Person-centred economics

 The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church.  Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love.  It is an allowance without compromising dogma.  Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism.  It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it,  in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.

What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre.  In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings.  While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished.  

Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian.  Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false.  Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism.  

A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929  and the Great Depression of the thirties.  An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini.  This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital.  With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished.  The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market.  This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable,  A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.

The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples.  An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism.  In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,

Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists.  This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union.  The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions.  In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community -  Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.

In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country.  There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person.  Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics.  Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.

Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration.  Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact.  As a result the person gets lost.

The person is not the same as an individual.  From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory.  The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person.  Industries disappear destabilising communities.  And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.

 In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this.  Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person.  Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.

Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far.  Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way".  It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891.  It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.

Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence.  Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.

The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste.  Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat.  

The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself.  The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed.  That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.

The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest.  Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation.  There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage.  Hence the name Enlightenment of course.

The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God.  Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to.  For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that   Durkheim described.  When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm.  Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.

There is much talk of re-enchantment currently.  Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God.   

      

Reactionary Rus

Russia seems either both European and Asian or neither European nor Asian.  Is it Marxist or conservative?  Atheist or Orthodox?  Democratic or despotic?  The West is never really clear about Russia, as Winston Churchill once succinctly put into a pithy comment.

Today the liberal Western media is wringing its hands about a further step towards despotism, voted for by the Russian public.  What makes the media more upset is that the new constitution voted upon by the Russian people not only in effect seems to give Putin power for life, but has been sold to the people as a restoration of traditional values, particularly in terms of protecting marriage as between man and woman and including God in the constitution.

Traditional values are thus seen as the clever ploy and part of a despotic manoeuvre to seize power.  Worse is that the Western media regards this as an appeal to prejudice as though Putin has manipulated base instincts to rally support for his prolonged presidency.

The constitution itself does place a strict limit upon the presidency of two terms of six years.  It nonetheless resets the clock allowing Putin to begin his terms all over again.  Hence the accusation of an attempt to fix up a lifelong presidency. 

The role of a little-known body called the State Council is also raised in importance and power.  Again Putin’s critics have accused him of using this body to ensure he retains power as a member.

Whatever the politics, and this article is not meant to defend Putin, the interesting question is how Putin has relied upon social conservatism as an integral part of these constitutional changes.  By contrast, in the West, with its representative democracy, widely-held socially-conservative views remain excluded from political debate.  It is as though socially-conservative views cannot break through the dominance of liberalism in the Western party system, while Putin’s ever increasing power has meant the focus of accountability is directly upon him.  If Russia were to introduce same-sex marriage only one man could be held responsible for that.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom a Conservative Government could introduce same-sex marriage with very little consequence in terms of electoral losses amongst small-c conservative voters. 

It would be a mistake to see social conservatism in Russia as somehow imposed as false consciousness from above.  Anyone who has encountered the revival of Christianity in Russia or discussed traditional values with Russians will have found that socially-conservative views remain mainstream for many.  It is far more likely that Putin is following the instincts of grass-roots attitudes that survived seventy years of atheistic Marxism to win his referendum.

What the overwhelming vote for Putin’s constitutional changes therefore demands from Western social conservatives is that they ask themselves why they are losing so badly compared to the victory in the cultural war in Russia.  And it is not just in Russia,  indeed many of the former Warsaw Pact nations are seeing a revival in both conservative Christianity and social conservatism, from Hungary to Poland.  Meanwhile, without any violent revolution in the West, values have been stripped away leaving a meaningless liberal anomie somehow fraudulently compensated for by Left-wing identity politics.  Most social conservatives will appreciate which of the cultural options will lead to greater human flourishing.  The disconcerting thing is that in Russia it appears to come at the cost of stable rule of law and democratic politics.

But is the political contrast so black and white?  While there is clearly a healthy bedrock and foundation of rule of law in the West, it is undeniable that as the cultural Marxist and postmodern outlooks have rapidly spread from the Academy into politics, law enforcement and the legal system, those fundamentals cannot be taken for granted.

 

There is a sort of totalitarianism-lite in the West.  In a free market economy it is vital to be able to survive in the world of employment.  With legislation on hate speech and equality goals any challenge to the cultural Marxist agenda can result in loss of employment - permanently.  There is no need for the Gulag or brutal oppression when people are scared about not being able to pay their mortgage or feed their families.  Meanwhile elections might change the finer details of economic policy, but whatever the voters want, the agenda of attacking traditional values continues under whichever party is in power.  There is a sort of liberal oligarchy installed in the West, with much more in common across borders than with the people within politicians' own nations.  In the UK the Brexit vote was a sign of this disparity and the same was true of Donald Trump’s election victory.  

