The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Moving The Last Ditch to WordPress was stressful and expensive but it gave cause for unexpected thought. In the course of organising the move, I re-read some old posts for the first time in years.

My tone has changed a lot over time, most notably since the late Mrs P. died.

I used to be more strident. More indignant. I also used to be more confident that I could (as part of a wider movement) effect change. Interestingly, I noticed that the common thread running through hundreds of posts is that they are almost all from a moral point of view.

Unlike most who blog about politics, I barely ever discuss whether a given policy proposal will have the desired effect. Or whether it’s likely to be popular. Or to make voters’ lives better. My posts are pretty much always about whether a given action or proposal is morally right or wrong.

This may be why I am so out of step with modern Britain. These are old-fashioned concepts. As is “innocent until proven guilty” – one of the founding concepts of our civilisation. Barely any politician or journalist now seems to grasp it. There are now always calls for stern action against the accused in potential criminal cases before the investigation is underway, let alone concluded.

Nor do modern politicos seem, judging from those MPs calling for the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew to be investigated by Parliament for the crime of treason, to grasp the other foundational concept of the separation of powers.

A man accused of any crime is entitled to a fair trial. Only when he’s been found guilty by due process of law, should journalists and other jackals begin to tear at his metaphorical flesh.

These are not concepts that had to be explained to anybody when I was a boy. How have they been lost? For that matter, how have the more fundamental concepts of right and wrong been lost?

Having lived abroad for two decades of my life, I am always amused when the British claim ownership of such broad concepts as “fair play.” They’re far more widespread than many Brits seem to think but it was always good – in a way – that they were so central to how we saw ourselves. What happened to that?

No police officer, social worker, teacher, councillor, or MP could have been unaware of the moral implications when first they encountered local rape gangs. Their reactions, however, were driven more by self-interest than by moral revulsion. At the best (or least bad) they prioritised a fear of jeopardising their careers over the suffering of the victims. At the worst, they were active accessories after the fact to the crime of rape by covering it up for fear of political consequences.

Equally, there cannot have been a single man served up fresh young flesh on Epstein’s island who did not know that – legal or not – it was morally sketchy. I’ve never much concerned myself with the sexual foibles of others. They’re private matters and, as long as they’re adults, people can make their own choices.

So I never thought much about Randy Andy’s alleged antics until recently. Being a prince is pretty damned tedious. You live in a gilded aquarium. Your life is very limited. You can’t make your own way in the world and must stay humiliatingly dependant on your family. Provided you’re discreet about it, and so long as the ladies in question are mentally-competent and of age, why shouldn’t you take advantage of the royal glamour as princes always have.

If I thought about Andrew at all, I felt rather sorry for him, to be perfectly honest. He’s a buffoon with a sex drive. So are most men at times.

Cherchez la femme,

say the wise French, when any man behaves badly.

However the latest revelations from the Epstein files are rather different. It seems the whole point of his entertaining the powerful on such a scale may have been to gain insider information. His sinister remark to Mandelson that their friendship had been all about what Mandy could get rather than what he could give was new. As is the fact that former Prince Andrew is alleged to have delivered him market-sensitive secret papers.

Mandy, Randy Andy and indeed all the visitors to Epstein’s domain are now alleged, not just to be sleazy and sexually-incontinent, but corrupt. Time will tell. They’re innocent until proven guilty and some or all of these stories may yet prove to be untrue.

I am still not sure that the sexual element to these scandals is the significant aspect. The question is why – in pursuit of whatever incentives were on offer for their misconduct – there was no voice in our rulers’ heads that said

This is wrong

I may be a sheep returned to the Christian fold, but I’m not going to say the decline of religion is the cause. It’s the cause of other problems – some serious enough to threaten the stability of a civilisation built on Christian foundations – but it’s perfectly possible to be a moral atheist. Or a moral follower of most other religions.

My rule of thumb for my 55 years as an atheist was to ask myself whether I’d be embarrassed for my mum, my wife or later my daughters to know that I’d done something. Sometimes I did it anyway, just as Christians sin, but –also like them – I knew when I was doing wrong.

Our rulers genuinely now don’t seem to know. Look at the short history of this Labour government. The number of U-turns is hilarious. If they did these things believing them to be right, or just or necessary surely they’d have stuck with them? They seem rather to have done them in the hope of approval. When it was not forthcoming they said, in the words of the old joke;

I have my principles. And, if you don’t like them, I have others.

I can’t imagine Keir Starmer worrying about anything but electoral or personal advantage. I don’t think the concepts of right and wrong have ever buzzed across his synapses. I think the same may be true of Boris Johnson. He’s arguably the cleverest PM in history, but he’s a complete moral vacuum.

Mrs Thatcher opined that things began to go wrong when people focussed on feelings rather than reasons. She certainly had a point. The current generation’s sense of the importance of feelings has led some of them to reject the whole concept of reason. If a man thinks he’s a woman, she is and to hell with the whole science of biology. They have even taken to packaging Truth personally and using possessive pronouns for it.

That may be a symptom, but I don’t think it’s the cause of moral decline. I think it goes even deeper. Rousseau’s pernicious concept of “the social contract” started humanity on a path that led, I would argue, to the moral vacuum we now occupy. Where is this contract? Who signed it? Who negotiated it? How can it be modified? No-one ever seems to have asked those questions because it was such a useful hook on which to hang the predatory relationship of the state to its governed.

If there is no social contract, there can be no moral basis to take the product of another’s labour by force. Yet that’s what even the best of states does. Once we accepted the principle that the state can help itself to whatever it deems necessary to perform whatever services it wishes, the whole concept of morality was on life support.

It didn’t die immediately of course. Judeo-Christian values were powerful and persistent. They took generations to die and still haven’t – quite. Even the most famous of Atheists, author of “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins, now admits that he’s “culturally Christian” and that informs his morals.

Once the proceeds of your life’s work are at the mercy of powerful rulers governed only by the need to win approval to get elected, life becomes pretty much a “benefits auction.” Promises have to be made to get elected. Bribes in the form of “benefits” have to be given to voters. Every incentive in society becomes perverse.

The whole immoral mess still enjoys massive support even as it draws close to its inevitable collapse. The only reason it’s discussed at all is that those perverse incentives have pulled in millions from the Third World. A life on benefits in the UK puts recipients comfortably into the top ten to fifteen percent of humanity economically. Only in discussing what these incomers receive – without they or their parents or grandparents having contributed to the Welfare State Ponzi scheme, can people see clearly what they would never see in relation to their own “entitlements”.

Assuming that the new right-wing parties emerging from the corpse of the Conservative Party can stop squabbling and dividing enough to win power, it may be all that they achieve is to preserve the delusion of the Welfare State a bit longer. By throwing people out of the Ponzi Scheme for not having paid in, they may delay the moment of its collapse. The question is whether, in the course of attempting that, voters will finally see it for what it is.