Guy Shrubsole is the author of Who Owns England? a forthcoming book that reports out a paintstaking researched data-set laying out, for the first time, a comprehensive view of the land ownership in England, finding that half of the country is owned by 1% of its people: a mere 25,000 aristocrats, oligarchs and corporations.
Shrubsole’s research breaks down land ownership, singling out the likes of Brexiteer James Dyson (who lobbied in favour of Brexit, then relocated his company to Singapore when it became apparent that the UK would be plunged into chaos by it).
Shrubsole is also at pains to point out that he may be underestimating the extent to which land ownership is concentrated into a few hands in England, because 17% of England and Wales is undeclared at the Land Registry, and much of the property that is in the registry is nominally owned by anonymous, secrecy-shrouded companies that are often fronts for English and global elites.
Guy Shrubsole, author of the book in which the figures are revealed, Who Owns England?, argues that the findings show a picture that has not changed for centuries. “Most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few,” he writes, adding: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of middle England put together.”
“Land ownership in England is astonishingly unequal, heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite.”
The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.
It is difficult to anticipate what form this future colonization will take. Long ago, it was made possible by the huge differences in the level of education. But today?
For a decade we have been revealing the incongruity of the French desire to re-establish its authority over its old colonies. This was the logic behind the nomination by President Nicolas Sarkozy of Bernard Kouchner as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Kouchner replaced the French Revolutionary idea of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” with the Anglo-Saxon notion of human rights. Later, his friend President François Hollande declared, during a press conference on the fringes of the UN General Assembly, that it was time to re-establish a mandate over Syria. The great grand-nephew of ambassador François George-Picot (of the Sykes-Picot agreement), ex-President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, spoke of this even more clearly. This should help us better to understand the desire of President Emmanuel Macron to continue the war against Syria, without the United States.
There has always been a “colonial party” in France which crosses all political parties and acts as a lobby in the service of the wealthy class. Just as in every period when it becomes difficult for unscrupulous capitalists to crush the national work-force, the myth of colonial conquest resurfaces. If the Yellow Vests revolt, let us continue with the exploitation of men by other men » on the backs of the Syrians.
Long ago, this form of domination hid, according to the words of Jules Ferry – under whose auspices François Hollande consecrated his son mandate – behind the duty of bestowing civilization. Today, it aims at protecting the people whose elected leaders are qualified as dictators. France is not the only ancient colonial power to act in this way. Turkey quickly followed on.
The Ottoman Empire
Three months after the attempted assassination and aborted coup d’état of July 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave his inaugural speech from the university which bears his name (RTEÜ). He delivered a list of the ambitions of the Turkish Republic since its creation and those of his new regime. Making an explicit reference to the National Oath (Misak-ı Millî) [4], which was adopted by the Ottoman Parliament on 12 February 1920, he justified his irredentism.
This Oath, which was the foundation of the passage of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, lays claim to the territory in the North-East of Greece (Western Thrace and the Dodecanese), all of Cyprus, the North of Syria (including Idlib, Aleppo and Al-Hasakah), and the North of Iraq (including Mosul).
Currently, the Empire in re-formation already occupies the North of Cyprus (the pseudo-Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), the North-West of Syria, and a small part of Iraq. For all these areas, where the Turkish language and currency apply, prefects ( wali ») have been nominated, and their offices are situated in the White Palace of Ankara.
A poster shows the French and British empires and bearing the inscription: “We will win because we are the stronger” in Paris on June 11, 1939. Photo | AP
The British Empire
As for the United Kingdom, it has been hesitating for two years about its future after the Brexit.
A little after the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, Prime Minister Theresa May went to the United States. Speaking to the representatives of the Republican Party, she proposed re-establishing the Anglo-Saxon leadership of the rest of the world. But President Trump has been elected to liquidate these imperial dreams, not to share them.
Disappointed, Theresa May then traveled to China in order to propose that President Xi Jinping share control of international exchanges. The City, she said, was ready to ensure the convertibility of Western currencies into Yuan. But President Xi had not been elected to do business with an heiress of the power which had dismantled his country and imposed on the Chinese their opium war.
