Peon, welcome to your new progressive society, sponsored by your friendly tech billionaire

It is popular right now to portray what is happening in the USA as some sort of herald for tomorrow’s dystopia, as a sort of failed and divided state – a Trumpland of hatred and bile interspersed with talking heads analysing everything and nothing. Yet the USA remains the biggest economy in the world and, without question, is still the biggest cultural, academic and intellectual influence on us all. You need only look at how the summary killing of a black man in Minnesota resulted in protests, riots and supine elite displays right across the world, to understand that the USA dominates the world. There is no protest march for a racist genocide in Burma, slavery in Mali or police killings in France.

Trumpland is a hiatus not a trend, a reaction rather than a planned or directed ideological movement. It may be that this reaction sustains enough to see Trump returned in November for another four years of bizarre twitter trolling, but this doesn’t affect the real change in the USA, the change that created the reaction. You can, like Joel Kotkin, see this as a New Feudalism or you can track those who see the world of “woke” as a sort of permanent cultural revolution, but there is no doubt that what’s happening in the USA right now is spreading ever more quickly elsewhere.

The winning ideology is perhaps best called “progressive” rather than “leftist” or “Marxist” (for all that it is filled with these ideas). Even if Trump is re-elected the slow tramp of this ideology will continue, indeed opposition to Trump will be used as a vehicle to accelerate the change. Because of Trump, and to some extent the way in which conservatives react to the progressive idea, the model for progressivism won’t be democracy, for all that they talk about it, but rather the sort of Brave New World, soft oppression typified by the Communist Party's propaganda image of China.

Even traditionalist or communitarian voices will begin to question the essentially liberal presumptions of the USA. In one well-received opinion piece describing the US as a ‘failed state’ we read this: “…America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion.” We read on to hear how, in effect, liberalism has turned Americans into weaklings all mixed with a disdainful dismissal of that nation:

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

The thing being attacked here isn’t Trumpland but rather the vainglorious idea prevalent in those progressive circles that the USA can have the economic success wrought by liberalism and social justice - a sort of warped ideology more about social control than actual social justice. The threat to America doesn’t come from Trump, it comes from that ‘nepotistic rentier oligarchy’ in places like California.

Even before the pandemic, California topped the nation in the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners and has become progressively more unequal in recent years. But its greatest shame is the prevalence of poverty amid enormous affluence. California’s poverty rate, adjusted for cost of living, is the highest of any state and was higher in 2019 than in 2007.

California’s political leaders like to talk about racial justice, but Latino and Black populations bear the brunt of the pain. And by some measures, such as minority home ownership, California remains far behind states such as Texas, Michigan, Arizona and Florida.

California presents us with the vanguard of progressivism, a set of characteristics that represent a soft authoritarianism that Aldous Huxley would recognise:

“…it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.”

So, what characterises this Brave New World of progressive, caring authoritarianism?

1.   The search for and idolising of victimhood. Not simply “we are all guilty” but rather “you” (a specific and identified group, organisation, or institution) are guilty, your very existence oppresses me and makes me a victim. Authority uses this to control institutions and, by indulging victimhood, buys compliance and support

2.   Increasing dominance of business strategy by human resources management – these ideas are presented as protective (“employee rights”) but become just another tool for control and direction. Fear of exclusion, loss of advancement or even dismissal for “wrongspeak” will act to protect the organisation from external criticism and to ensure compliance and the spreading of corporate propaganda. People's private lives are not exempt from this corporate oversight.

3.   People will rent rather than own – not just homes but cars, equipment, and entertainment. In many cases this will, in true feudal tradition, be wrapped up with employment. You won’t just have a job but a flat, a vehicle and a set of home services courtesy of your employer.

4.   Leisure will be tied in with employment with your social life dominated by work colleagues, even to the point of socialising being done at corporate facilities – gyms, (alcohol-free) bars, and restaurants. The boundary between work and leisure will erode for all but leaders who will continue to enjoy ownership and a tightly policed private life

5.   There will be few children – a persistent faux-green propaganda will encourage this by telling women having children is selfishly destroying the planet – and those there are will spend much of their growing up in communal child care settings so the productivity of their parents isn’t lost to the sponsoring corporation or the government it owns

6.   Society will be unequal, not just because people no longer own things but because leaders will live apart from others and will have radically different lives to the workers even those fortunate enough to work for those leaders. Beyond the progressive corporation will be another world, a sort of hand-to-mouth existence of insecure, low-paid work. But far from those in this life representing a failure to meet need, they will instead provide corporate or state propaganda opportunities in the form of ‘charity’ and ‘policy’, how progressive concern for wellbeing is expressed.

