and university science faculties, at the helm of FTSE 100 companies
and in the boardrooms of our banks, independent schools are – how can I best put this – handsomely represented.

You might hear some argue that these peaks have been scaled by older alumni of our great independent schools – and things have changed for younger generations.

But I fear that is not so.

Take sport – where by definition the biggest names are in their teens, twenties and thirties.

As Ed Smith, the Tonbridge-educated former England player, and current Times journalist, points out in his wonderful new book “Luck”:
Twenty-five years ago, of the 13 players who represented England on a tour of Pakistan, only one had been to a private school. In contrast, over two thirds of the current team are privately educated. You’re 20 times more likely to go on and play for England if you go to private school rather than state school.

The composition of the England rugby union team and the British Olympic team reveal the same trend.
Of those members of England’s first 15 born in England, more than half were privately educated.

And again, half the UK’s gold medallists at the last Olympics were privately educated, compared with seven per cent of the population.

It’s not just in sport that the new young stars all have old school ties.

It’s in Hollywood, Broadway and on our TV screens.

Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne – all old Etonians.

One almost feels sorry for Benedict Cumberbatch – a lowly Harrovian – and Dan Stevens – heir to Downton Abbey and old boy of Tonbridge – is practically a street urchin in comparison.

If acting is increasingly a stage for public school talent one might have thought that at least comedy or music would be an alternative platform for outsiders.

But then –

Armando Iannucci, David Baddiel, Michael McIntyre, Jack Whitehall, Miles Jupp, Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller and Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were all privately educated.

2010’s Mercury Music Prize was a battle between privately educated Laura Marling and privately-educated Marcus Mumford.

And from Chris Martin of Coldplay to Tom Chaplin of Keane – popular music is populated by public school boys.

Indeed when Keane were playing last Sunday on the Andrew Marr show everyone in that studio – the band, the presenter and the other guests – Lib Dem peer Matthew Oakeshott, Radio 3 Presenter Clemency Burton-Hill and Sarah Sands, editor of the London Evening Standard - were all privately educated.

Indeed it’s in the media that the public school stranglehold is strongest.
The Chairman of the BBC and its Director-General are public school boys.

And it’s not just the Evening Standard which has a privately-educated editor.

My old paper The Times is edited by an old boy of St Pauls and its sister paper the Sunday Times by an old Bedfordian.

The new editor of the Mail on Sunday is an old Etonian, the editor of the Financial Times is an old Alleynian and the editor of the Guardian is an Old Cranleighan.

Indeed the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last 60 years…

But then many of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers are also privately educated.

George Monbiot of the Guardian was at Stowe, Seumas Milne of the Guardian was at Winchester and perhaps the most radical new voice of all --Laurie Penny of the Independent – was educated here at Brighton College."

It's all about me

Apparently there was once a book published, entitled Everything That Men Know About Women.

Every page was blank.

Ho, ho, ho.

Of course, as a stunt, a book entitled Everything That Women Know About Men would be too expensive to produce.

Every page would be a mirror.

Decline and Fall

For his novel Foundation, Isaac Asimov is said to have been inspired by Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Wherever he got his information from, he certainly understood the symptoms of a society in decline, as evinced by this scene in Foundation:

 '"We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the periphery they've lost atomic power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has blown up because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that atomic technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict atomic power."'

That was in 1951. This year, in Britain, after a series of relatively dry winters that have depleted underground aquifers, a couple of months of almost continuous rain has produced frequent flash flooding. First because the ground was too dry to absorb it, then because the ground was too wet to absorb it.

Continuous immigration and urban expansion in the south-east of England has resulted in water shortages and hosepipe bans. Because the infra-structure in place was built by the Victorians and is now out of date, having been unable to keep pace with population needs.

And the solution? To build more reservoirs that can trap and store all that flood water flushing down towards the sea?

No. The chief recommendation is that water meters should be made mandatory in everyone's homes to discourage them from using water.

This is in Britain, an island surrounded by water, and with a temperate, exceedingly damp climate. But current fashions dictate that we treat water as scarce.

This is a minor example of the mindset of decline that Asimov highlighted. Of course he was talking about 'atomic' power, so how does this compare to the ideas surrounding nuclear power today?