Theresa May tried a third version with the Commonwealth. Some of the ex-colonies of the Crown, like India, are today enjoying powerful growth and could become precious commercial partners. Symbolically, the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Charles, was raised to the Presidency of this association. Mrs. May announced that we are on our way to a global Britain.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on 30 December 2018, the British Minister for Defence, Gavin Williamson, published his analysis of the situation. Since the fiasco of the Suez Canal in 1956, the United Kingdom has implemented a policy of decolonization and has withdrawn its troops from the rest of the world. Today, it conserves permanent military bases only in Gibraltar, Cyprus, Diego Garcia and the Falklands, to give these islands their imperial title. For the last 63 years, London has been oriented towards the European Union, invented by Winston Churchill, but to which, initially, he never imagined that England would belong. The Brexit tears this policy to shreds. From now on, the United Kingdom is back as a global power.
London is planning to open two permanent military bases. The first will probably be in Asia (Singapore or Brunei), and the second in Latin America – most likely in Guyana, in order to participate in the new stage of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy of the destruction of those regions of the world which are not connected to globalization. After the African Great Lakes, the Greater Middle East, it’s time for the Caribbean Basin. The war will probably start with an invasion of Venezuela by Colombia (pro-US), Brazil (pro-Israel) and Guyana (pro-British).
Taking no notice of the smooth speechifying of the French, the English built an empire with the collaboration of multinational companies in the service of which it placed its army. They divided the world into two parts, which may be summed up as follows – the sovereign was the King of England (and therefore submitted to political tradition over here ) and the Emperor of India (in other words subjected to the private East India Company and unlimited autocrat over there).
Decolonization was a corollary of the Cold War. It was forced on the states of Western Europe by the duopoly of the USA and the USSR. This held during the time of the unipolar world but now meets no obstacles since the US withdrawal from the Greater Middle East.
It is difficult to anticipate what form this future colonization will take. Long ago, it was made possible by the huge differences in the level of education. But today?
Sidelined The theatre director Angela Richter visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London. For the last time, she fears
A photo was not possible in the embassy under the current circumstances. This one was taken during Angela Richter’s visit in 2014
Julian Assange looks very pale. “Pale” isn’t quite accurate; his skin looks like parchment, almost translucent. He hasn’t seen the sun for almost seven years. He sits opposite to me in the so-called Meeting Room of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the snow-white hair, his trademark, is shoulder-length and he wears a long beard. We joke about him looking like Santa. He wears a thick down jacket and eats a piece of the sushi I brought for lunch. It is cold in the room and I regret that I left my winter coat at the reception.
It is just before Christmas, and Julian Assange has probably just had the worst time of his stay at the embassy. Since March 2018 he was de facto in isolation, no telephone, no internet and no visits. The internet ban must be particularly difficult for him; it was not only his field of work, but his only access to the world.
The mood in the embassy is tense; the new ambassador is due to arrive. They have turned off the heating and taken the bed, he sleeps on a yoga mat. I cannot help the impression that everything possible is being done to make his stay so difficult that he finally gives in and leaves the embassy voluntarily. But what will await him then?
It’s the first time since I’ve known him that he really looks drained, his former boyish face, which always seemed peculiar to the silver-white hair, has adapted to his age. The nine months of isolation have visibly weakened him, he has become leaner, but in our conversation he seems mentally strong and more determined than ever.
Surrounded by microphones
When I ask him how he had endured the isolation for so long, he replies that he was almost delighted at first. He was sure that such a flagrant violation of his human rights would cause great public outrage and European politicians would stand up for him because of pressure from the media. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and as the months passed, he lost faith.
In the meantime, it has even become public that the US authorities had filed criminal charges against Julian Assange. Charges that were supposed to remain under lock and key until Assange could no longer escape arrest. They confirm what Assange has feared for years and why he has often been declared paranoid in the press. But even after this revelation there is no indignation.
WikiLeaks
Since 2007, the disclosure platform has made it possible to publish documents anonymously. In 2010, it launched a video entitled Collateral Murder, which shows how civilians and journalists were killed in the attack by a US combat helicopter in Baghdad. In 2011, Wikileaks published…
His stay in the embassy, granted as political asylum in 2012, now resembles more and more a detention with rigid punishments. The isolation has still not been completely lifted, from Friday evening until Monday morning there is still a ban on contact, and anyone who wants to visit him has to submit a formal application to the embassy. There were probably also rejections, he tells me. I was lucky and got two of the requested four hours approved.
