Eve of Destruction

"Ah, you may leave here, for eight days in space,
But when your return, it's the same old place,
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace,
Hate your neighbor next door, don't forget to say grace,
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction."

Let's get one thing straight from the start. There is not some sudden unexpected "anti-establishment" mood sweeping the country, or the world for that matter.

The recent spate of political events and outcomes, from Brexit in June to Trump rallying in the polls within the last few days (at the time of writing), have been described by some commentators as an "anti-establishment movement" and a "rejection of global elites." But these are not manifestations of some new deeper insight people have into Machiavellian machinations whispered in the corridors of power. There is not some recent improvement in people's appreciation of their rights and responsibilities and how these are subverted by unaccountable corporate interests, directly or as mediated by the state.

They are not rejecting of global elites. The repeated suggestion that they are is an insult to the intelligence. One, ironically, that is promulgated by global elites. It is a lie repeated by those corporations' media cohorts to confer some renegade appeal to the forces of reaction.  

For these are reactionary, not revolutionary, times.

People who are genuinely interested in change do not choose the likes of Farage or Trump as their standard bearer. Their champions do not lead easy, pampered lives. Their champions are often reviled rather than celebrated, and they are certainly not celebrities. They are rarely wealthy. They don't sit in a televised boardroom and point their finger and declaim "you're fired." They don't use a pint of warm bitter as a prop during a photo opportunity down the pub as they regale us with cosy homespun bigotry and casual, superficially plausible lies.

They are in the jungle with Che. They are on the cross with Christ. They never promote the interests of the wealthy, or of the entrenched, vested interests that reside in anonymous offshore tax havens, safely out of democracy's reach.

Real anti-establishment activists place flowers in the barrels of guns instead of demanding the right to bear arms. They throw the money lenders out of the temple instead of deregulating the temple to grant its financial services a free hand. They read books instead of burning them. They seek connection and dialogue with others instead of demonising them. They respect experts instead of ignoring or deriding them. They exhaustively research, gather evidence, subject that evidence to severe scrutiny, tentatively draw heavily qualified conclusions, actively seek constructive criticism of their ideas. They don't jump to lazy conclusions on the basis of a headline repeating a demonstrable lie, or on the basis of an anecdote offered to support some agenda. They make hard choices. They don't offer easy answers. They make sacrifices. They do not respond to the latest dog-whistle or knee-jerk. They pay the price of keeping the peace, in reputation or blood, rather than asking others pay the price of fighting their wars for them.  

Gil Scott-Heron observed the Revolution will not be televised. So what do we make of these people who are never bloody well off the telly, these Trumps and Farages and Johnsons and the rest? They're no revolutionaries. This is not a revolution. This is not a backlash against authority. Yes, people feel pain. But their pain is being misdirected against innocent scapegoats by the very interests that caused it. This is a coup. This is a shoddy putsch prosecuted by unprincipled imbeciles incapable of understanding or curtailing the forces they have unleashed to deliver their pathetic short term objectives, aided and abetted by a decimated and shell-shocked media barely able to repeat the lies they are fed, let alone challenge them.

And now that the UK Government are illegally compensating multinationals for adverse consequences of Brexit, why not just cut out the middle man, abolish taxation, and offer us all to the multinationals as indentured slaves?  

There is nothing new about this. This is not an anti-establishment movement. This has been on the cards for a long time. The disaster that has been gradually unfolding over the course of 2016 before our eyes has been a long time coming. We now look back fondly to a time when the most we had to concern ourselves with was the possibility that the Prime Minister might have had sex with the corpse of a pig. But the forces, the trends, the relentless drip-feed of hate and lies in the right wind press, the erosion of trust in public institutions, the devaluation of intelligence and education and robust well-informed opinion, have continued for decades to bring us to where we now find ourselves, on the brink of the election of a self-confessed sex criminal to the highest office in the USA, no doubt green-lighting sexual assault there in the same way racist hate-crime has been green-lighted in the UK by the outcome of the EU referendum.