Well, nuclear power is being rolled back too. The recent tsunami in Japan and the problems it caused when a nuclear reactor went into meltdown has caused a rethink of nuclear power there, but nuclear power is also being abandoned in Germany, in spite of it having a good safety record there. And France, 100% self sufficient in carbon-free electricity thanks to it's unique and far-sighted nuclear network, is also cutting back, with the incoming President Hollande pledging to cut France's nuclear power generators by half.

Europe has been in decline since 1914. Its greater exposure to the 2008 credit crash - in spite of being more social-democrat and less casino-capitalist than the US - is down to its systemic weakness and its crumbling foundations.

It could also be put down to what could be called a 'decline mindset'.

When a civilization is ripe, it tastes sweet.

When it goes soft, it starts to rot.

Comrades, pass me the champagne.

The Socialist Workers Party makes me laugh. It's made up almost entirely of students and graduates, and it's run by university lecturers and academics. A worker's party with no workers in it?

It's a Walther Mitty organisation really.

Socialism is just a bourgeois hobby horse these days.

The gap between the rich and the poor.

The gap between the rich and the poor is supposed to be getting bigger. Guardian and BBC types frequently point to the sky high earnings of city fat cats compared to the scrapings of the underclass.
There will be trouble and social schism they say, often aligning themselves on the side of the poor against the rich, sometimes even imagining themselves to be part of the masses. Social commentators in the Guardian still cheer or quietly support the agitations of the downtrodden. Some see themselves as 'the workers' on the simplistic basis that 'anyone who works is a worker'. Some look forward to a day of reckoning for the rich.
They ought to be careful what they wish for.

The rich are a tiny minority in this country. To most people they are fairly invisible. How many people have seen a millionaire in their average week? The majority of people around the country are unlikely to come across one in their entire lives. Except on the TV.
The underclass, though much talked about, is also fairly invisible. Very few people are aware of conditions in some estates, or see what police and social workers see everyday. The underclass are fragmented and tend to live in small ghettos. Society is able to ignore their problems, or ignore them as a problem, or romanticise them and their problems, because they remain confined to specific areas, from which they rarely venture far from. And as a percentage of the country's population, they are a tiny proportion of the whole.

There is another category of 'rich' person however who is very visible in everyday life. They live in fairly nice houses. They drive fairly nice cars. They wear fairly nice clothes and have fairly nice gadgets. They go on fairly nice holidays. They are the upper middle class - the occupiers of the overlapping circles of the Guardian and the BBC, as well as Channel 4, the Telegraph and the Times. People who don't actually think of themselves as rich and who are mostly unaware that they are on the other side of a line that divides them from another, poorer group - the lower middle class.

The story of who the middle class is these days in Britain is the story of how the working class fractured and apparently disappeared. It was the decline of manufacturing and the start of the credit boom in the eighties that destroyed the working class. Those who couldn't adapt fell down to become the underclass. Those who could grabbed the credit and stepped up to become the lower middle class - skilled tradesmen who suddenly got to live in semis, drive more than one car that wasn't knackered and go on holiday abroad far more frequently than their parents ever managed.
Those who used to be called the middle class were nudged upwards to become the upper middle class.
This is why New Labour moved to the middle. There was nowhere else to go.

Modeling themselves on the US, the majority of people began to identify themselves as middle class. The 'new' middle class became the majority, taking over from the working class. Middle class sensibilities became the norm, no longer challenged by cruder and less politically correct working class ones. The upper middle class, whether they recognised it or not, were the elite - evangelists for the moral narrative of the country: a distinct brand of soft left liberalism. Which is why the Conservatives increasingly embraced a softer, more liberal conservatism. They had no choice.

And the dividing line between the upper and lower middle classes? A university education. The same line that divided the old working classes from the middle classes. A degree remains the gateway to the higher paying careers. The jobs below that line are nowhere near the same level. And surprisingly, given the meritocratic rise of the past forty years, that line is hardening. A teaching assistant earns a lot less than a teacher. Without a degree, it will soon be impossible for a vocationally qualified teaching assistant to become a teacher. And that's just one example. Throughout the spectrum the lower middle classes will find that the upper middle classes have pulled the ladder up.