I have visited Julian Assange about 30 times between 2012 and 2017 at the Ecuadorian Embassy. This resulted in three theatre plays and a friendship with one of the most controversial people of our time. It was not always easy to defend him, especially since the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, for which many journalists, former supporters and friends of mine have made him jointly responsible. Moreover, most journalists seem to have agreed that there is a mad conspiracy between Trump and Putin, with Assange as intermediary and helper. At the end of November, the Guardian claimed that Paul Manafort, head of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had met Assange three times in London: in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Fidel Narváez, the then Ecuadorian consul in London, has formally denied this. WikiLeaks initiated legal proceedings against the Guardian and Manafort publicly and denied the meetings. His name does not appear in the Ecuadorian Embassy’s guest book and there are no images of him entering or leaving one of the world’s best-monitored buildings.
“Remember you are an Englishman and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.” — Cecil Rhodes, British imperialist, 1910
“Almost the entire population of Britain looks as though it has let itself go. Where once emotional restraint and self-control were admired, now it is emotional incontinence. It is no surprise that the British are despised around the world.” — Theodore Dalrymple, British author and psychiatrist, 2018
A new dystopia, rising from the ashes of WWII, now rears its ugly head and casts its shadow over England’s no longer “green and pleasant land”.
Merrie England! Was it ever that merry? A beautiful mirage! Maybe such a happy land never existed except in fantasy and in the perceptions of a privileged few blessed with all the felicities of the Good Life. And yet it has always existed in longing, where all utopias and earthly paradises germinate, as in the fevered imagination of William Blake who longed to build ‘Jerusalem’—Civitas Dei, or the City of God—in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. Blake’s thoughts on this subject will be presented at the end of this article in one of the most beautiful and profoundly moving videos you are ever likely to see on the internet.
Meanwhile, let this literary gem by George Orwell on the three main races inhabiting the British Isles—the English, the Scots and the Irish—serve as a lighthearted introduction to this otherwise sombre article. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”
The English, by common consensus, are the maddest of the bunch.
Once famous for their stiff-upper lip attitude to life, a characteristic still found among the educated upper classes and a conservative older generation, the British as a whole have undergone a startling change of national character in the last two decades. This is almost certainly due to the toxic influence of television, trashy Hollywood movies, and the mind-destroying excesses of the internet. The Brits have lost their self-confidence, their customary aplomb, their cheerful joie de vivre. Why? Because they have become demoralised. Thoroughly demoralised. “In every face”, to quote William Blake, you now see “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.
The narcissistic younger generation in particular, confident in their own omniscience, bear little resemblance to their parents and grandparents whom they tend to belittle as inferior beings with all the wrong ideas and attitudes.
The new Brits tend to be an emotional bunch. They get easily upset. They are outraged by six appalling things before breakfast. They insist on having their “safe spaces” in universities, for example, where no idea is allowed to penetrate that might possibly ruffle the tranquil waters of their intellectual somnolence. Dare to disagree with them even on some minor point and they will snarl at you for crossing their “boundaries”. Getting on their nerves is easy. All you have to do is exist.
British Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (1852-1928) once noted dryly, “Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.” The older I get, the more I appreciate the truth of the witty aphorism that youth is wasted on the young. Apropos of which, one is reminded of the old French adage that says it all: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillese pouvait. — “If youth but knew, if age but could.”
To attract attention nowadays, if the ads in fashion magazines are anything to go on, young men need to look darkly dangerous and young women anorexically deranged. The passport to peer approval is an air of decadence, if not degeneracy. The tragedy is that this immature attitude to life, previously confined to the young, has now infected the general population at large.
British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple has written much on this subject. He says:
All kinds of princely personages—footballers, rock stars, actors, actresses, and the like—display their inner turmoil. They parade it as beggars in some countries display their amputated stumps. They seem to be saying, ‘We too suffer, despite our wealth, privilege, and fairy-tale lives, which you falsely imagine to be enviable and without blemish.’
