The 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent, was a period of widespread public sector strikes over pay, significantly damaging the Labour government’s public image and leading to a loss of support for their policies. This disillusionment, combined with widespread public frustration over the disruption, created an environment where the Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher, could win the 1979 general election.
The UK media and broadcasters began the narrative that everybody’s life in the UK would be great if we just got rid of the problem, namely the Labour Government. This implied that all the tools, mechanisms, and institutions of the British/English union were perfect; it was just the governance by an imperfect Labour Government that was holding the nation back.
Mrs. Thatcher was duly elected in 1979 and enjoyed a great ‘honeymoon period’ for a while before the same media that had suggested replacing Callaghan with Thatcher would fix things and it would be Great Britain again decided maybe that wasn’t the right decision. Maybe she was the problem and holding back the return to greatness. Fortunately for her General Galtiera of Argentina, invaded the Malvinas Islands.
There is nothing our Anglo press and media love more than giving a damn good thrashing to Johnny Foreigner, be it on the sporting field or, as in this case, in a conflict. Overnight she became a female Churchill. For a short time, she became untouchable. However, our media and chattering class are like vampires; they need a constant supply of blood.
They decided that all that was wrong with the governance of old Blighty was that the Iron Lady was now past her sell-by date, and the new narrative was; she has to go to allow Mother England and her Celtic colonies to become great again!
The media ramped up the attacks on Maggie, and eventually, the men in suits arrived at number 10 to tell her that her time was up.
John Major was their new messiah; he would correct the errors of Maggie, and life would be better for one and all. When this plan didn’t bear fruit, the usual suspects started the discontent pieces in the media and on the compliant BBC. Once Murdoch and his attack dogs were set in motion, Major’s days and that of the Tories were numbered. It was one of Murdoch’s rags that found the very thing to get rid of this impediment to British greatness: the ‘tired out of ideas Tory Government,’ fiddled expenses!
Suddenly, the term “sleaze” appeared in every newspaper and political TV piece. They made sure it was associated with the Conservative party due to several scandals involving MPs, most notably the parliamentary expenses scandal that broke in the 2000s, which detailed MPs claiming excessive expenses for items like mortgages, second homes, and other allowances. This led to public outrage and calls for reform, which the vile UK media happily amplified.
Murdoch and the metropolitan chattering class had found a new messiah to make England Great Again! Enter Tony Blair, the new luvvie of the London media and broadcasters. He would fix everything, they told us. At first, the chattering class were delighted with Tony the boy wonder. Fluff pieces appeared almost every other day. They even likened him to JFK. In return, he gave them the thing the Anglos love the most: a war against an inferior and non-white nation, muslims the cherry on top. The news rooms and TV studios were bursting with tetesterone and massive erections as the British Army joined with their US allies in a war in Iraq.
The problems, though, quickly surfaced. The war was supposedly about Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t exist. Blair’s right-hand man and equally evil sidekick, Alistair Campbell’s ‘sexed-up dossier’ was exposed as a lie to justify that illegal encounter that led to 1 million Iraqi deaths.
So our equally complicit and corrupt UK media decided that Tony Blair had to go, and they had a ready-made replacement, the dour faced, history graduate they had bumped up as the Iron Chancellor, Toom Tabbard Brown. The worst thing to come out of Scotland since John Bailliol!
This man, who had spent the previous decade backstabbing his next-door neighbour Tony Blair and who had spent his entire life backstabbing his country of birth, was very quickly exposed as an utterly useless PM. Not a surprise to those of us who had watched him skulking around in the dark for decades, a truly despicable human being a totally over- promoted fool only in place because of the media and the equally stupid Labour Party that believed the media propaganda about the fool.
When the English establishment media and chattering class realised their mistake, the same tactics that were deployed to get rid of Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair was once more put in place for removing Brown.
The people in the shadows had decided they liked the cut of the jib of the new Tory leader an almost clone of Tony warmonger Blair. A posh boy, old Etonian of course, slippery as an eel dipped in oil. Photogenic, young family, fresh, new and thus far, no baggage. The choice was made, Labour out Tories back in and everything will be great again.
Of course, there has to be the pretense of democracy and a pesky General Election. However, that does not present a problem to the people who actually run the UK. *Spoiler.* it is not the guy in Number 10 or the 650 MPs at Westminster that is in charge!
So the media and broadcasters did their thing to ensure they got the outcome they wanted, and David Cameron was the new champion and PM for the UK establishment, media, broadcasters, and moneymen!
