One of the biggest and cheapest jibes of Remoaners at Brexit voters was that they were too thick to know what they were voting for. It was a tag I never accepted. The only thing Brexit voters were guilty of, in my view, was for having the independence of thought to see through the tidal wave of propaganda attempting to compel them to vote for continued British membership of the EU and instead, to think for themselves and vote accordingly.
Lo and behold now and we see so much of the so-called intelligentsia, the chattering classes and the Establishment, the same people who looked down their noses at Brexit voters, now seemingly completely devoid of common sense or ability to grasp basic laws of consequence.
To give but a few examples from recent days. The wailing of so many who had been at the forefront of the endless demands for more and stricter lockdowns during the covid crisis now complaining at the inevitable rises in tax, particularly the current national insurance increases as the Government desperately grapples to begin meeting the cost of this collective madness that gripped so many.
Then we have the wailing at the unprecedented rises in energy prices. Yet again very few seem to make the connection between these rises and recurring energy shortages and the years of campaigning to close down or curtail coal extraction and gas and oil production and switch our reliance to far more unpredictable so-called renewable energy.
Next we see understandable horror at the return of rampant levels of inflation not seen for decades, following endless printing of money, politely called quantitative easing to fund government largesse. In reality this is a cruel and cynical theft of peoples' hard earned savings whilst governments gain from the true depths of their accumulated debts being reduced as the currency is increasingly debased and devalued.
Point this out to any of those demanding more and more government spending and more and more irrational curtailing of fossil fuels and all you get is a shrug of the shoulders or a complete denial of any link. Cause and effect would appear to have been thrown out of the window.
To cap it all, we have a political class unable and/or unwilling to deal with things which can be seen, such as controlling illegal movements of people between international frontiers or defining basic differences between males and females, yet who pretend to think they can control an unseen, airborne virus and that they can control the weather and the climate and that we should trust their very questionable ideas for doing so. We also have a media class which largely shares those same mentalities, sometimes to an even more extreme extent as they can wriggle out of being held to account too by not being in charge of implementing the ideas and policies that they advocate, even though they are a large part of driving those narratives.
On the international stage it is no better. In the case of the United States it’s actually even worse. On top of the above self-inflicted problems the inevitable outcome of so-called “Defund the Police” campaigns has seen police officers resign in droves as their forces are left unable to cope with a rising spiral of crime, especially violent crime, as police budgets are cut to the bone. All the progress in bringing crime levels down in cities such as New York has been put firmly into reverse. What else did they expect to happen?
As ever it is the poorer communities which suffer the most, whilst those in power who misled people into listening to and then voting them into office hide inside their own well-guarded gated communities. The wall now erected around Congress, at the same time as work on the wall being erected on the US - Mexico border was stalled leading to that border getting increasingly overrun, is probably just the starkest example of a cynical elite protecting themselves whilst washing their hands of their responsibilities to those who put them there.
I could add so much more. The flight on Canadian banks as investors withdrew their savings after the Canadian Government began seizing or freezing the accounts of people not convicted of breaking any law or the way that Russia turned Western sanctions on their head by requiring that Russian oil and gas exports now had to be paid in roubles, leading to the rouble appreciating in value against Western currencies to an extent that it’s now worth more than it was before the initial sanctions were imposed.
Back home, we could look at why so many of our institutions are no longer fit for purpose, can no longer do their core tasks properly and seemingly continue to exist as ends in themselves, serving themselves above and beyond anyone else and getting so much wrong. From the police to the NHS, from the Post Office Horizon scandal to the maternity scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS, the blind eye turned to the grooming gang scandals in so many towns and cities and the wall of silence about so many of these matters until it is too late.
However, to do so risks losing the argument in the detail. All I ask, almost in despair, is where are the grown-ups. Where are those leaders and those commentators who had a bit of common sense and who could delve beneath the surface to the truth? Those driven by a sense of public service? And why are so many so easily led? Is it the fault of our education systems and our universities which have been turned into indoctrination centres? Is it the cutting off from routes to the top in so many professions for those who never went to university but who learnt how to do things properly in the real world before rising to the top?
Some put this all down to the World Economic Forum and a plan to bring down so much of what we have and replace it with something completely different. That may or may not be so. I sometimes can’t help but think however that it is just a collapse in common sense and the throwing away of so much of what we once took for granted, including our past ways of doing things. The replacement of practicality with questionable theories and doctrines accepted as articles of faith, we can all quickly identify them without the need to mention them, and then hiding behind wishful thinking that won’t brook criticism until it is too late. I don’t pretend to have the answers but isn’t it long overdue to at least start asking the right questions?