Sufferers and victims are turned into heroes merely on account of their suffering or victimisation, so that those celebrities who confess to misery, drug addiction, and alcoholism, are even more to be adulated than they already were.
It’s no longer safe for a young man to flirt with a female colleague at work. Simply looking at her with interest is now classified as a “microaggression” and could get him reported for “sexual harassment”. These uppity feminists keep telling everyone around them, much to the irritation of most intelligent men, how “oppressed” their grandmothers were and how “liberated” they are now.
No wonder misogyny and male suicide rates (see below) have shown a sharp increase in recent years, keeping pace with a rise in rampant feminism and soaring hemlines that leave little to the imagination.
— § —
I was relieved to find that Dalrymple’s views on Brexit coincided with my own. The fact that 17.4 million people voted in a referendum over two years ago, in June 2016, to sever all ties with the European superstate is, according to Dalrymple, not only a triumph for democracy but also a victory of the wiser older generation over the Clueless Young. For it was the young who voted fatuously to remain tied to Europe’s apron strings, whereas it was the oldsters who voted overwhelmingly to escape the diktats of a sinister superstate that seeks to banish all borders between countries and turn Europe into a multicultural zoo.
Of these emotionally overwrought young idealists who voted to remain in the EU and lost, Dalrymple has this to say:
Nearly half of the young people who voted to remain [in Europe] either wept, or felt close to weeping, afterwards. They felt that their future had been stolen from them by those who voted for Brexit. The fact that the youth unemployment rate in Belgium and France is 25%, in Portugal 30%, in Italy 39%, in Spain 45% and in Greece 49% did not seem to worry them. They were not of the youth-unemployment class.
The British are now a traumatised nation, Dalrymple believes. The evidence for this lies all around us. We only need to open our eyes. There is a moral relativism in the air. The result? Moral anarchy. Knifing people to death in the streets or throwing sulphuric acid in their faces, disfiguring them for life, has become the crime du jour. “A sense of lawlessness and fear is sweeping across Britain,” I read in the Daily Mail today. “Violence is soaring on the streets, police are grossly overstretched and the prison system is sliding into crisis.”
The country is certainly in deep trouble when its prisoners are marching through prison corridors, brandishing machetes and clubs, while the prison officers are cowering in their back offices behind chain-locked doors.
The country’s National Health Service (NHS) is in meltdown, with vast numbers of people being denied vital operations. People are going blind because there are not enough doctors to give them cataract operations. You have to be in agony before they give you a hip replacement or repair your hernia. So how are the politicians trying to solve this problem? They are letting in more immigrants to add to the overload of patients requiring cataract operations, hip replacements and hernias! And how are these empowered pundits helping to solve the doctor shortage, a shortage entirely of their own making? They are importing more immigrant doctors who can barely speak the English language and are often medically incompetent, if not downright dangerous.
A report in today’s Daily Mail (24 August, 2018) carries the headline: ‘The UK streets where more than 3 in 4 babies have migrant mothers”. Apart from an enormous influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland and Romania, vast numbers of illegal immigrants and so-called “refugees” have swarmed in from Asia and Africa. The top five countries contributing to non-white immigration, in order of their high numbers, are Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Somalia. Between them, these now make up as much as 7.1 per cent of the British population. (See this chart).
In 2017, 28.4 per cent of births were born to mothers outside Britain. In some parts of Britain, it was as high as three children in four. It was the largest percentage since 1969. Campaigners said the statistics were a striking illustration of the way mass migration is changing the face of the country — and placing additional pressure on public services, including hospitals, schools and housing. The proportion has risen every year since 1990.
The floodgates were thrown open with a vengeance in 1997 when the mendacious war criminal Tony Blair became prime minister after a landslide victory. Blair was later to be rewarded for his services to multiculturalism by being awarded the prestigious Charlemagne Prize in 1999 by the EU, a distinction he was to share with Angela Merkel who was to bag the same prize in 2008 and was to eclipse even Tony Blair in her misguided enthusiasm for mass immigration. This is not the place for expatiating on the crackpot theories of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the ideological godfather of the EU. Suffice to say that this Austro-Japanese promoter of miscegenation and mongrelisation through mass immigration was to be the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize (in 1950), which is why it is also sometimes known as the Coudenhove-Kalergi Prize. Other recipients of this coveted prize, all politically correct promoters of multiculturalism, have been Henry Kissinger (1987), Bill Clinton (2000), Pope John Paul II (2004), Pope Francis (2016), and Emmanuel Macron (2017).