Nonetheless, even without the heavy-handed legislation and the confident arrogance of the liberal oligarchy, the public in the West are very unsure about their conservative instincts.  While Russian babushka grandmothers ensured values survived Soviet oppression during the years of the Godless regime and the various nationalistic movements in Catholic Europe looked to Pope John Paul II, in the West the tide of consumerism and popular culture has almost drowned any residue of conservatism.  It is not just a detached oligarchy, but a confused public that ensures the onward and unimpeded march towards Sodom and Gomorrah.   

The Academy, the political world and the media reinforce the enthusiasm and commitment of each other for pursuing an agenda of radical liberalism that can only end in anomie.  Those institutions (such as the Church and the Tory Party) that should give leadership in this cultural battle are dominated by the same group of people – liberal, privileged and tending towards a relativism learnt at university.  The non-values dressed up as worthy tolerance and open-mindedness that these powerful people share give them some sense of purpose while allowing moral decadence in their own lives and in society at large.  While ideas inherited from the Protestant roots of much of the West in terms of probity in public office and the rule of law persist at least for now, there is a programme of undermining the standards and meaning bequeathed to us by Christian civilization.  The corruption is benign and amoral at the moment, not violent and criminal.  In a sense that makes it all the more corrosive to the soul of Europe.  It is spiritually and morally bankrupt, but sees itself as righteous and worthy.  This is a very dangerous situation.

 

It is dangerous not because of the risk of some extremist movement from beyond the Overton Window (although such a risk should not be breezily dismissed, as we saw from the rise of Black Lives Matter with its Marxist agenda of erasing history and silencing opposition over the summer).  Even in the straitened times of Covid 19 and in the post- Credit crunch world, material life will not turn into unbearable suffering for most.  Instead there is a risk of falling into a state of anomie in part because of all our wants being met in a consumerist society and all our freedoms to follow our passions respected as long as we “respect” the driving passions of everyone else.  Fundamentally important to this nadir of Western civilization is the disappearance of Christianity.  What remains of the Church as an institution in most Western countries is run and led by that same anti-traditional section of society, thereby ensuring no genuine revival is possible.  Combine that with the continual pushing at lowering of moral standards and promotion of immorality in drama and in all aspects of the media and the trajectory of the West looks to be pretty vertiginous.

 

To look specifically at the UK, where social conservatism is almost silenced, there is no mechanism such as the primary system that the United States has, to give direct democratic input into the selection of the prime minister.  True we are a  monarchy, not a pure republican democracy.  A primary system for the potential Prime Minister does not necessarily mean that the Queen would not still have the formal role of appointing her first minister, only that the party would select him differently and then recommend him to the Queen.  That primary system would be a safety valve to overcome the control the party has over selection of candidates.  It would be a means to start dismantling the liberal oligarchy.

What the Left dismisses sniffily as “populism” must have democratic avenues to be expressed, because it reflects the attitudes and prejudices of a nation.  Despotism from the Right remains a very remote risk in the West of course.  The real danger is the growing power of cultural Marxism to which dominant liberalism has been unable to present any serious ideological resistance.  Freedom of speech, political diversity and honesty are all under threat from the cancel culture of the Left.  Electing a Conservative Government in the UK has done very little to slow down the increasing power of the Marxists, as has been seen by the ease with which they seized control of the streets and attacked precious monuments with seeming impunity. 

Thus there are a number of reasons why traditional perspectives are locked out of the public square – the lack of Church leadership, the cultural changes forced by the media, the infiltration of the Conservative Party by hard-line social liberals, the politically-correct restrictions enforced through intimidation and by means of new laws.  Meanwhile the Academy continues its programme of brainwashing our young people with Marxist indoctrination. 

Nonetheless, Russia faced all this too and yet retained its belief in traditional values.  Perhaps the iron fist causes a reaction of resistance; but more likely, despite Sergeism, the values were more deeply instilled in the Russian people and could not be erased.