Decades of hysterical bigoted misinformation. Decades of dog-whistles and knee-jerks, prodding us and making us twitch in our stupefied trance, our cathode ray slumber. Decades in which education, critical thought, reliable information, civic concern, altruism, authentic individuality, have all been demeaned, devalued, denigrated, despised, dispensed with, in favour of delusions of consequence-free existence, get-rich-quick schemes, money-for-nothing lotteries, superficial celebrity culture, rewarding selfishness and conformity, luring us towards a myth of comfortable consumerist servitude as salvation from the threat of threadbare freedom and a wilderness of ostracism and ridicule.

The only aspirations cultivated and legitimised in this scenario are shallow materialistic appetites. The only needs that can be acknowledged are for things advertisers can sell you. The only requirements recognised are those whose ultimate fulfilment will leave an unexpected dissatisfaction and a craving for more that continues and grows until it gnaws at and hollows out whole societies and abandons us to inhabit their bombed-out husks.

The great vessel we are embarked upon, this ship of fools, is headed for the rocks. It will take as much to steer it away from them as it took set it on that course.

Sub specie aeternitatis

The original sin wasn't the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

It was ignorance. It was an act of forgetting. It was the loss of knowledge.

The creator wanted to experience being part of his own creation. He had to assume its limitations to do so. And so he exchanged his divine knowledge for common knowledge. He forgot his divinity.

But common knowledge is not knowledge at all. It is its absence.

What we call knowledge is blind groping, a coping mechanism, a rule of thumb, a persistence of cross-purpose, an endurance of error, a set of beliefs that are certainly mistaken but which we must take to be true only because they have stood the test of time so far. They cannot be held with the unassailable certainty available only to the creator of their content.

And so in becoming one with his creation, he forgot he was its creator.

He became us.

It is only by recognising the divinity in each other that we restore this knowledge to the creator. This is our redemption.

Our soul is our capacity to love. Our bodies cannot fulfil this capacity once we die and they become inert and corrupted and disintegrate. But that capacity endures in the divinity we all share.

Tiamat

The meaning of life is to flout its finitude,

to create real moments that cannot exist in time,

to disprove, however briefly, their impossibility.

The world is superficial.

We live in a world of surfaces:

colours and shapes;

constellations named after gods;

pretty patterns with silly names.

So when I look into your eyes

when all they see is me,

and I witness infinite, terrifying depths

that have waited since the dawn of time

until this moment to consume us,

where an ancient and unruly monster stirs

whose conquest calms the tumult,

I claim we are transformed with a kiss.

You are overthrown at last, my Tiamat.

We withdraw from time,

the point is proven,

and you are suddenly so fragile,

a flower that blossoms

only within the scope of caress,

invisible petals unfolding,

the exhalation of your breath

upon the world’s surfaces

revealing secret colours

attuned only to my eye,

like rainbow colours shimmering

on the bubble’s skin

that contains the secret

world that we’re in.

I solemnly convey my reward

through this garden only we know,

to an overgrown altar of Tethys.

I lay this first kiss upon it,

upon the altar raised to you,

this altar that has existed for all time

only for this moment.

I sweep away the moss and fallen leaves,

the accumulated detritus and defilement of ages,

and complete the single, unrepeatable ritual

for which this altar will forever stand,

but, afterwards,

you bear the brunt of our burning love,

you carry its ash for us after I leave

amid the pain your flesh inherits,

among the world's assaults,

enduring storms to keep that colour

safe upon its delicate stem

concealed so that I may see it again

when I return to enjoy the illusion of calm

you let me take the credit for,

and I will never know the price you pay

for the miracle of beauty I witness today.

You are so fragile.

Not monstrous at all. 

The little birds

Ten thousand little birds one day
decided they must fly away.
No mummy bird or daddy bird
was there to give a guiding word,
but seasons turn. They could not stay.

The journey, it grew hard and long.
As hearts grew heavy, wings grew strong.
Some men said what they did was wrong,
and so they sang a lonely song.

One third were shot down in mid flight,
another captured in the night
and caged and sold for the delight
of men who don't know wrong from right,

so barely one third reached our shore.
I wish that there was many more.
We welcome them with open arms
and promise to preserve from harm
these little birds escaping war.