Which brings us back to the Brits, now in the process of fighting for a meaningful Brexit which would help to free them from the shackles of the European superstate, hellbent on flooding every European country with as many foreigners as possible. The correlation between high levels of immigration, especially from Third World countries, and high and escalating levels of crime are now so blindingly obvious in Britain (and indeed elsewhere) that it’s hard to believe that this correlation is not only hotly denied by the authorities but denounced as “racist” if it should even be suggested. One has only to open the newspapers in Britain to see that not a day goes by when monstrous crimes are not being committed by criminals who are disproportionately of immigrant stock, mostly of African or Asian origin.
Two cases, both plucked from today’s Daily Mail, will amply illustrate this correlation. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Not unless such coincidences occur several times a week:
A mother-of-two stabbed by a knifeman targeting lone women at night was saved by her thick coat.
The victim, in her 60s, was walking home with fish and chips on Friday night when a stranger leapt out and knifed her in the stomach…. The terrified pensioner thought she had been punched as her thick clothing stopped the blade from plunging deeper into her stomach.
Yesterday her distraught daughter told how her mother might have been killed, but when her attacker went to stab her a second time, ‘she saw the glisten of the knife and just ran’.
Bleeding, she managed to stagger back to her home…. Police are linking the unprovoked attack to the stabbing of another single woman in the same area over the Bank Holiday weekend.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “In both cases the suspect is described as a black male, aged around 40….”
The second case involves a bloodbath perpetrated by an out-of-control Afghan immigrant:
A mother and daughter were stabbed to death in a frenzied attack outside their home yesterday morning. Neighbours in the quiet suburban street initially thought their screams were the sound of foxes.
Last night police were hunting Janbaz Tarin, 21, for the murders of his former girlfriend Raneem Oudeh, 22, and her mother, Khaola Saleem, 49. The women were originally from Syria but have lived in the UK for at least 16 years. Tarin, who is originally from Afghanistan, worked in a corner shop.
Wendy Brown, 76, who lives nearby with her husband, said: “We have lived here for 40 years. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It is terrifying.”
What the native born English lady is saying, if you read between the lines, is that 40 years ago, before the invasion of her country by outlanders from foreign parts, she was living in a relatively safe and crime free country. No longer. Most of the criminals you hear of nowadays no longer have reassuringly familiar names the average white Brit can pronounce, like Winston Smith and John Brown. The five doctors mentioned in the paragraph below, for example, all convicted of sexually assaulting their white female patients, happen to be without exception of Asian origin. Coincidence? Most unlikely. Forty years ago, for a start, doctors groping and taking obscene photos of their female patients surreptitiously, were extremely rare events. Today they are all too common. And the names they bear are disproportionately foreign. The five doctors featured below—hardly a ringing endorsement of multiculturalism—all sport pretty weird names most Brits would get wrong in a spelling test: Dr Gosul Islam, Dr Rajeskumar Mehta, Dr Syed Bukhari, Dr Jaswant Rathore, and Dr Thair Altail.
The average older Brit now feels like a stranger in a strange land.
— § —
Dalrymple sees the British as finding refuge for their many sorrows in a cheerless hedonism, drinking themselves into a stupor or seeking consolation in the pleasures of the flesh. Quite a few male doctors, often of immigrant stock—see here, here, here, here, and here—have begun to subject their female patients to sexual abuse on an almost epic scale. The politicians are at it too, sexually harassing and groping their female staff in the House of Commons or watching pornography while supposedly engaged in high-powered affairs of state. These are the people running the country. Having lost control of their own impulses, they are nevertheless given licence to lord it over the lives of millions of their fellow citizens.
Is it any wonder the country is going to the dogs?
