Horizon Scan No.2

The ballad of Boris and The Donald

Welcome back!

There’s one major one of note this week, but firstly some housekeeping.

I said when I started the SubStack that it was very much a work in progress and I wasn’t 100% sure what the end result would be. My main aim was to provide an outlet for my thoughts and perhaps draw attention to some of the things I believe are worthy of note for those people interested in living the SEG ethos.

The decision to add the paywall for some content wasn’t something I wanted to do, but it’s my belief that in the present day it’s sensible to have multiple sources of supporting yourself and those you care about. You should absolutely do the same if you’re able to.

What I’ve found in practice is that I really dislike creating something and then only allowing those who have subscribed to have access to it. I also find it pretty hard to decide what should be fee and what should be paid. There’s also a contradiction I dislike, in that if I believe some information is important and will potentially do some good for the community at large, then making people pay to get access to it doesn’t fulfil that objective.

So I’ve made the decision to make all content free to all subscribers. I myself am subscribed to various SubStacks, some paid, some free, some free with the option to pay, which I often take because I appreciate the work of the author. I hope that some of you will choose to do the same here because you get value from it. Think of it of buying me a posh corporate coffee every month.

For those of you who are paid subscribers already, if you want to cancel and just get this for free, no problem at all. I realise many of you will have chosen to pay in order to get access to something others weren’t or to support me saying things I was concerned to say in public in case there was a misunderstanding that I speak for the SEG community. I’ve been encouraged by many of the community in private that I’m being too cautious in that regard and should just follow my own advice and speak openly without fear.

So let’s do that!

The first one is a strange parallel I see happening in the US and UK.

It concerns these two characters, both of who will split a room opinion wise. Now let’s start with getting out the way that I know in their own ways they’re both complete turds. But in my own way so am I, and so are you. I don’t actively dislike either of them, because I recognise them for what they are, intensely ego driven individuals. Their interest in other people comes only from how you are a character in their story. Neither of them were meant to end up in the positions they did. The Donald was mocked in public by Obama that he’d never be President, so then he HAD to, and Boris idolises and wanted to be Churchill.

Regardless of your personal opinion of them, they both won elections. Enough people connected with them and their message that they voted for them. They both won against the odds by getting ‘ordinary people’ on their team. They are both examples of what I spoke about in my last piece on integrity (yes I know they both have minimal integrity in the sense of honesty), but they are both themselves and you can trust them to be that consistently. The majority of the general public find that valuable and will forgive them their personal flaws for that. What’s interesting is that both of them got into power and didn’t truly know what to do with it and so wasted a lot of opportunities. In The Donalds case the team around him consistently worked against him to stop him rocking the establishment boat too much. He wasn’t politically savvy enough to see it and to be honest was happy enough that he’d achieved his aim by winning already. For Boris it was the similar, except it was his team, headed by Dominic Cummings, who were the ones trying to disrupt the established order. Boris having won now just wanted an easy time of it, enjoy the trappings of PM and set up his book deals for when everyone eventually found out how “ludicrous it was” that he was PM - his own words. With his wife holding his balls he eventually spilt with the team preventing him having an easy time, despite them being the ones who handed him his win.

So to the issue. The time is approaching where the the public in the US and UK will again vote to choose the person to lead their countries. The current leaders are both very unpopular, having poor approval ratings. One of them is barely alive, held up by the strings his team pull him with. The other was ushered in with the help of the traders in the City of London via a coup, removing the Prime Minister at the time Liz Truss who’s policies the City boys decided weren’t for them, so they shorted (sold) the pound until they got their way.

So these two guys have a problem, their main rivals are seen vastly more favourably than them - even just in a populist sense - and they’re going to have an incredibly hard time keeping their jobs with them in the game. So it seems the best course of action is to just do whatever you can to stop them running. Sounds a bit tin pot dictator doesn’t it? Nah, couldn’t be, we don’t do that in the west.

Let me make clear here that I’m less concerned with the fate of The Donald and Boris, than I am with precedents being set around what is acceptable behaviour for those sitting in power to do with their political opponents.

In the US we’ve see the Democrats doing everything within their power over the past few years to ensure that The Donald can’t run and again. Repeatedly accusing him of things to do with Russia that have now been proven not to be true. Those charges having failed they’re now trying to jail him for having secret documents at his home. I’m no mega expert on US politics, but I’m fairly sure that the President the ‘end user’ of those documents and there are rules which say he can take them home assuming the proper care. Also didn’t they find a load of secret documents in Joe Biden’s garage from when he was VP? This leads into the fact that over the years there have been repeated instances where US officials did similar or worse that they are accusing The Donald of, that have been brushed under the carpet because it suited at the time.

We are seeing the law being used inconsistently, which is bad enough. But what’s worse is the timing. Using the law inconsistently as a tool in order to jail a rival presidential opponent immediately prior to an election. Not to mention the party of the sitting President not having to take part in any debates in order to be a candidate. But considering that President is likely to wander off the stage murmuring gibberish when he gets tough questions from a rival candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr, I can see the play.

There are a concerning number of people that are unwilling to acknowledge that the above isn’t normal. It’s like they hope if they ignore it it’ll be fine. But it won’t. Worse are those people who don’t care how they win as long as they do, just to be able to gloat and ‘get Trump’. Once we’ve lost the ‘correct’ way of doing things, once we normalise ignoring the law when it suits, that’s it, the way of life you’re used to is gone.

It doesn’t come back without a fight and I can’t be fucking arsed with that.

Compared to the US version we’re a bit less exciting in the UK. We’ve got a sketchily biased committee trying to get Boris permanently banned from UK Parliament because he ate some cake at a party during Covid lockdown.

People get very wound up about the lockdown stuff and in some ways they’re correct that we expect our leaders to be role models and they shouldn’t be breaking the rules, despite it being very hard to know in that period what was rules, guidance or law - the difference is important. I bet you broke the rules, I did. Many of them them made no sense whatsoever anyway and if I know that, so did our politicians, so they broke them too. We’re all humans, we’re all turds.

Why this matters in the the UK is that the Conservative party, currently in power, is in disarray. Those who voted them into power in a huge 80 odd seat majority, enough to get through whatever they liked from their manifesto - the manifesto that gave them that majority - are leaving them in droves. An obsession with Net Zero and a refusal to effectively tackle illegal immigration, both in opposition to what was stated in the manifesto, mean the future of the parliamentary Conservative party is now in real danger.

So with Boris no longer an MP, having stood down to try and dodge some of this madness, he wanders like a shit Ronin in search of a new party, perhaps to return as its leader and back into the PM seat - we love an underdog and come back story in the UK and Boris would play that part perfectly. That is a very scary prospect for current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the man who I’m now convinced has absolutely zero political deftness at all, so badly does he fuck up the 4D chess every time he tries it. He tried to stitch Boris up as part of the Covid enquiry and ended up shooting himself in the face with Boris’s WhatsApp chat gun. Now the committee looking into the Covid party stuff (a party Rishi was at) and which will attempt have him banned for life from Parliament - therefore not being able to head up a new party - is headed by a woman who has openly made her negative feelings about Boris known in the past 6 months and was at a party doing Karaoke during Covid! Plus one other member of the committee has admitted to breaking the rules.

So we see the same thing here as in the US, games being played that undermine the structural integrity of civilised society for the careers of a few short sighted idiots. Idiots who are supposed to represent us. It becomes more obvious every day that there is a disconnect between those running the country and the people. Surely we can do better than this?

I think we can, but the people, party, movement, whatever, that will do it aren’t in the game yet.

They need to get moving.