The BBC has a new celebrity left winger to flood the airwaves with their views….Steve Hilton, a one time David Cameron advisor….which could explain a lot when you listen to his thoughts.
‘Parish’ Hilton is all about the ‘local’ now, anti-big business, anti-capitalist and confusingly seemingly also anti-communist bu he just doesn’t realise it. He has a very confused message and a very naive one. The BBC likes him though with him popping up everywhere, twice on Today today, on Marr’s Start the Week ,with that other favourite lefty guru Stiglitz, and given a free hand to promote his message on Newsnight….that message being very ‘Occupy’ and would seem better suited to Miliband than the Tories….as the Times points out…‘Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s modernising guru, has a message that the opposition should take to heart‘. One notable omission from Hilton’s hit list is the power hungry, anti- people EU….could it be because Cameron is pro-Europe? Are we being sold a political ideology by Hilton rather than a genuine attempt to understand the problems and come up with a solution?
Kathy Gyngell from ‘Conservative Woman’ on the Today programme (08:55) said Hilton was irrelevant and infantile….can’t say I disagree.
Hilton tells us he is against the centralised, uniform way of doing things by Government….isn’t that Communism and the Labour way, a way in which the individaul is irrelevant? And yet he ascribes it to Capitalism. He claims that for most of human history politics was local and it was impossible to be organised any other way….really? Has he never heard of the Aztec, Roman, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Muslim, Soviet, SNP, etc etc empires? Has he never heard of the Domesday Book...’a landmark in the triumph of the centralised written record, once set down fixed forever, over evolving local oral traditions’, the rule of kings and queens, the Aristocracy, the Church? The centralised power of previous societies and ways of ruling were enormous and overwhelming, the privileged elite who held the reins of that power controlled it ruthlessly.
Life for people has never given them so much power than what they have today, especially in the capitalist West where consumer power, political power and now with the internet, the power to challenge the entrenched Media empires, has never been so strong….the power of ‘people power’ and bad publicity is enormous as shown by Thomas Cook being shamed into handing over money it received upon the death of tourists to a charity….but then again a powerful central government is essential to enforce regulations against such big institutions and businesses on behalf of ‘The people’. And in politics things are being shaken up radically….UKIP forced Cameron to change his politics, the SNP wiped the floor with Labour……there is no ‘status quo’ with one overwhelming, out of touch elite, they are vulnerable as never before….people have real political power…certainly it’s not perfect….the EU for instance is vastly out of touch and beyond the power of people to easily effect….but change is possible….the Soviet Empire fell because of ‘People Power’ such as ‘Solidarnosc’ backed up by Maggie and Reagan and those ‘useless’ Nukes….and the ‘Arab Spring’….which the BBC assures us was triggered and maintained by people on the ‘social media’.
Hilton of course talks about the Banks and tearing them apart but also the supermarkets saying that more competition needs to be injected by government…that ‘local’, less intrusive, less powerful government. He tells us that the barriers to entry by competition are too strong and the big supermarkets are just too powerful….has he never heard of Aldi, Lidl and the ‘Pound’ shops, the insurgent low cost supermarkets who are making the big supermarkets run for cover?
You kind of suspect Hilton is the victim of that very thing he tells us we should be wary of, the elitist, closed minds created by being in a limited environment that turns out to be an echo chamber reflecting and reinforcing ideas that he desperately wants to believe in. Just how many ‘real’ people does he talk to rather than activist campaigners and political geeks? Not many it would seem.
Why is the BBC giving him so much airtime? Great publicity for his book…..and yet his ideas smack of easy, utopian crowd pleasing, lefty schmaltz that lack any grounding in the real world and are completely unworkable in that real world….or irrelevant and infantile as someone said….much like Occupy and Giles Fraser.
Sounds like the perfect mouthpiece for the McBeeb – out of touch, ill-informed, over and yet under-educated, and over-opinionated; and the fact he doesn’t wear shoes means he must have thrown them in protest at some stage at someone. Another box ticked for the “progressive” McBeeb,
The one thing that drives the centralisation of control, beit in business or government, is efficiency. Ironically, due to the “human element” these efficiencies create vast organisations whereby individual humans create little empires for themselves which create inefficiency… but generally, on the macro level, efficiency drives centralisation through the economies of scale.
Competition drives such efficiency further, and that is a good thing, for consumers. Consumers demand more and more value for money and so these individual humans make choices which drive the efficiencies which drive centralisation.
The problem is not in the scale of the organisation, but in the constant drive for better value for money, purely because the actual money itself is the single flawed element in the whole system.
As a means of exchange, money is wonderful. It works. The problem is, there is never enough money. Even as more and more money is created and loaned and circulated, poverty continues to exist. Why? What is money after all?
Money is something which is largely created out of thin air, and then interest (which is never created at all) is charged upon it.
To massively over simplify, the money issuers issue 100 “tokens” of money into circulation through loans, and expect 110 tokens back, without ever creating the additional 10 tokens. No wonder we all feel like we are constantly chasing money which does not exist!
Fractional reserve banking of fiat currency is a system, by design, to remove real intrinsic wealth from the many and give it to the few. It demands that we try to find money to repay the interest on loans, which has never ever been created. It is a financial game of musical chairs. When the “establishment banking dynasties” want certain policies, they flood a country with cheap money, so there is plenty in circulation to tempt people to borrow. The economy booms, people feel confident in the future and they borrow to invest… Then when change is needed, there is a “credit crunch” the banks stop lending and then there is not enough money in circulation to repay loans, and asset forfiture happens, businesses close and there is a recession, and governments are voted out.
Until such time as the current global system of creating money as a means of exchange, is tackled, then we will ALWAYS have poverty and people on the capitalist right attacking and being attacked by people on the socialist left.
And while these attacks are distracting the masses, the state and corporations are colluding more and more by implementing the bastard off-spring of socialism and capitalism. A vile, human crushing system called “corporatism” or “Corrupt Capitalism” or “Crony capitalism” or “privatised socialism” whereby the state and vast corporations collude to rip off tax-payers, stamp out competition and and restrict consumer choice through state mandated cartelism.
It is surely not beyond the wit of man, to create a means of exchange which serves mankind, rather than enslave mankind in unrepayable debt?
Localism – fine in principle and sounds lovely, but what has Steve Hilton to say about the necessity of the the government to take over Rotherham council, send auditors into Tower Hamlets or investigate Birmingham City Council’s knowledge of the ‘Trojan Horse affair’?
Making the governance , not just government, of the country open and accountable is the best way forward . IE ; the civil service .
It increases efficiency and dispels conspiracy theories .