THEN (1958) . . . and NOW (2018)
— § —
The last two centuries have seen enormous technological progress but human nature is pretty much the same with one significant difference: a huge number of Brits are now committing suicide at the drop of a hat, especially young men. Suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 50, with 84 taking their own lives every week. Though not far behind in the suicide race, women are more likely than men to develop serious mental complaints and to be on medication of some kind. The number of people I notice talking to themselves in public places nowadays, twitching spasmodically or jerking their heads round from side to side like marionettes gone mad, is truly frightening.
The worst fate, according to Dalrymple, is to be an intelligent and sensitive person born into the British underclass. “The social pressure on you to fail is enormous,” he notes. “I remember a girl who wanted to study French but ‘they said I was stupid because I was clever’. Can you imagine growing up in that environment?” British education, he concludes gloomily, involves “people who come out of school knowing less than when they went in.”
The country’s cultural level has plummeted. The Brits are so degraded culturally they can’t even answer the telephone properly. They were once known for emotional constipation. Now it’s emotional incontinence.
Tolerance has become the new vice:
A society that tolerates everything is rather bad. Shouting, screaming, intimidation. We are prepared to tolerate public vomiting, but if you use the term “actress”, you are a sexist. A very well-educated lady told me public vomiting is all right: “They can clear it up.” This is how the élite thinks. They are so anxious not to seem narrow-minded or bigoted, or of being “judgmental”.
Dalrymple thinks it’s a puzzle as to why Britain has become more degraded than all other comparable countries.
He recounts an experience he had in Manchester, where he was staying at an hotel: “There was laughing and screaming outside at 1.30 in the morning. When I went out the next morning, I found that someone had been nearly murdered—he was in hospital, in a coma. You can’t tell the difference in England between people enjoying themselves and someone being murdered.”
Almost the entire population of Britain, Dalrymple notes ruefully, “looks as though it has let itself go. Where once emotional restraint and self-control were admired, now it is emotional incontinence. It is as if they had undergone potty-training in reverse.”
The person who controls himself is not only a figure of fun, but a traitor to his own best interests. “It is no surprise,” Dalrymple concludes, “that the British are despised around the world.”
— § —
I hate to see the British described in these negative terms. In fact, I have to disagree that the Brits are “despised around the world.” If anything, the opposite is true. Most white Americans still regard their British ancestors with affection, admiring their accents and taking pride in the blood and soil of their forefathers. The blood that flows through their veins, after all, is the same blood that flowed through the veins of the Pilgrim Fathers and the veins of Shakespeare, Milton and Newton. Even India secretly mourned the demise of Pax Britannica when the raj came to an end and the burra sahib, weary of conquest, packed his bags and went back home.
One virtue the Brits have always enjoyed in abundance, far more than any other country. This is noblesse oblige, an innate compassion for the underdog and a hatred of the bully. Their sense of honour, even now amid their desolation, has never left them. This virtue, needless to say, is more often to be found among the well-bred upper classes and is conspicuous by its absence among the nouveaux riches and the lower pushy types who are forced to live by their wits.
You will notice this, too, if you live long in Britain: the kindest people in the country are the older generation, especially its valiant brigade of dotty old ladies. Ever ready to drop their coins in a beggar’s bowl or buy a takeaway tea and sandwiches for some homeless bum, these charitable old dears are also most likely to fall victims and be fleeced alive by scam artists. Meanwhile, it’s the young and trendy who are the most heartless when it comes to derelicts. Never expect even a smile from them if ever you go begging, let alone a penny for your pains.
We need to cross the Atlantic to see what has happened to the Brits. The same malaise, or creeping soul sickness, that has afflicted their American cousins, has now fallen on the Brits with a vengeance. In the words of an American psychiatrist, this new plague is known as “shit-life syndrome”.
US doctors [have] coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible.
Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall, Hutton adds, and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. “Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”
Many Americans are now in poor health. In physical pain. They are so depressed that they not only need antidepressants but opioid painkillers. To this they add alcohol, drinking themselves into a stupor. It’s a never-ending cycle of misery. “They have much to be depressed about”, Hutton glooms, adding the significant fact that these dead enders all tend to be ardent Trump supporters. “They, and tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition, constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base.” Mostly marginalised and maladjusted white Americans, they live in hope that their president will one day wave a magic wand and rescue them from futility.