The cat

My beautiful angel, my daughter,
I am sad as well that the cat died,
and I remember her too.

The moon keeks in
through your half-drawn curtains
and you crouch at the end of your bed.
Tonight you are a wolf! Together we howl,
while imaginary snakes and cheetahs prowl
around your bedroom floor.

Your heart is an eye: it sees far;
farther than I can see, past every star,
and every astronomy I know surrenders to its laws.

And then I want to weep. The tale you seek
this bedtime is your current favourite night time repeat,
the cat.

I tell you what you already know, my beautiful angel.
All that lasts is love. Everything changes, except love,
and even if love is all we can remember
once everything else has faded, or changed, or been forgotten,
even if we can't recall the sight or sound or shape or smell,
as long as we felt love, then what we loved will last forever,

even in old age, when we can no longer tell the tale,
and even when those we told have become enfeebled
and themselves have grown old,
as long as we felt love,
then what we loved will last forever.

Our hearts are created as vessels
where love can enter and take shape
and they break to set it free.
Love was waiting for you before you felt it,
and when it touched you it connected you to everything
and in the end love is all that's real.

I promise you your love for the cat is sung
by simple unwitting birds
thousands of years from now
which the cat hears
as she awakens once more
in the garden where she fell asleep
so long ago
and goes on patrol
with all the snakes and cheetahs
of your imagination.


(In memory of Vespucci, a much loved cat)

Leviathan

Madness begets madness.

Our cruel indifference towards those genuinely in need is matched only by our presumption and our spurious outrage at our own imagined victim-hood and our fantasies of thwarted entitlement. We loudly protest when short changed by the shop keeper, then, once the error is rectified, walk past the beggar on the pavement outside, oblivious to his need as we reflect on our own petty vindication. We reward or console ourselves with a holiday, and once there, complain about tardy service at the cocktail bar on the beach where the bodies of drowned refugees were washed up the year before. The wreckage of a home destroyed by a typhoon or a tsunami one thousand miles away becomes the flotsam that spoils our paradise, and heirlooms and keepsakes and photographs of people now anonymous among the living are litter that ruins the view.

When we try to discuss these discrepancies Reason itself merely invites scorn and ridicule. Argument is treated as affront. Evidence is dismissed as provocation. Logic is taken personally. There is only shared conviction or deliberate contradiction. There is no nuance, doubt or investigation. Assertion is an end in itself. Facts become banners around which to rally. News is fake unless it makes us feel good. The lies of others are tolerated, indeed celebrated, if they permit us to continue to lie to ourselves. Hate and avarice prevail and the dog-whistle and the knee-jerk are our only clarion and litmus of validity. All our criteria of truth corrode and crumble in the acid and greasy bile with which we lubricate our discourse. We succumb to the suggestions of every opportunist and indulge every easy prejudice. The habit of forensic thought is replaced by reflex and gratification.

We must put our hands over our children's ears when our leaders speak to protect them from the filth our leaders spout as they try to exculpate themselves from their sex crimes, implicating all men to make their own guilt seem commonplace and unremarkable, or as they distract from their corruption and plunder with calumnies that misdirect our indignation towards the weak and the vulnerable and the foreign. We placate the angry at the expense of moderation. We indulge bullies who insist we listen to them despite having nothing to say, who complain they are being ignored even though no-one else is allowed to speak. We allow others who timidly bear the most urgent of messages to fall silent to appease them and let their loud, empty words fill our halls and chambers and courts and parliaments and cathedrals with their specious import.

But do not confront the world head on. If you do you will only discover it possesses inexhaustible reserves of horror that will overwhelm the best in anyone. It will outdo the most inventive imagination with the variety of its atrocities. It leaves even God dumbstruck and paralysed with trauma, unable to intervene. What chance do we then stand?

Is there is another way?