In the West since before the Enlightenment, all the way back to William of Ockham and the Nominalists, truth and values have been attacked.  This has disorientated ordinary people, meaning they are not sure how to justify what they feel in their spirit to be true.    The real problem therefore lies in centuries of dismantling our Christian values.  It lies in the very liberal paradigm that tried to accommodate the fracturing of Protestantism into different sects and the loss of a coherent and sustaining tradition.  It lies in the European narrative from a Humanist perspective of an oppressive Church that played the role of Caesar.  It lies in the doctrine of Papal Supremacy that broke the West from the East and eventually led not to a rebuilding of cohesion, but everyone becoming their own Pope through Protestantism.

Therefore even with avenues for populist expression, whereby the residue of traditional values amongst ordinary people that have not yet been erased might find expression, that incoherence of tradition will not be overcome.  Instead only a spiritual renewal will achieve anything in secular society.  Only a rediscovery of Tradition in the sense of a uniting, objectively true and subjectively encountered reality can heal the West.  Its very dynamic scientific and material successes are in part both due to and a cause of the break down of that cohesive Tradition.  The worldly comforts and riches achieved were pursued after the loss of Tradition and distract from the need for a return to Tradition.  The West has gained the whole world, but lost its soul.

Russia undoubtedly has its problems, as indicated by high levels of both single parenthood and abortions.  There is financial and criminal corruption in high places.  It was badly damaged by the Revolution and prior to that there were Oriental forms of oppression by the Tsarist state despite its Christian ethos that was so deeply rooted.

Nonetheless what survived in Russia and what often seems alien to those of us unable to see the world from outside the liberal paradigm, is the tradition of faith that is life sustaining in an eternal sense.  Of course, even the Church was heavily compromised by the Soviet regime, but the Tradition through the Holy Spirit exists within each member of that Church, as Lossky explained.  It is far more possible to remain unperturbed in one’s faith in the Orthodox Church when there are profound sacerdotal failings than under the sacerdotal hierarchy of all forms of Western Christianity.  Priesthood and laity are understood differently.

What we see in Russia is a suffering nation and through suffering Christianity flourishes.  Western material success combined with a reductive strand of theology has led to a hollowing out of the Tradition. Only from the small seeds of faith and re-connection with the Holy Tradition will the West be rescued in a sense far more important than maintenance of the rule of law and democratic rights.  Perhaps a time will come when those fundamentals of law and freedom are lost so that providentially we might rediscover what is important.  In the West we have lost the sense of what is most important and that is why we have become obsessed in a maniacal way with cultural Marxist causes.  The rise of Left wing extremism is indicative of the craving for meaning, but it will not be found there.  It will only be found in a return to Traditional Faith and the Church.  Russia has already learnt that lesson the hard way and furthermore at a grassroots level it never fully lost touch with Tradition.   We need to be able to understand what is happening in Russia and we can only do that by stepping outside of our liberal secularist paradigm.    

Civic Virtue and the World

Aristotle taught that man’s telos was to achieve virtue.  Just as the purpose of a musical instrument is to be played and thereby produce music, so Man is to live ethically.  Part of that ethical living is to make a commitment to the Polis, the city state, and to devote oneself to public life.  It is ethical to participate in politics.

As Edmund Burke famously pointed out, for evil to triumph good men simply need to do nothing.  If men of virtue do not participate in public life it will become dominated and controlled by the corrupt, the careerist and even the criminal.  In the West after generations of participation, engagement in politics has been decreasing, leaving the field of public life to the cranks and fanatics that our current university system seems intent on churning out of its post-modern system.  Indeed, it seems it is only those driven by vanity as opposed to virtue that have the energy and zeal to enter public life.  

Whether it is fanatics like Corbyn and McDonnell who wish to change the country in a way no normal person could accept or shallow careerists like David Cameron, there seems little room for the man committed to public service as an Aristotlian virtue.  There are two predominant forces in politics today – the ideological leftist extremists and the careerists.

In the United States we have seen a peaceful revolution against this corrupt (in the broadest sense of the word) system.  Donald Trump was elected because there was something rotten in the state of the Western democracy.  A professional and managerial political class committed to its own shibboleths of ideology, well out of step with the consensus of normal people had become isolated in its apparently impregnable position of power.  Donald Trump was elected to change all that – he said the unsayable in an environment of suffocating political correctness.  Paradoxically this New York TV celebrity gave a voice to traditionalist conservatives and Christians deeply troubled by the course the political class had set their nation upon.

It is no cliché to draw a parallel with Brexit.  That other Anglo-Saxon nation, the old country, the United Kingdom went through its own peaceful revolution in the Brexit vote.  Delivering the largest democratic mandate in history the British public voted decisively to leave the international and globalist project that was set up to destroy the nation state and democratic accountability - the European Union.  In England and Wales the vote was emphatically for leave, the figure only being made more marginal by a capital city out of step culturally and politically with England and Wales as a whole.  Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain for specific reasons and should not be considered as having voted against the United Kingdom itself.