Don’t for one minute think that your actual X in the box decides the Government of the UK. The decision is taken by others, then the propaganda industry does its thing. This is a repeating cycle.
When Cameron had outlived his usefulness to the elite, he was removed, though it was a little harder this time to achieve. The damned Internet had now reached critical mass and the dead wood press didn’t hold so much sway with the public. The independent bloggers and commentators were making their presence felt. The broadcasters were still on message but the Internet was impossible to control. So bot farms were set up and Twitter and FB were bombarded with “Cameron bad, May good” tweets and posts.
When it was decided she wasn’t getting them their hard-line Brexit, she had to go, and who better for the ruling elite than another Old Etonian, Boris Johnson. Same outcome when they decided he had to go, same modus operandi, and everything will be great, Enter Liz Truss, for 45 days,(they hadnt wanted the brown chappie!) Even the men in dark suits didn’t have time or need to remove that clown!
Next up after being left with no choice,and the backing from the usual suspects, the bot farms doing their bit, enter Rishi Sunak. Just what the moneymen wanted, a millionaire married to a billionaire and an ex-Goldman Sachs spiv to boot!
When the proletariat once more, as in every other government failed, to see any improvement in their lives, the unrest began. The men in the shadows fear two things: equality, and civil unrest. So when Labour actually elected a leader without their interference, their two biggest nightmares arrived in one man, Jeremy Corbyn.
Alarm bells were going off all over the City of London and in the country estates of the Home Counties. This was a catastrophe in motion, Corbyn had to go. The whispering campaign began in the media. Corbyn was a bigoted anti-Semite, they said. Socialism is communism and bad, very bad! The bot farms went into overdrive. The Labour Friends of Israel faked outrage. Holocaust denier, friend of terrorist organisations, a Czech spy was another.
With Corbyn removed, the decision-makers could move to their next placement into number 10. So the clamour to get rid of the Tories and Sunak began, same method because the public fall for it every time. Sunak bad, Tories bad, Starmer, good guy, Labour good. If we just get rid of the Tory Government and bring in a Labour Government everything in England’s green and pleasant land will be perfect was the narrative. The present government, everytime is potrayed as the only problem, not the system of governance, nosiree!
They were right, the public fell for the propaganda as they always do and Starmer and the Labour Party were put in charge with a thumping majority. I don’t think even those in the shadows believed it could become such a shitshow in such a short time.
Now they are telling us Starmer and Labour are the problem. The only way to fix this is to get rid of them and bring in Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, then you will find yourselves living in a land of milk and honey. The British public fall for everything, why not once more? Reform will win, and guess what, it too will quickly become a shitshow!
The Democrats among us worry that at recent by-elections 70-80% of those that are entitled to vote remain at home. Believe me, the men in the shadows love it! It means the hard-core, hard of thinking morons will give them that appearance of democracy to get their man in place.
Your lives will keep getting worse as their wealth grows. They win every time, keeping us divided and giving a few access to a little gravy means the true money folk get a trough full of caviar, not Bisto! Meanwhile, as they pick your pockets, you are blaming immigrants and the unemployed for your rotten standard of living!
The one little difficulty for them at present is their main propaganda unit, the BBC, has finally been exposed as a lie factory! Changing the governments in the UK has never and will never improve the lives of the British public.
Only a root and branch transformation of our entire governance will improve our lives: a written constitution, a fair form of voting, an elected head of State, and elected second chamber are necessities.
The biggest change required is the ending of the British Union. We require four separate nations on these islands all governing themselves and a new inter-state working partnership, no dominant member a true arrangement of equals!
Josef Goebbels viewed the public as susceptible to emotional and repetitive messages, believing propaganda’s aim was complete indoctrination. He is quoted as saying, “…the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.
Sound familiar?
“JPTi strongly discourages any collaboration or funding for the individuals currently identifying themselves as the Committee of Liberation Scotland & Salvo, as their conduct has exposed a profound lack of reliability, professionalism, and integrity”
Zero to do with this article about the corrupt UK.
Never value truer observation made that –
” the hard of thinking morons will give them that appearance of democracy to get their man in place.”
” Our lives will keep getting worse as their wealth grows. They win every time, keeping us divided and giving a few access to a little gravy means the true money folk get a trough full of caviar, not Bisto! Meanwhile, as they pick your pockets, you are blaming immigrants and the unemployed for your rotten standard of living!