Even though we may raise a humble yard from the limbs and timbers of our greatest cities, its pillars becoming our tallest skyscrapers, its canopy our hand extended upon the sky, within which to perform our noblest ambitions over countless generations, we find the highest degree of civilisation we can accomplish is still just an exquisitely refined barbarism. We may invest the finest vessel we can construct with the noblest cargo of hope, and launch it with our age's loudest boast of progress. But Leviathan will splinter the stiffest beam in its grip, and reduce all collective endeavour to disconnected tales of individual panic and despair, and to survive we must become flotsam and seek that beach where we intrude on another's dream of paradise.

But we accept the futility of our efforts and we make them anyway. The most we can achieve is temporary repair, so defiantly we live in a world built and rebuilt from its own wreckage. And we act not out of the consequences of our actions, but because our actions are who we are. We are not defined by their futility.

And we are kind to one another. We offer the beggar the change we received from the shop keeper. We learn the histories of the places we visit, reflect on the losses they have suffered, and celebrate the human legacies they have left us. We will dismantle and fold up and pack away and dispatch paradise to distant lands so that some earthly shelter may be assembled where it is needed.  

And kindness begets kindness.

Help the world's victims one by one, for you cannot vanquish the world itself in its entirety. We may not swim to solid ground. At least we shall not sink.

The living

They are the most alive who know it least:
the children playing in Aleppo's streets,
carefree, and then most cruelly made aware
of living by its sudden end beneath
a cracked and concrete sky. And from now on
what we call life is just a kind of death.

The sea

The sea does not end on Lesbos' shore.
I found it yesterday in Hamburg hauptbahnhof
in the eye of the woman to whom I gave my sandwiches
before I remembered what was important
and ran to make it to my meeting
but last night, safe at home,
thinking about my day, I found the sea again,
in my eye this time.

Elevator Pitch III: the Richest Man in the World

Pat Murt was what people used to call "poor." He had no discernible talent, no job, and no savings. These days that didn't matter so much. But it wasn't always this way.

He was badly injured during the civil war of the late 2020s, and relied on prosthetics for mobility. He had been pulled from the rubble in Chicago barely alive. He was begging on the street when Trump Tower came down during a bombardment. Thanks to prompt medical attention he had survived. It was the mental trauma of those experiences he found most difficult to overcome. His mental and physical injuries made it impossible for him to work in the sense people had understood before the wars. Indeed, they made him vulnerable to abuse by people who perceived him as a burden.

But Pat Murt was not in any way disadvantaged by his circumstances. After the wars ended - wars were no longer won or lost, they gradually abated to a point when they were generally accepted to be over - and after the great global turmoil of the early 21st century subsided, after the death throes of the old world and the birth pangs of the new had ceased, he found himself in what people used to call Utopia, where his compound needs were fully met and he could completely fulfil his potential.

How did he arrive in this position? The inexorable interaction of global forces played themselves out to this conclusion.

The turmoil had been caused by stresses arising from the revaluation and devaluation of property due to two forces. On the one hand, climate change stranded assets and made them useless, with environmental degradation precipitating mass migrations, while on the other hand, scientific progress rendered technologies obsolete and left the resources those technologies had previously been used to exploit utterly worthless.

In an effort to protect their investments, corporations and their financiers precipitated a series of conflicts around the world. A new feudalism emerged in which powerful interests sought to act without any oversight, regulation or democratic scrutiny to preserve their wealth and privilege. Wars were started to legitimise their avarice and restore value to their holdings.

Natural resources, land access, water rights, all were subjected to arbitrary seizure by corporate interests, fenced off, and protected by armies of private security contractors acting above the law. Supranational bodies that monitored and safeguarded workers rights and environmental protections across entire continents were subverted and dismantled. People were reduced to a new form of merry serfdom by demagogues who cultivated spurious nationalistic fantasies of victimhood that set them against each other, and a media that confirmed every bias and purveyed every banal distraction.

But eventually food riots turned into public unrest which turned into open rebellion. Pat found himself swept up in the giddy optimism of the Illinois Spring. But once war starts, all reason is superseded. Parts of the world descended into a chaos of shifting alliances as war aims and end games altered with every outrage, yesterday's enemies become tomorrow's allies, and all plausible victory conditions receded out of reach. The Illinois Spring became an intractable nightmare, with a fundamentalist militias called "Deus Volt" and "The Lost Tribes" fighting to establish a mid-Western theocracy, gradually being degraded by Canadian airstrikes.