The parallels between America and Britain, Hutton tells us, have now become obvious:
Shit-life syndrome is not just a feature of a US city such as Baltimore, where the difference in life expectancy between the richer and poorer districts is as much as 20 years, it’s a feature of our cities, too. Within the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest is 16 years. And the trends are deteriorating.
Too many of England’s towns are becoming crucibles of shit-life syndrome. They have become inward-looking, urban islands in which despair and despondency are too prevalent. Train and bus fares are so high that travelling within them has become prohibitively expensive. Stripped of power by the most centralised system in Europe, they are disempowered and sullen about the present and apprehensive of the future.
All this can and must change.
But nothing changes.
Two years after Brexit, Theresa May—famous for her catchphrase “Brexit means Brexit”—has yet to deliver on her promise to cut free from Europe and reclaim British sovereignty.
Having stabbed the British public in the back by openly aligning herself with the Europhile enemy in recent months, though affecting a need for fair play and a desire to give the British public what it voted for on 23 June 2016, Mrs May would be only too happy to see Brexit fail.
This is what democracy has come to mean in Britain: you are free to vote only if you vote correctly. Stalin was right when he said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”
Well this is a Sunday and Sundays are good for chelaxing and poetry. This is from my bud James Anderson from England who is battling his government and PTSD, not in that order. He is a formidable crusader against pedophilia in England and when he gets really riled up, or hurt, he writes delectable peasant poetry. That’s what I call it anyway. Poetry for the great unwashed.
(Yes, I know chelaxing is not a word, live with it)
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Bird flu has been confirmed in a dozen wild birds in southwest England for the first time this winter, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair said Friday.
“This is the first time avian flu has been identified in the UK this winter and while the disease does not represent a threat to the public, it is highly infectious and deadly to birds,” UK Chief Veterinary Officer Nigel Gibbens said.
The ministry said tests had showed that the infection, detected in 17 birds in Dorset county, was closely related to the H5N6 strain that has been circulating in wild birds across Europe in recent months. It stressed a different strain affected people in China last year.A prevention zone will nevertheless be introduced in the area until further notice. The ministry said there were no plans for any culls or movement restrictions but urged poultry farmers to keep a close watch on their birds.
The first case of a human contracting another strain of avian influenza, H7N9, was registered in China’s northern province of Shanxiin last year. Those who were in contact with the person, did not reportedly show any symptoms of infection, however.
This is what evil looks like in 2017. Look at their faces, that is what evil looks like. Ignorance, stupidity, and greed changes a human being. Rot in prison failures of humanity.
Several members of a traveler family have been sentenced to jail for running a modern-day slavery camp.
Ten men and one woman belonging to the Rooney family were convicted at Nottingham Crown Court on Tuesday for exploiting vulnerable people on a site in Drinsey Nook, Lincolnshire.
Nine members of the family were sentenced to jail for a total of almost 80 years in prison.
The family recruited unemployed, vulnerable, often homeless men from across the country to work for meagre wages in their various businesses.
Almost all of the 18 victims were found to have mental health or drug and/or drink problems.
The court heard the victims, all adults aged between 18 and 63, were beaten and left without running water and toilet facilities while living in squalid caravans.
In one case, a man had been exploited by the family for 26 years. He said he was once made to dig his own grave in case he failed to pledge life-long servitude to the family.
In another case, a victim told the police he sometimes felt he was treated no better than one of the family’s dogs, as leftovers were thrown at him to pick up from the ground.
In sentencing, Judge Timothy Spencer QC called it the “wholesale exploitation of vulnerable men”.
He told the family: “Violence is a consistent theme in this case.
“Your victims had reached a position where they were cowed into submission.
“They knew that any resistance to you was futile – it would have been met by you recruiting more family members to deliver more violence.
“These offences are chilling in their mercilessness.”
The judge also compared the family’s lavish lifestyle to the debased one of their “labourers”.
Senior investigating officer from Lincolnshire Police Chief Superintendent Nikki Mayo said: “While their ‘labourers’ were suffering, this family were [buying] luxurious holidays to Barbados, Australia, Egypt and Mexico…high performance BMWs, spa days and even cosmetic surgery.