Whereas in recent weeks we have seen a significant triumph for the Trump administration, in the exoneration of the President from any suspicion of being complicit with the Russian Government to win the election; in the United Kingdom Brexit has been dealt what is perhaps a fatal blow.  Theresa May will now work across the House of Commons, where there is a majority committed to stopping Brexit.

This tells us much of the decline of British institutions after forty years of being governed by an unelected and foreign bureaucracy.  It is no wonder that when Parliament was merely there to provide a fig leaf for two thirds of laws not democratically processed, the quality of politician and the institution of Parliament itself should have suffered a serious decline.  Our political class is not up to the job of Brexit because it has been enervated and corrupted by the European Union and its corrosive effect on representative democracy.  Participation in politics when ruled by Brussels is a charade and it has attracted those who are happy to play a charade.  Now their bluff is called and they are terrified by the thought of political responsibility and accountability.  What might seem like an opportunity to the public man of integrity is terrifying to the careerist politician.

The corrupt careerists therefore did what comes easiest to them, they lied that they would deliver Brexit while spending three years plotting to subvert the democratic result of the referendum.  This is of course disgraceful, wrong and corrupt.  How should one respond?

Despair or extremism are two very tempting responses.  Our system appears to have shown itself irredeemable.  The public gave Parliament a chance to restore its sovereignty and it preferred vassalage.  Yet neither anger nor despair are responses that one striving for virtue should countenance.

There is the so-called Benedict option  If we look at the betrayal of Brexit not in isolation but as symptomatic of the decline of Western politics, then rather than despair should we not be liberated from placing any hope in temporal victories?    One could then withdraw from the world not in despair, but in a spirit of devotion and hope for the next world.  It is interesting to note that Aristotle himself placed the life of contemplation at an even higher level of attainment in virtue than civic participation.

If we are thinking in typological terms, then an analogy might be drawn between a Brussels-administered United Kingdom and First-Century Judea, with its charade of independence, while de facto power was very much in the hands of the Roman administration.

There was a political movement in Judea, the Zealots, who sought for a political victory over Rome.  They were disappointed in a corrupt Jewish establishment that had come to terms with Rome.  These zealots were also to be deeply disappointed in Christ, because they had hoped for a Messiah who would overturn the oppressors and bring about a political Utopia in the form of a new Davidic Zion, powerful and flourishing.  Yet as Christ taught, His kingdom is not of this world.

The temptation to zealotry in today’s circumstances would be to slip into a revolutionary mindset, perhaps even looking at a violent solution to the political corruption and lack of national sovereignty revealed by the Brexit betrayal.  Such an extremist Brexiteer zealotry is not the answer.

Yet again just as despair and extremism are temptations that should be resisted, abdication of responsibility is not an answer either.  We are in the world at the moment that we should be, with all the responsibilities that entail to act or not.  We cannot entirely disengage from this disappointing and fallen world, but neither can we place the totality of our hope in it.
 

Christian civilization is under attack in subtle ways, for the serpent is the subtlest creature in the garden.  Whether it is the attack on gender as a reality or national identity or marriage, forces have combined to destroy the foundations of our culture.  Brexit is just one example of this attack on all that gives meaning, in that national identity has to be dissolved if the post-modern agenda is to succeed. 

The point is not to give in to despair, but to continue the good fight, with an expectation of all being put right eschatologically.  With the specific example of Brexit our nation shook and destabilised the foundations of the new establishment’s new Tower of Babel.  It is right to continue shaking it, without believing we can replace it with a perfect state ourselves.  If we were to do that we fall into the very heresy of chiliasm that lies behind the concept of the European Union.    There will never be an ultimate political solution to this world, but it is right to strive against corruption and duplicity and attacks on our core values.

GLOBALISM TRUMPED?

After a long hiatus and many major political events having taken place I have decided to resume this 'blog.  This year is the centennial anniversary of both the end of the Great War and the regicide of the Tsar - two events that were to shape the next century in so many dreadful ways.  From the perspective of the English shires neither event brought much happiness.  The Great War drastically and tragically reduced the number of young men in the fields and was arguably the cause of the next cataclysm, the Second World War.  The Tsar's murder and the murder of the Empress, the Tsarevich and their daughters, made hard-line Socialism a real alternative that inspired some of the British Left's worst attacks on the English of the shires.