It was the filthy robbing Europeans and the EU who were holding back our golden future
And now its the filthy immigrants and the boat people bleeding the country dry.
And that is why without doubt the Government has announced that they have set aside £1 billion to fund 18,000 redundancies in NHS England and the Department of Health.
No doubt.the subsidy thriving jocks will not be affected like their poor hard done to English cousins.
Jock better stand ready for the future backlash for living off the backs of his southern cousins. Foreigners, the root of all our ills.
I think this article is quite on point. When it is put on paper so cleverly as Roddy has done, it seems obvious what is going on and how we are being taken for fools.
It did not dawn on me that it was the so called “press” who would decide who govern the UK/Scotland. I always thought it was something else using the press as a tool. However, in my defence, I must say I have been convinced, for quite a while now, that there is no democracy in the UK at all. And I do not mean just in Scotland. In Scotland the effect is simply exaggerated to a ridiculous level.
For a few years now I have been convinced that there are no elections as such. They are elections in name only. Fakelections. They are, in my view simply a performance to make us, the electorate, believe we have any power of decision at all. In other words, they are designed to keep us believing this is a democracy rather than a soft dictatorship in disguise. And, of course, to make us believe that the awful clown the powers that be had installed on the “driving” seat was “our” choice. So, when the clown does not perform, those same powers that be can claim that it is “our” fault, and not the fault of those powers who chose, planned and installed the clown on the (pretend) “driving” seat.
It is my view that the decision of who will win a particular “election” is made by someone, something well in advance. Then everything is set in motion to either achieve it, or, more likely, to make us believe it was “spontaneously” achieved because “we” chose it.
I find it really amusing to see how a complete fool or incompetent clown can be hyped up so much by a series of colluding propaganda mouthpieces to make them look like a groundbreaking talent. I could not believe my eyes when I saw how tiny Sunak really is. In all the pictures published of the man, he looked like a giant. That is just an example of how the mouthpieces distort reality to create a fake one.
The article above mentions how the propaganda machine when deployed on industrial scale and on overdrive changes public opinion in the UK. If I have to be honest, I do not even believe anymore that the powers that be give a toss about changing public opinion. The only thing they care about is that there is a perception by the public that it does. And that is even fading away now to the point that the dictatorship hiding behind this veneer of faux democracy is already showing its horns and fangs with the amateur dictator Starmer.
It is my view that the exaggerated deployment of propaganda deployment is the tool that can be used a posteriori to justify, in the eyes of the public, the apparent change of opinion. It is not necessarily the tool that achieves any change by itself. In other words, if somebody dares to dissent and question a result, the establishment minions can quickly dangle the rancid propaganda deployed in the past as the “cause” of that strange (but convenient for the establishment) result. Well, I don’t buy it anymore. I am of the view that the propaganda is not the “cause” of anything but rather the tool a dictator establishment uses as the excuse they can justify their diktat with.
This explains to me, for example, what is happening with labour. We are told Labour won by a landslide. But did it really? The percentage of the vote they got was even lower than the vote they got under Corbyn. There was no landslide. What there was is the combination of FPTP and low turnout. If there was real support for Labour in the first place it would not be falling from grace at such speed in so little time. Starmer premiership and leadership was nothing more than a bubble full of hot air that cooled down very, very quickly.
The concept of “percentage of the vote” is completely meaningless to demonstrate democratic support when the turnout is low, never mind if it is below 50%. In such context, the expression “percentage of the vote” is just another form of propaganda that attempts really hard to justify as valid a result as valid when, strictly speaking from a democratic point of view, it is not. The win of labour because of FPTP with so little real support in the form of votes to back up that “landslide” of seats and how quickly the whole thing is unraveling goes to show just how much of a fake democracy the so called UK “parliamentary democracy” really is. This “democracy” is not about the electorate exercising their power to decide. It is all about using the people to ratify with their participation in the fakelections the choice the establishment has already made well before the first voter cast their vote.
I have grown really, really weary of the “Professors” or “Experts” that are rather predictably wheeled out at critical time points with their so called “predictions” or “projections”, in particular regarding the resurrection in Scotland of a dead as a dodo colonial party or another. Every time one of them emerges I cannot help but laugh. I do no longer believe they are giving “predictions” or “opinions”. I am convinced they are simply propaganda tools seeking to plant in our minds the seed of whatever it is that the powers that be have already decided it will happen. In my view, the real role that those “experts” play is that of making the outrageous look normal and what the public wants, so it does not longer sound outrageous the day it is announced as the “official” result. By then, the outrageous has been regurgitated by so many propaganda mouthpieces that it has become “acceptable” by the masses. In other words, it is all an exercise on management of expectations prior to the election, so a serious wave of public dissent (civil unrest) can be avoided when the “official” result is announced.