7.   Surveillance will be ubiquitous, from cameras and face recognition through to apps that track our whereabouts and activity in the name of wellbeing. Moving around the corporate spaces of our lives will be dominated by the lanyard and the ID card. The world will become increasingly Taylorist, a sort of Californian version of Zamyatin’s “We”, as our work, play, reproduction, sleep, and health are monitored day and night

8.   Social enforcement – where people police their neighbours’ compliance – will become normal as government and corporations use technology to create systems encouraging the snitch, the bully, and the gossip

It may be that this world never arrives (although I fear it already has for some people) but it is the world – a sort of 21st century bread and circuses – that emerges from the chrysalis of progressive politics. In one respect it is a world of contentment (although we should probably not ask what the system would expect of those who do not comply or even rebel) but it is also a dead world. It’s not just that liberalism provided grit in the world’s shoe, a sort of impulsion to betterment, but that it told us you are not better than me and that each should have the same opportunity to improve. This was what made America, indeed it is what made the world, rich.

Progressivism rejects the idea of equal opportunity, choosing instead victimhood and a preference for identified groups. A preference that doesn’t threaten the powerful but acts to limit the old pioneering spirit, what Deidre McCloskey calls “innovism”, by removing much of the impulsion to betterment that liberty provided. As talk of innovation, research and development expands so the amount of actual innovation diminishes. Economic growth stagnates but, so long as people remain content in their coccoon, with dependence on the system, this stagnation is accepted.

Trumpland is a reaction, a reflection of the fear many have that they’ll be left outside this progressive bubble as much as a feeling that somehow the direction is wrong. The problem is that conservatives are really bad at revolution, they have an almost visceral opposition to breaking things up or tearing things down. This is one of the reasons why, while Trump is not a conservative, his revolution has, on its own terms, failed. The need to face down the new feudalism was there but, when the chance to do so arrived, conservatives were not prepared to pull down progressivism’s statues – to defund universities, to end affirmative action programmes, to face down public sector unions, to reform state schooling, and to refuse the cries of victimhood that sustain progressive ideology.

In a past age it was liberals – the sort of men who wrote the USA's Declaration of Independence and drafted its Constitution – who tore down the institutions of feudalism and mercantilism. Today’s liberals, leave aside a few noble libertarians, prefer to tolerate the faux liberalism of our progressive culture. They trip over themselves to splutter about black lives mattering, to argue that words not truths define identity, and to attack conservatives for daring to criticise their progressive friends’ propaganda or their 'save the planet' mythology. This is a liberal world where freedom enhancing things like the motor car or the Internet must be controlled and restricted because a few people use them badly. This is a liberal world that bans e-cigarettes while permitting cannabis, that plonks "me too" on its chest while indulging polyamory. A world where the leaders lead dull conservative lives in stable families and protected communities while urging others to reject family, children and traditional lives.

Progressivism is a modern monster raised up on ideas of victimhood, entitlement, and dependency. It is not interested in giving people a stake in society, the chance to grow and succeed, and the chance to fail too. We’re sliding gently into a warm pool of compliant contentment where we don’t need to grow up, a sort of Never Never Land presided over by seemingly benign corporate HR programmes and a government that enables this soft authoritarian control.

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Is democracy dying? If it is, there's blood on the left's hands

It sometimes seems that way as we move from a pluralist world where ideas are discussed and debated to one where debate is contained and constrained - a short step to that one-party state:

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

This may seem fine until (and maybe the 'ever-so-right-on' chap writing this doesn't care) you consider this excludes not just millions of Californians but, more to the point, a huge swathe of opinion about taxes, markets, intervention, housing and the classical liberal enlightenment. Worse still, our wealthy progressive doesn't just want a one-party state in California but wants to impose its ideas on other places like some ghastly authoritarian hegemon - conservatism must be destroyed:

The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards.

As I said, it seems not just that democracy is dying but that it's 'liberal progressives' - The Left as we call them in Europe - with blood on their hands.

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Racism - why the progressive left's definiton is damaging

It was some time in the early 1990s when a friend, steeped in the occult law of progressive politics, explained to me that most on the "left" didn't mean what I thought they meant when they talked about racism.