The Century went on to see rapid mechanisation of agriculture, the replacement of smallholders with agri-business, the mass shifting of women into the workplace, with all the implications for family, and a profound loss of confidence in faith and patriotism.  After the Second World War the move towards the abolition of the nation state by the powerful elite of Europe gathered momentum and became more formalised with the first steps towards a United Europe.  With National Socialism vanquished in the Second World War and International Socialism with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama's End of History with the triumph of liberalism seemed to have been reached.  The secularist individual whose only guiding principle is choice has become the ubermensch, so contrary to the actual Nietzschean idea.

Yet this victory now seems hollow.  If the new liberal world can be seen as globalist and cosmopolitan, so that everyone is just an individual, not defined by culture, religion or nationality - a citizen of the world and therefore a citizen of nowhere to paraphrase the current (at the time of writing) Prime Minister - then human beings seem to be rebelling against this individualist, consumerist globalism.

And this rebellion is completely understandable, because we are more than consumers, more than individuals and life is about more than choice.  The effect on the English shires of this liberal globalism has been profound.  The high street has become a uniform entity from John o' Groats to Lands End.  Agricultural workers are cheaper migrant labour, and even more noticeably to most, retail and services have recruited from abroad, changing the fabric of small communities and the pressure to accommodate a massive influx of foreigners means the green and pleasant land young men went to die for a century ago is to be turned into housing.  Meanwhile a political class that has become absorbed into a globalist elite has no sensitivity or understanding of the impact of these issues, only able to think as it is, in terms of GDP and economic calculation.

Globalisation can certainly be said to have had a greater impact on the third-world economies, for better or worse.  Economic growth has certainly been achieved (and we cannot surely begrudge that) but at the expense of traditional lifestyles and has brought in the Western-liberal influence that cannot tolerate the traditional family structure and wants to pull women out of the family home into the workplace.

Yet in the West, from which the reductionist doctrines of individualism and globalism emerged, resistance too can be found.  The referendum in the UK in which the public chose by the highest ever turnout to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States were serious blows struck against a detached elite's vision of one globe of atomistic individuals.  Immigration has been the very real problem that has galvanised popular resistance; yet other issues, such as deindustrialisation and firms relocating to countries with cheaper labour on the economic side, and on the social, an aggressively liberal vision of human beings that places choice of lifestyle above any sense of a human telos in family, were also being rejected.

In reaction to the perceived effrontery of ordinary people rejecting the ideology of their betters, the elite has responded with ferocity to both Brexit and Trump.  At every turn the political/globalist establishment has attempted to subvert these two Anglo-Saxon rebellions.

Part of the tactic of the liberal elite has been to attempt to tarnish Brexit and Trump by association with the bogeyman caricature of Russia that its allies in the media have created.  Anyone in Britain must be unnerved by the prospect of Russian interference, given the recent appalling crime in Salisbury, where a British subject has now become a fatality; yet Russia is being portrayed as a bastion of reactionary conservatism by the elite in an attempt to discredit the valid cause of Anglo Saxon conservatism.  Russian politics is far more complicated than that and this caricature has been created by the elite for its own propaganda purposes.

What is the vision the Anglo Saxon people on either side of the Atlantic have voted for, which has so horrified the establishment?  It is no Corbynista socialism (our elite seems far more comfortable with Corbyn, than with President Trump or Nigel Farage interestingly!).  It is rather a more compassionate version of our own economic system.  Donald Trump with his emphasis on protection is not a Socialist revolutionary, but is a patriot.  He is proposing economic policies that protect domestic jobs.  He wants capitalism to serve people rather than people having to serve a capitalism with no roots in any country.  President Trump recognises that globalisation and mass-immigration are choices made by the elite and that they are not inevitable.

In just the same way Brexit was about restoring national control, in terms of democratic accountability for laws that we live by and an end to the right to freedom of movement of virtually a whole continent to our small island.  This is not revolutionary, it is the restoration of common-sense and a capitalist economy that enables people's lives to get better, rather than live at the whim of globalist companies.

This vision won the democratic battle, but now the battle continues in the corridors of power and in the media, which is compliant to and complicit in the globalist agenda.  Given Theresa May's decision to betray the public on Brexit and the continued attempts to undermine the Trump presidency, it is by no means clear whether two victories in two battles against globalism will ever translate into winning ultimate victory.