Lower middle class lifestyles have only been sustained by credit. There has been no massive revolution in manufacturing innovation or a sustained growth in GDP to fuel the affluence of the masses. Massive inflows of investment cash from a surging East Asia since the eighties has allowed more money to slosh about the investment system. Banks felt able to dish it out even to high risk categories. Credit cards used to be jealously hoarded by banks. By the nineties they were simply giving them away. It was the inflow of money and our enjoyment of it that caused the credit bubble. Its burst was inevitable.

Credit is now being squeezed and this means big problems for the lower middle class. It's their debts that are now a burden. It's their lifestyle that is suffering as they fail to afford the things that they'd only just started to take for granted. The credit boom may not come back and they will discover that their new found wealth was not built on solid ground. They will slide.

The growing gap between the rich and the poor is actually between the upper middle class and the lower middle class.

And if the lower middle class fall out of their middle class lifestyles, will they become the working class again? No, because the industry that gave the working class their identity is gone. In the 'information age', in a service economy, the working class has become the servant class, feeding burgers to, tending the material possessions of and minding the children of the better off. They won't see the upper middle classes as 'one of them'. And they will come to resent them, their culture and their attitude. And their liberal moral stance.

Upper middle class types who have preached egalitarianism have recently stoked up the flames of class war in their desire to 'bash the bankers'. They should be very careful about how they fan those flames. They might find that they are standing on petrol-soaked firewood.

The politics of Accretion

Accretion is the process by which the planets in our solar system formed. When the sun was born, all the left over bits were left spinning around it. Gradually these bits started to clump together. As the formed bodies got bigger, their gravitational mass increased, drawing in more bits and making the mass bigger still until, eventually, a planet was formed that had hoovered up most of the fragments in its orbital path around the sun.

This is why every planet has it's own orbital path.

The Asteroid Belt is an example of what all the planet forming bits look like - the process of accretion was prevented from taking its course here by the disruptive influence of Jupiter's gravity.

The theory of Accretion also works well in the description of the business world. Out of a starting mass of tiny companies, bigger companies start to form, sucking in and taking over smaller failing companies until they grow to the size of corporations. The market is then dominated by a few corporations rather than a gigantic mass of small independent companies all with equal clout.

We've seen this in western business culture that began in the 17th and 18th centuries. And we've seen it recently with the Internet boom.

The Internet was supposed to democratize everything. Ordinary people would have the ability to start up their own venture on the net. Mass ingenuity would outmanoeuvre the less nimble big corporations. The dot.com boom was the result. Yet in just one decade (rather than the centuries needed in older business) most of the startups went to the wall or were bought out, and we now have the giant Googles, Amazons, etc. We start out with a clean slate, and the process of accretion happens regardless.

Capitalism starts out with lots of lizards and ends up with a few dinosaurs taking over.

Socialism simply dispenses with the lizards and replaces them with just one dinosaur.

The process of accretion has also occurred in the history of societies.

Humanity began as hunter-gatherer Bands. Lots of them. And they travelled, and frequently fought (be under no illusion about this last point, the evidence is very clear). Tribes then formed, which were simply groups of bands uniting under one chieftain. There was nothing voluntary about this 'uniting' however. The chieftain was part of an aristocratic elite and the bands were subdued.

Tribes, often united by an elite, a language and sometimes a religion, grew bigger. Failing tribes were conquered or broken up, their fragments sucked in by the larger tribes. The remaining tribes fought amongst each other until one emerged victorious, subduing the others and becoming the ruling elite of a much larger entity that we now call Nations.

Accretion is not the result of 'Will', or the desire to co-operate. It occurs by gravitational force. Or simply force.

One day the world may be run as one complete, indivisible entity, with one world government. But it won't be because all the nation states chose to co-operate and voluntarily subordinate themselves. It will be because one state militarily, economically or culturally - or all three - conquered all the others and made them agree to become vassals.

Are we near that condition now?

No. The UN is, like the EU, mostly voluntary, and therefore doomed to disappear under its own flabby irrelevance. The US, while more powerful than any state in history, shows us that it will take a lot more to subdue the entire world. The process of accretion continues.

Unlike in space however, accretion in business and in governments is accompanied by the constant re-breaking up and re-moulding of entities at periodic intervals.

Whether it was Persia, Rome, Ottoman or Spain, the old dinosaurs were broken back into lizards, only to reconstitute bigger dinosaurs elsewhere.

Looking at history and at all of contemporary world politics, there is absolutely no evidence - not one crumb - to suggest that this will not continue.