You see, along with most of the populace, I'd laboured under the misunderstanding that racism was prejudice based on a persons race. So a decision, for example, to exclude someone, not employ someone or stereotype someone based on their race is pretty much all there is to racism. It seems I was wrong - or rather that there's a different meaning of racism that derives from society's structure, history and other stuff that Marxist sociologists speak about.

Under this different meaning of the word 'racism', I (as a white person) do not have to say or do anything at all that regular folk consider racist for the progressive left to consider that I am a racist. My very existence is a monument to racism - white people are racists because they are white people. And, of course, the victims of that racism - people of colour - cannot be racist even if they use language or act in a way that most folk would consider racist. Understand that you don't have to agree with this definition of racism (and I don't) for it to be significant in the way a discourse about racism is conducted.

There is, for some white people, an escape clause. You become an 'ally' of people of colour. This doesn't actually stop you being a racist because you are white but it does provide some protection as your heart is in the right place - especially if you've acknowledges the deep structural causes of racism within society (having learnt about this from listening to those Marxist sociologists).

Which brings me to Emma Dent-Coad MP and Nasreen Khan (or Naz Kahn as she was until recently).

Taking Naz Kahn first. It is clear that Naz is a person of colour (being, in this case, a Muslim of South Asian heritage) which means that, in progressive mythology, she cannot be a racist even if she says something that is racist. Moreover, Naz's crime was to be anti-Jew and there's a problem with the Jews in that progressive myth . Everyone recognises that Jews are a minority and that they were (and are) persecuted but they are mostly outside that people of colour definition because that would put them in the same category as the Palestinians who are, of course, oppressed (by Zionists who are mostly Jewish).

Ms Kahn may have overstepped the boundaries of what the progressive left will accept in terms of antisemitism - mostly by suggesting Hitler wasn't all that bad, which means the Labour Party will eventually get round to sacking her - but her opinions are simply slightly more extreme versions of those held by a significant proportion of Labour members. Anti-Zionism is acceptable (because the Palestinians are oppressed) even though opposing Zionism means opposing the existence of Israel, something central to the identity of most Jews.

Meanwhile, Emma Dent-Coad, the MP for Kensington is reported to have called a black Tory activist, Shaun Bailey, a "token ghetto boy". Normal progressive left reaction to this (and indeed that of most regular folk) would be to say "racism" because referencing the ghetto and calling a black man 'boy' definitely fits everyone's idea of racism and Ms Dent-Coad is white so, in that progressive mythology, presumed guilty of racism. Yet a black progressive left MP, Clive Lewis, chose to defend her:

I see some brothers getting upset at @emmadentcoad recent comments. Where were your howls of outrage at the Tory ‘nigger in a woodpile’ comments? Pathetic.She’s done more for black people in her constituency with #grenfell in 6months than most tories will do in their entire lives.

What you see here is that Ms Dent-Coad is being defined as an 'ally' to people of colour thereby provided cover for a deeply racist (in regular folks' understanding of what that word means) remark. You see, Ms Dent-Coad is on our (people of colour) side so therefore we can excuse her offensiveness to a black person. And this get out clause is reinforced by the victim is this case being a Conservative activist and politician. Here's Mr Lewis again:

If you think you can fight racism and be in the Tory party then I guess this conversation isn’t going to go very far I’m afraid. If anyone has any understanding of the structural reality of modern racism, you’d not come within a country mile of a Tory membership card.

In Mr Lewis's mind, Tory equates to white. What he's saying is that any black person (and the comment was in response to someone who is a person of colour) who joins the Conservative Party has given up on racism, is a sort of traitor to the cause - an Uncle Tom or a 'coconut'. And, within Mr Lewis's mindset, adhering as it does to those progressive myths about racism, this must be the case - the Tories are the party of the establishment and the establishment is white and racist.

If one thing comes of this sorry situation - with a senior Labour MP insinuating that thousands of black and minority Tory activists, including hundreds of councillors and MPs are somehow unconcerned about racism - I hope it is to confine the stupid progressive definition of racism to the dustbin of silly ideas where it belongs. We've made huge progress over the past few decades in dealing with the endemic racism within our society and, as the words of Naz Kahn and Emma Dent-Coad show, we've still a long way to go. But to say that "structural reality of modern racism" (whatever that actually means) says that Conservatives don't care about racism is to wear a set of ideological blinkers. Racism is, in the end, always about people prejudging others, often harmfully, on the basis of their race. Yes it's ingrained and embedded in society but can we not try and turn it into some sort of 'groupthink' where only those subscribing to a narrowly-defined ideological position can be called anti-racist?