As the world limped towards exhaustion it seemed the only winners were the corporations who thrived on the impoverishment of others, the plutocrats who contrived artificial scarcity to control and manipulate the people.

But slowly a different world emerged.

New science and new technology unlocked cheaper renewable energies. Wind, solar, and wave power devices became more efficient and more affordable, and were available at every scale, from off-grid homestead to utility scale power plant. Indeed, advances in energy storage eliminated the need for expensive transmission infrastructure. The transport and transmission networks merged as co-operatively owned fleets of autonomous electric vehicles charged themselves directly at renewable generation facilities, then recharged each other in transit, passing electrolytes between flow batteries in a similar way to the mid-air refuelling of aircraft. The grid was replaced by the swarm, a mobile source of power that could be accessed by even the most isolated community.

And the humble leaf, the basis of energy capture and storage on Earth for billions of years, became bionic. The amount of solar irradiance that Life on Earth had captured and used hitherto was always going to be restricted by the maximum efficiency of photosynthesis of no more than 2%, since all other uses of energy were ultimately derived from this, whether the energy was immediately accessed as feed stock or biofuel, or sequestered for millions of years as fossil fuels, only for those reserves to be squandered by a single species in one massive industrialised extravagance over a short period of time to create an illusion of abundance.

Now highly efficient artificial solar powered leaves could be created which captured solar energy and generated electricity to electrosynthesise hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Historic carbon emissions in the atmosphere could be moderated. Every ounce of fossil fuel ever burned could be recovered from its combustion products now that renewable energy technologies had become more efficient than nature at capturing the incident solar energy resource. Climate change no longer had to be a one way street. The extra energy made available by this greater degree of efficiency could be used to turn it into reverse.

The ability to use solar energy that was not intercepted by the Earth's canopy of leaves and carpet of grasses also improved. Differential heating of the Earth's surface created pressure differences that drove winds that amplified ripples on the sea into waves as tall as houses just as before. But where these had destroyed all but the largest, most robust wave energy devices previously, networks of small inter-connected devices appeared. For what survives the heaviest sea better than the smallest flotsam. These networks effectively increased the surface tension of the seas. Devices were connected by piezoelectric polymers to generate power and the networks of these devices created permanently calm shipping lanes in the corridors between them where floating maritime communities developed.

For the first time in history energy was genuinely abundant, free, and available as and when required without detriment to the environment.

But this meant that everything else was free too. Because the value of everything had always been reducible to energy costs. The cost of raw materials was reducible to the energy associated with their extraction. The cost of products was reducible to to energy costs associated with processing those materials and distributing the finished articles. And so the basis of all accumulated wealth was undermined, as was the ability to replace that wealth.

Old political and economic structures lapsed into irrelevance in this post-scarcity world. A benign anarchy emerged. The transition was made easy by the adoption of a new form of currency: asymmetric money. Where money had previously been used as a means of exchange in transactions, this was no longer necessary. In a world of abundance, in which all costs had been abolished, there was no need to keep score of who gave what to whom. People acted on the basis of kindness towards each other, and gave and received their time and the fruits of their labours freely, simply in order to participate rather than for the sake of a reward.

The transition to this post-scarcity scenario was made easier by using asymmetric money which was not given in exchange for anything, and did not represent value in the sense previously understood, to keep account and maintain balance. No, these tokens denoted simple participation in an economically significant act. They had only one denomination, which indicated that the bearer had either performed or been the beneficiary of an act of kindness.

And so those whose needs were greatest accumulated the greatest number of these tokens. The poor in spirit were indeed blessed. Theirs was the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek did indeed inherit the Earth. And Pat Murt became the richest man alive.

When the occasion arose for organised collective activity to define or achieve some project beyond the capacity of a single individual, those who had accumulated the most wealth in terms of asymmetric money could exert the greatest influence. And so, to the extent that the office had any meaning in this benign, post scarcity anarchy, Pat Murt eventually became President of the Earth.