“The greatest positive of this case is that so many of the victims have now got their lives back, they’ve got a real second chance at some peace and happiness and to grow and flourish in their communities – it’s very much deserved,” Mayo said.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has criticized Britain’s after-work drinking culture, which he claims discriminates against women and mothers.
The left-wing politician said the tradition of going for a ‘man pint’ after work benefited “men who don’t feel the need to be at home” with their families, while discriminating against women who want to look after their children.
Corbyn’s remarks have caused controversy among some, who accuse him of assuming women are more likely to be responsible for childcare.
He made the comments in a speech on Labour policies for women, during which he promised to set up a Women’s Advisory Board within the party.
Although he did not call for a national ban on “early-evening socialization,” he did suggest it should come to an end.
Media pundits, such as BuzzFeed’s James Ball, were quick to call the Labour leader out for adopting the “sexist trope” that women look after children and men work.
Unfortunately for the Labour leader, his comments also overshadowed progressive policy proposals.
A string of other suggestions included the establishment of an annual Labour Women’s Conference with the power to make policies and a consultation on how to tackle threats and sexual harassment online.
Corbyn also said he would boost the powers of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to penalize companies that don’t publish detailed gender pay information at a company-wide level.
The incumbent leader enjoys widespread support among Labour’s female membership base, with 67 percent of women within the Labour movement backing him.
A report by the Health and Social Care Information Centre showed that 61 million antidepressant medications were prescribed last year, which is 31.6 million more than in 2005, and 3.9 million more than in 2014. This category of drugs also noted the biggest numeric rise in prescriptions last year. The total spent each day by the NHS on antidepressants is a staggering £780,000.
What makes this figure particularly alarming, is the fact that these medications have actually been shown to be ineffective. A recent study published in the Lancet showed that only one of 14 commonly used antidepressants was more effective when it comes to relieving depression symptoms than a placebo pill in young people.
A 2010 study published in JAMA showed that SSRIs such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil do not benefit people with mild or moderate depression, working no better than a placebo. Other studies have actually shown that even sugar pills might work better than antidepressants!
Studies show side effects far outweigh potential benefits
While taking medications that don’t work might seems like nothing more than a waste of time and money, the truth is that the side effects of antidepressants make this an extremely dangerous practice.
For example, a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes can be two to three times higher if they take antidepressants. A Canadian study found that women who took SSRIs were two times as likely to have a stillbirth, while another showed that they have a 40 percent higher risk of birth defects like cleft palates. The effect of the drugs on blood clotting is believed to be behind the 45 percent higher risk of stroke noted in those who take antidepressants, while overall death rates are 32 percent higher among women who take these medications.
All of these side effects are very concerning, but one in particular could have a big impact on society at large, and that is these drugs’ tendency to incite suicidal thoughts or feelings and violent behavior. This can be evidenced by the extremely high proportion of school shooters and other mass killers who were taking antidepressants or in the process of withdrawing from them at the time they committed these heinous acts. This puts not only the patient at risk, but countless others as well.
British mental health charities call for changes
The head of policy of the charity Rethink Mental Illness, Gillian Connor, said that a greater awareness of mental illnesses and willingness to seek help are likely behind the 107 percent increase in antidepressant prescriptions noted since 2005. She added that the national mental health services are overstretched and underfunded, which is why antidepressants are all too often the only treatment that is available.
She told the Daily Mail: “One in 10 of us will experience depression at some point in our lives. What we want to see is people experiencing depression offered the full range of treatments available, including talking therapies.
“People have to be able to access the treatment that is right for them, whether it’s antidepressants, therapy or a combination of the two.”
The head of policy and campaigns for the mental health charity Mind, Vicki Nash, echoed these sentiments, saying that talk therapies are not available to everyone who needs them. She said that antidepressants are simply not the solution for everybody, and that they should never be used as the first line of treatment for those with mild depression.
Some people with mild depression find that getting better sleep and reducing stress can help take the edge off. The Health Ranger’s Ultrasonic Essential Oil Diffuser can help fill your living space with the refreshing and stress-reducing aroma of peppermint, or perhaps the relaxing effects of lavender essential oil to lift your spirits and ensure you get proper rest to feel your best.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
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