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Burning art - the latest Progressive initiative

I'm one of those people whose response to art is to say 'I know what I like' so don't take what follows as a piece of art criticism.

The painting in question is called 'Open Casket' and is by an artist called Dana Schutz. Here's one review:

The painting is based on a photograph of African American Emmett Till, laid in a coffin. The 14 year old young man was brutally murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, his face horrifically disfigured in process. Earlier this year, it came out that the accuser, Carolyn Bryant, had lied and made the story up. The painting in question is a marvel to look at and currently on view at the Whitney Biennial. Schutz layers and builds paint in such a way that it appears economical even though she’s literally built a swollen lip out of paint.

So far, so good - and ever so right on. The problem is that Dana Schutz is white and, therefore, “It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,”. As a result the author of that line has decided to go beyond mere criticism and to call for the painting's destruction:

UK-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Black has launched a campaign demanding the Biennial curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket from the show, and calling for its destruction.

In a long and angst-ridden letter Ms Black explains that the terrible imagery in the painting - 'black pain' she calls it - might, in the event of the painting's sale, result in profit. Meaning that white people will have gained from the exploitation of that pain. And, moreover, that the artist should know better than to continue to use such expropriation. Dozens of fellow artists have lined up behind Ms Black in saying that the Whitney Gallery should remove and destroy the painting - though Ms Black has only allowed black artists to sign the letter.

It seems to me that, whatever the merits of the painting (and everyone, even Ms Black, seem to think is is powerful and well-executed) the idea that we destroy art because we don't like its message, its image or its artist simply takes these Progressive voices into the same world as the book burners of 1930s Germany or the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Ms Black and others may see their cause as righteous but then so did those who, back in 1989, tried to ban Robert Mapplethorpe's "The Perfect Moment" exhibition because it featured explicit gay sex. Or a thousand other examples of censorship by the state and other authorities - on grounds of taste, religion and the ethnicity of the artist.

It's fair to say that our Progressives are a bit mixed up over this:

Prior to that conversation, if you’d asked me if I thought it was a good idea for white artists to refrain from rendering certain racially charged subjects, I would have responded with a rant about how all this debate would lead only to white artists depicting black subjects less frequently. I’m not sure that position would have been wrong, but I’d now add the caveat that some subjects might be worth leaving alone. I write this knowing this road has “slippery slope” written all over it. After all, I’ve now written about this painting. Am I now profiting off black suffering too? I don’t think so, but then again it’s in my interest to think that.

Confusing eh? For my part I suspect that the politicised hypersensitivity of the black artists seeking the painting's destruction serves the cause of art badly and the idea of liberty not at all. Such actions merely reinforce the idea that offence and sensitivity must be policed, the very same idea that led to literature, music and art being suppressed by public censorship for its portrayal of women, gay men and sexual liberty. This is why - despite the arts world describing itself as such - I have called the protagonists here Progressives rather than liberals. Suggesting it is liberal to want a painting destroyed simply because the artist is white is the very opposite of of artistic freedom. Indeed it is little different to the idea, from another bunch of modernist illiberals, of degenerate art.

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Care about the planet? Well stop saying local is better then.

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One of the most common myths of the modern trendy progressive world is that which say 'local' is always better - for the economy, for the planet and for society. If only we 'transitioned' our places into being locally-focused, resilient communities filled with independent shops, urban gardens and local food networks say the advocates - with comments like this ever so common:

The same goes for agriculture, textiles, and many other sectors where returning to local, human-scaled enterprise will lead to less worker exploitation and environmental damage while producing better, healthier products. Nonindustrial practices may be more labor-intensive, but they’re also better for us all. For those of us used to white-collar jobs, the idea of growing vegetables or making clothes may seem like a big step backward toward more menial labor. But consider for a moment the sorts of activities the wealthiest Americans or most satisfied retirees engage in enthusiastically: brewing craft beers, knitting, and gardening. If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts.

This quote is from a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and was quoted - as an example of progressive ignorance - by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. What bothers me most isn't the stuff about the local multiplier that are used to justify resilience - we know that's pretty much nonsense - or even the truth that this sort of local protectionism only makes us poorer. No, what bothers me is that the idiot progressives promoting transition towns and putting up these 'back to the land' arguments are completely wrong about its environmental impact.