Amber Rudd: stuntman

Of course Theresa May would appoint Amber Rudd as Home Secretary. She wouldn't want her successor in that great office of state to be anything other than a miserable dissappointment in comparison to her tenure. When someone is promoted they would like to be missed in their old job.

I imagine Theresa coming to this position after having filled all the other vacancies in her cabinet, after having dispensed all the poisoned chalices and hugged all her most serious and detested rivals especially close to her bosom, and on turning to the one remaining empty chair, wondering "now, who is left that will make me look *good*? Who can I rely on to be even more incompetent than I was? Which eager puppy dog is super keen to make even the most repellent, politically damaging announcements on our behalf? Who can be relied on to fly even the most ridiculous, ungainly kite?"

Her eye falls upon Amber Rudd. Amber's dismal failure as a businesswoman is matched only by her meteoric rise once she quit business for politics. Her tenure at the Department of Energy and Climate Change was so effective the department was abolished. There was nothing you could ask her to say about renewables she wouldn't happily contradict five minutes later at your behest if your shale gas pals phoned you and requested it. There's nothing she won't do if you ask her. Perfect. She can be the fallguy. My very own 'bitch Stewie'. Bitch Theresa as it were.

"Amber?"

"Yes boss?"

"Amber, I'd like you to be Home Secretary"

"Really, boss? Aw, shucks, boss, thanks, I won't let you down, boss, I promise"

"Good, good. Now, Amber, the conference season is coming up, and I have a small problem I was hoping you could help me to solve."

"Gee, boss, anything, you name it boss"

"Well, ever since that Brexit thing happened, people have been expecting us to do something about it"

"Um, ok, boss"

"I want to stage a coup, Amber. I want to accelerate us into an abyss of fascism. I am going to call this abyss 'the centre ground' so it can be reported by the press as something utterly unremarkable. It's what the country needs in these tumultuous times, Amber, what with all this Brexit turmoil. It is absolutely the right thing to do, I'm certain of it. It's the measured, sensible response. Steady hand on the tiller in stormy waters, all that stuff"

"Sure thing, boss"

"It won't be messy and horrible like Munich. No, history will record that the Birmingham putsch didn't take place in a crowded beer hall, with demagogues struggling to their feet on trestle tables trying to make themselves heard over a rowdy crowd of malcontents, no, history will show a polished and professional coup delivered at a podium, with elected government ministers speaking into a microphone with crisp, clean diction, in reassuringly confident tones, from an autocue, in the full glare of the cameras broadcasting it to the nation."

"Whatever you say, boss"

"You see, Brexit was always supposed to be a palace coup, an internal struggle between school friends. The original intention was weaken Cameron with the narrowness of his victory. This is why we didn't know what to do when the other side achieved more than they intended by his narrow defeat. But now the coup has turned ugly because all that's left that has any direction and purpose are the demons we unleashed to achieve all this."

"Um, ok, boss, I think I follow you"

"Which is, unfortunately, what always tends to happen when you attempt to cultivate and harness the people's fascist instincts for your own political ends, you see"

"If you say so, boss"

"So you see, we need a coup to restore order. It should be easy given we are already the party of government"

She tries to quell an awkward, self-conscious snort of laughter, quickly suppressed.

"I doubt most people will even notice"

"To be honest, I hadn't noticed, boss"

"The problem is, these demons, as it were, are now wandering around this green and pleasant land, beating up Romanians, stabbing Polish people, and so on, and we need to say something to keep them happy. I was thinking we could require registration of foreigners, basically chapter two of Mein Kampf, but, you see, I couldn't possibly be seen to advocate this myself, you understand?"

"Um, I think so boss, yeah, I get it"

"Good, good. You realise these demons are metaphorical?"

"What's a metaphorical, boss?"

"So .... I want you to do it, Amber. Think of yourself as my body double. It'll be like being a stuntman. I'm sure you'll have a lovely time and be very good at it"

"Sure thing boss, thanks, boss"

Like bitch Stewie, Amber would probably collapse in a heap at some point. But not just yet.