I am of the opinion that Brown’s “vow” was also a management of expectations tool rather than a tool that changed anything in practice. It is very easy and very convenient to justify the no result with the vow, because it distracts people from looking into the possibility that the result could have been rigged.
I am incredibly suspicious of the polls. The number of polls in the last 12 years or so is impressive. But the thing is that Scotland does not have a huge adult population. With so many polls being taken, the expectation is that almost each adult in Scotland would have participated in one or know somebody who did by now. Neither I participate in any of those so called polls nor I now anyone who did nor I know anybody who knows somebody who did. And this is strange. For instance, when I compare the polls with the selection for jury service, something does not sit quite right. Several members of my family have been called for jury duty in the last 10 years and I know quite a few people at work who were called for jury duty too. Yet, I know nobody or heard of nobody who took part in those polls. How is that possible? The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the pool used for those polls is extremely small. But if so, how representative really are they?
I am also incredibly suspicious of the way the votes are counted in Scotland. In my opinion, the votes should never be moved out of the place where they have been cast until counted and the results corroborated by the chair and assistant for the polling table, all in presence of representatives of all parties. The minute somebody tells me the boxes are being moved to be counted somewhere else, alarm bells start to blaring in my head telling me that the door for cheating and fraud has been deliberately opened wide.
Because here is the thing, how many is the maximum number of voters each polling table in a single polling place has allocated to them? It cannot be much more than a few thousand max. How many of those actually vote?
So, how long would it take to count a few thousand votes (if that at all)? One hour?
Isn’t far, far, far easier and much less likely to make mistakes when you only have two people to count the ballots of a single table in a polling station than when you have several people counting the ballots of a mix of, not tables from one polling places, but many tables of several polling places?
And more importantly, where is more likely for cheating to happen, when you do not move the boxes, count in situ and you have in front of you the list with the number of voters who cast a vote, or when you do not even know how many boxes you are supposed to be counting because the counting is being done by several people at the same time?
I have never taken part in the counting of ballots in Scotland. But I have been present during the count of votes for one table in a couple of elections in another country. Counting the votes did not take even one hour. Then the report was completed in presence of the witnesses from different political parties, communicated to the government and the report and the ballots taken to the court. Very little scope for cheating. When I compare that with the way the “elections” take place here and how the ballots are counted, I shake my head in disbelief.
Needless to say that I am convinced we were cheated in the referendum. The case of the postal votes was simply a joke too far.
I see the refusal of Swinney and STurgeon before him of making any effort to achieve a pro-indy supermajority, or unity of the pro-indy movement as part of the same propaganda machine mentioned above. It is the engineered fall back excuse that can be dangled after the election as the justification for the permanence of a rather suspiciously high number of colonial representatives in Holyrood when there should be very few left by now.
There is something about all this hype for Reform that does not sit quite right with me. I smell a rat. A big one. It is constantly in the press, the broadcasters, even some bloggers appear to be amplifying the message. And let’s not forget the stupidity of Swinney and his convention against Reform validating it. Is all this a form of free marketing or is this just another round of propaganda mouthpieces colluding to manage our expectations in preparation for the outrageous “official” result the establishment has chosen for us this time?
So, what is the likelihood the establishment will rig the result if the new darling of the deep state Reform UK does not manage to make a splash in Holyrood?
Thank you for your comment it is worthy of being an article in its own right. I do,of course,share your concerns. The UK is not a democracy it is at best a Feudal Autocracy and I agree 💯 our vote is a sop to make the public believe they decide the result.
I agree with the content of your post and in particular the section about participation in opinion polls and being called for jury duty, Mia. I have been called for jury duty on two occasions in my life, but have never been consulted in an opinion poll. I have always thought that the results of opinion polls must surely depend upon who is being asked. And who is being asked clearly isn’t representative of my part of the world or anyone I know. I have never encountered anyone amongst my family, friends or on-line contacts who doesn’t support Scotland’s independence. Who this ‘No’-voting ‘majority’ were has always been a mystery to me. I’ve yet to meet any of them.
It is also very dependent on how the question is posed.