It simply isn't true that this return to pre-industrial production has less environmental impact than modern intensive agriculture or mass-production of the clothes and tools we need. We know that extensive agriculture uses more inputs than intensive agriculture, which is a pretty wasteful start, but we also know that this sort of farming is more polluting and has a bigger impact on wildlife and the local environment. Yet the 'Greens' and their progressive fellow travellers persist with their myth-making and in denying that the same benefits come from agricultural intensification as come from any other improvement in our efficiency in using resources - it makes us richer, it puts less strain on the planet and it allows time for those pleasant pastimes like home brew beer and allotment gardening.

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Quote of the day - green politics and the privileges of the wealthy

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It's from Joel Kotkin and speaks of California. But it could apply in the UK - indeed in any European nation:

But now, having embraced a stringent environmentalism, the gentry seek to impose their “green” agenda on the hoi polloi. If this hypocrisy isn’t disturbing enough, consider the increasingly top-down nature of environmentalist politics. In the past, conservationists focused on how to protect people from harm and preserve nature, in part, so people might enjoy it. Many of today’s progressives not only are determined to protect their privileges, but seek to limit the opportunities for pretty much everyone else.

And the same goes for policies in health, in education and in criminal justice - the interests of the left wing gentry ar eprotected and the working classes get stuffed.

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Things that are true...

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Even when they appear in the comments under a Guardian article:

Lets face it, support for Levinson is all about silencing rightwing opinion

No doubt about this at all. This has been the entire agenda from the start. It wasn't about the wrongdoing of journalists - the police and courts could deal with that problem - it was about muzzling Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre. Not to mention anyone else who challenges the sacred certainties of left-wing, progressive ideology. The boy pointing out the emperor's nakedness is to be silenced not celebrated.

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Perhaps we should make higher rates of tax voluntary?

Yesterday evening I made – via the wondrous medium of Twitter – an observation about tax. It was simply that, if someone had a choice between two tax environments – high tax and low tax, then they’d opt for lower tax.

Of course, it’s not a simple as all that – living in the glorious South Pennines may indeed be sufficient of an incentive to pay higher taxes. The set of choices – ‘choice architecture’ I believe the boffins call it – do not exclude remaining in a place where there are higher taxes.

However, the real lessons in all this are firstly that there remain many people who at least claim to be fans of progressive taxation and argue that they’ll joyfully hand over most of their income to the benevolent state – it is as one remarked “the price we pay for living in a civilised society.”

And this is fine – if somebody believes that it’s a spiffing idea for the government to have 75% of his earnings that who am I to stop them handing over this cash to the government? But these enthusiasts for progressive taxation don’t do this do they? We know they don’t because almost nobody  makes such payments to the British government (and I’m prepared to bet that the same applies in France, Germany and the USA – indeed more or less everywhere).

Instead people who want to pay more taxes – for whatever reason – choose instead to clamour for higher taxes on “the rich”. What these people want is for everybody to pay more – including those like me who think the government takes way too much off us in taxes (certainly for the service we get in return).

If these progressive folk are so keen on paying more nothing is stopping them from doing so. And if such people believe that giving more is about securing “social benefit” then consider some alternatives:

• You want money to be spent on caring for people? Rather than give it to the government, how about paying the nursing home fee for an elderly neighbour or providing someone to clean her house, bath her and help get her shopping?
• Perhaps you want your money to go to housing the homeless? Here’s a suggestion, rather than giving it to the government how about paying the rent yourself or – here’s a thought – putting the homeless person up in your spare bedroom
• Maybe you want lots of lovely arts stuff from your taxes? Just an idea, pay the money to your local gallery, sponsor a struggling artist or cough up for music lessons at your local school.

I could go on but you get the point. What these progressives are saying to us selfish Neanderthals is that we should be made to pay more in taxes because they want to pay more taxes. And what we get is a load of chittering about ‘civilization’ and ‘fairness’ – as if this is of any real consequence.

We live in a society where morality is defined – for some people – as being a fan of government. A culture where our duty to look out for our neighbour is sub-contracted to some state official meaning that we don’t have to do anything. Indeed, that state official actively dissuades us from such activity since it does him out of a secure, tax-funded living.

I am not a worse person than you if I believe that government isn’t the solution to social problems. Indeed, as one reads through the history of government, we see that for much of its time that government acts in the interests of the governors rather than the governed. And those governors include the scribes, the bureaucrats and the administrators as well as the god emperors, kings, senators and prime ministers.

The point of the revolutions – if I might be a little bit Jacobin here – was to secure the end of this tyranny, to establish a world where the interests of the governed, as determined by the governed, were paramount. And, since those interests were not universal (my wants, needs and preferences are different from yours) such an establishment can only be achieved by granting sovereignty to the individual. And this means removing that sovereignty from those god emperors, kings, ministers and scribes.