And now to Theresa's other problem: new found prominence. Her inscrutability can no longer go unscrutinised. They might find out there is no enigmatic taciturn reclusive genius in residence, just a well-dressed but dumbfounded incompetent. It's not that the curtains are drawn. It's that they might find out there are no curtains, and we are kept in the dark because the lights aren't on, and no-one's home. They might pop the bonnet on this classic British sports car and find there's no engine inside.

Who can she turn to that has had to deal with being 'found out' having been thrust into a position of enhanced prominence? Who can she ask for advice?

"Ruth!?"

They shall not pass!

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, in 1936, where the residents of the East End of London organised and successfully resisted Moseley's British Union of Fascists.

Moseley's blackshirts were seeking to make a deliberately provocative march through London's East End to intimidate the Jewish population, with the full support of the police. This was prevented by the people who erected and defended barricades on Cable Street and declared "they shall not pass."

Yesterday was also the day the current UK Home Secretary, failed business woman and former disasterous Energy Minister, Amber Rudd, made a sickening speech at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham about "British jobs for British workers," declaring that businesses would have to register their foreign workers in order to be named and shamed for employing them.

Amber Rudd is doing her best to ensure unionists in Scotland have to become apologists for a deeply unsettling, creeping fascism today, eminently recognisable from the 1930s, in order to continue to advocate the Union. Her most recent speech at the Tory party conference makes sure of that. At some point, surely, they will have to say "enough is enough?"

Slowly but surely the Tories are whittling away every honourable pretext for their position. We no longer need the UK as a vehicle for continued membership of the EU. We no longer need it as a vehicle for social justice. We no longer need it as a guarantor of pensions or the NHS. We no longer need it for a position of respect in the world. They have made perfectly clear what the UK remains a vehicle for in their conference speeches.

And all that remains as a viable argument for the unionists as a consequence is an assertion that we are somehow deeply, irrevocably dependent on the UK.

But this is no longer just the familiar "too poor, too wee, too stupid" argument of yesteryear. No, it's worse than that now. Because now what is it they would say we are too poor, wee, or stupid to achieve on our own? What creeping fascism are they now compelled to say would or should be the content of our unfulfilled, unfulfillable ambition, which we require the UK to accomplish?

All that remains for them is the assertion that we are somehow reliant on the UK in an even worse and more demeaning way than before. They must now nakedly assert that we are a mere parasite, clinging to the fat, gleaming torso of a Britain resplendent in Brexit, with no ambition other than to feast, leech-like, on its juices. For who would want more than that from what the Tories are making of it? Who would see in it a partner for the achievement of higher ambitions? Who would find in it the means to pursue the kind of society we desire for our children?

This image of the leech is perfectly consistent with the proto-fascist ideology that is coiling its tentacles around the limbs of our ministers of state. It perfectly articulates the politics of envy and blind greed and reckless consumption from which it emerges, a politics they have encouraged and on which they have thrived.

The Financial Times ran an article recently pointing out we have to dispel the myth that the UK somehow has a "leading" economy, if we are to have any realistic approach to Brexit negotiations. This is based on an assessment of the UK's fiscal situation, and productivity and GDP per capita now and in the future.

But the UK economy isn't about the money. The UK has an economy based on envy, not wealth. From this point of view the UK Economy is a leading economy, in the only way that matters. Our low pay, low productivity approach may be inconsistent with normal economic ambition, but it is perfectly aligned with the needs of the leech of envy we are cultivating and fattening up. Sure, our economy may rank poorly in relation to most objective indicators, but it far out-ranks the rest in the only one that matters from this point of view: "income inequality." Is this what we can be proud of in our curtain-twitching, greasy-poled, keeping-up-with-the-joneses, I'm alright Jack, Great British half-baked economy? Don't we lead the world in bitter, poisonous internecine envy? Aren't we loadsa-envy?

We can sell off the NHS on the cheap, as long as I can buy more of it than you. I'll cut off my nose to spite my face as long as I can cut off and keep your nose too. Isn't that the "productivity" and "efficiency" and "competitiveness" to which we aspire?