There remains a role for collective action, for collaboration, cooperation and co-production. And this can be delivered through a ‘government’ (indeed is perhaps best organised in this manner). But this doesn’t give us the right to argue that we should remove money from Fred simply because there are 100 or us and only one Fred. Yet that is precisely the principle behind “progressive” taxation – not that it is more practical to take money in this way but that it is somehow more moral to do so.

It would be a delight if, rather than coercing higher rates of tax from people, we make those higher rates voluntary. We can then apply the arguments – “fairness”, “civilisation”, “social value” and so forth – to persuading people to sign up to that higher tax rate. And it would finally call out the “progressives” – put up or shut up we might say.  And – forgive me for my cynicism – I’d bet that a fair few of those currently heaping coals of fire on the heads of us sinners would be found wanting in the taxpaying stakes!

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Perhaps if they stopped to think of those less fortunate?

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Yesterday I reminded the world – or rather that small part of it reading my tweets – that raising taxes doesn’t create economic growth. It was a simple statement of fact – or that was what I thought. After all taxes are a cost rather than a benefit (which doesn’t mean the same as saying taxes aren’t spent on things that bring us benefit). And public spending – where those taxes go – is almost entirely consumption, no different in effect from me buying a new food processor or a meal out when it breaks down.


My mistake, of course, was to mention the dreaded words “economic growth” - forgetting that there are a group of ‘flat-earth’ believers out there who want economic growth to end. After all they’re fine doing stuff like this and earning (in terms of average global incomes) really good money:

Director of Shelf Life Strategic Sales, co-instigator of @thesourceleeds, verbal identity expert

This fine activity (whatever it all might mean) sits quite a long way towards the top of Maslow’s jolly pyramid. I’m sure clients benefit from the great insight but surely such folk realise that their creative and exciting industry exists as a consequence of economic advancement – we no longer need to work in back-breaking conditions regardless of the weather, we can be a “verbal identity expert”.

So what it is with these wealthy, privileged, educated people that makes them say things like:

…and economic growth for the benefit of the few and the detriment of the environment taxes us all in the end...

Do they simply not understand that economic growth benefits everyone – not least because the government has more money to spend on schools, hospitals and other public service wonders? I wonder why it is that their sweeping assumptions about growth – that they do not benefit from it (when their very industry is a consequence of that growth)?

Maybe the answer sits with that little word “environment”? These are the victims of the “Great Green Con”, the triumph of propaganda suggesting that economic growth threatens our very existence. In their oh so progressive world, “unbridled capitalism” is a thing of ultimate evil, gobbling up the resources of the planet and bringing us to the point of collapse.

And what is their alternative? It is hard to discern from under the pile of platitudinous slogans, from beneath the drifts of received wisdom but I think they want some sort of “steady state” economy where verbal identity experts can ply their arcane craft secure in the knowledge that the planet is safe.

In this world people will no longer indulge in exploitative binges of consumption (other than on the products benefiting from improved “verbal identities” I guess) preferring instead a simpler, lower impact life of allotment gardening, home knitting and shopping at craft markets for ‘home made’. Our “verbal identity expert” will eschew a car, refuse foreign holidays and look sneeringly as those terrible, common people for whom such things are a break from the tedium of a job less interesting that the development of “powerfully authentic, precisely accurate statements”. Jobs on farms, in factories, power stations and sewage works. Jobs in shops, banks and insurance companies, job making the things we need and providing the services we want. Jobs that generate enough value for the businesses to afford such indulgences as a “verbal identity expert”.

And further afield, we’ll see African and Asian subsistence farmers and unemployed slum-dwellers whose chance of advancement – from securing the benefits of economic growth – have gone because the “verbal identity experts” have had their way and stopped the growth. Men and women condemned to scrat in the earth, struggling to survive let alone afford the iPad our “verbal identity expert” takes for granted (or the 4x4 truck they really want – but our expert won’t approve of that either).

The argument for zero-growth, for stasis – whether couched in progressive, “capitalism is evil” terms or wrapped in a green coat – is one of the most offensive of all the indulgent philosophies of our educated western society. It captures “I’m all right, Jack” and builds it into an entire system, it is promoted by successful, high-income people and directs its attention to denying the poor the good things those people already enjoy.

Perhaps if they stopped to think of those less fortunate?

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