In the meantime we are distracted by beguiling myths of choice, such as those which have crippled the English education system for decades. In England all other educational priorities are subordinated to the need to have 16 different kinds of school to go to and 20 different variants of GCSE Maths to sit. Standards are never quite as important as having as wide as possible a variety of ways to fail. Grammar schools are held up as means to improve outcomes. But all evidence indicates that they have zero impact on attainment. Grammar schools are not about attainment, they are about selection, in support of privilege. It is the politics of envy again.

This toxic atmosphere of envy ensured that the EU referendum earlier this year was never going to be an opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the future of the UK. The result was only ever going to endorse one of two different kinds of negativity. Unfortunately it turned out to be an endorsement of the worst one, the one based on demonising foreigners, the one for which victory was delivered on a tide of vitriol and intolerance.

Brexit has granted permission to a torrent of hate crime whose perpetrators are perfect proto-fascist recruits. They cannot be reasoned with, as they beat up and intimidate Romanian women and children, stab and kill Poles, and vandalise places of worship and cultural centres. The policy platform they are responding to is not amenable to rational appraisal because it appeals directly to something deeper than logic, some reptilian cluster of nerves lurking at the base of the brain, seething with frustration for millions of years during which it has been denied expression by all the layers of neo-cortex which evolution has accreted around it, all the lobes it has been enveloped in. But now at last they are granted permission to indulge every reflex and slight the ramparts of every civilised inhibition to directly access that inner monster for whom logic is merely a provocation. A serpent uncoils in their brain that will not be charmed by argument.

All of these developments are accompanied by suffocating irony.

As hate crime spikes in England, while declining in Scotland, we see the "anti-English" accusation against the Yes Movement unleashed once again online, supported by conveniently corroborative actions of "useful idiots," in perfect synchronisation with complementary rhetoric from Ruth Davidson and her cohorts at this conference of triumphant bigots, which is then dutifully repeated ad nauseam on all media outlets for the benefit of those who perhaps didn't hear it the first time. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. I'm sure there is no collusion and nothing sinister or co-ordinated behind this.

Meanwhile Theresa May - leader of the party responsible for Brexit - accuses the Yes Movement of "divisive nationalism," and Scotland's only Tory MP observes that the SNP has "no divine right to rule."

At no point are we asked by the Tories, by the Brexiteers, by former mayor of London Boris Johnson, by anyone in the tory chorus of British exceptionalism, to be proud of the people of Cable Street in London's East End. We are asked merely to despise today's equivalent of those they rose up to defend. The UK is not an expression of common cause with the people of Cable Street. The UK is a barrier that must be dismantled and overcome to achieve that solidarity.

Meanwhile John Simpson complains in the Huffington Post that the people were very badly let down by the media during the EU referendum campaign. But the media only behaved the way they did because that behaviour was positively reinforced during the Scottish Independence referendum. At no point was their conduct any worse than on that occasion. They did it twice because they got away with it once. This somehow escapes his attention.

I'm choking to death on the irony.

All the time Nigel Farage lurks somewhere, perhaps overseas advising the harbingers of nascent fascism elsewhere, such as Donald Trump with whom he is happy to share a platform and whom he has possibly coached in debating skills. Meanwhile at home his replacement, Diane James, resigns 18 days after being elected his successor. Perhaps she is just Nigel Farage in some sort of larval form as he regenerates. I bet you she splits down the middle like some sort of gelatinous exoskeleton or carapace and a fully rejuvenated Nigel Farage will emerge in due course.

So, surely, after Amber Rudd's speech yesterday, and everything that preceded it, and everything that must now surely follow, surely not even the most ardent unionist can argue for the Union on any grounds other than those that belittle, degrade and demean us even further than before? Surely they must see the urgency of the situation? Surely enough is now enough?

Indyref 2 is no longer just about Scotland and the assertion of her Independence. It is about Europe and rejecting the fascism that is now emerging in the world. Indyref 2 is where we draw and hold the line. Indyref 2 is where we say for the whole world to hear "they shall not pass!"