Morning,
Well the end result of that poll yesterday was that 58% of people wanted the various attacks that are happening each day in the UK mentioned. A major reason for this I think is that many of you live outside of the UK now and want to know what’s going on, but don’t watch or want to watch the news. 58% is not an overwhelming number though, so although I’ll mention them, unless there’s a specific reason to I won’t writer too much. I also might miss some.
For those of you who watched the last Horizon Scan here’s some info commented by a viewer that’s useful - Hughs’ google fingers were not strong last episode. Here’s more of a breakdown:
County Elections
1. Age: 21 years old or above
2. Property qualification: Owning freehold lands or tenements with an annual net value of £40 or more
3. Citizenship: British subject
Borough Elections
Varied widely according to local custom, but generally included:
1. Freeholders: Men who owned freehold property in the borough worth a certain amount (varying by location)
2. Leaseholders: Men who held long-term leases on property in the borough
3. Occupiers: Men who paid rent for property in the borough and were responsible for its maintenance
4. Scandalously elected: In some cases, men who had been "scandalously elected" (elected but not actually qualified) could vote if their disqualification was challenged and lost in court
For national general elections in the UK prior to 1918, voting rights were limited even more compared to local elections. Only men who met certain property qualifications were eligible to vote.
General Elections
1. Age: 21 years old or above
2. Property qualification: Ownership of a freehold estate worth at least £10, or occupation of a house with an annual rental value of at least £10
These requirements applied uniformly across the country for all national general elections prior to 1918.
I think what’s interesting is that the qualifications attempt to provide an increased potential level of maturity than today, 21 isn’t old but there’s more life experience there than 18, particularly in 1918. Having to be a property owner or renting one of a certain value also means you’re likely to be a bit older and certainly means you have a stake in the system. The things you’re voting for affect you directly. There’s more incentive also to value and work for your entitlement to vote, being able to say ‘I’m a voter’ meant something. It isn’t a meaningless thing that you’re just given and can’t be arsed to use. Prior to 1918 voter turnout for general elections was around 75-80%, the 2024 general election struggled to hit 60%.
I get the point of the post and this kind of thing really can be sketchy - see the Trump assassination attempt - but I do also understand the issue in investigating people, finding actions that perhaps are not over the bar for prosecution and so you have no choice but to release and do your best to monitor. We see the same thing all the time in the UK when someone is ‘known to the security services’. There aren’t the resources to do this effectively for so many people, so when some actually follow through on threats these headlines and comments are inevitable. Now in the UK, for some people on a watchlist who aren’t yet citizens, the easy route - yes it’s easy with the will to do it - should just be deported immediately, as you should be if you end up with a custodial sentence - there should be no foreign criminals in any country, that incentivises each country to minimise prisoners. The irritating thing is with the technology we have today we could undoubtably monitor everyone on watchlists with ease and put limitations on their ability to carry out crimes. I’m not suggesting something smaller scale than this doesn’t happen already with appropriate permissions relative to each case, but it could be done at scale.
BLAIR MODE ACTIVATED - Find yourself on a watchlist and you could be tracked 24hrs a day, unable to travel to certain areas, all your conversations listened to, internet activity tracked, all your financial transactions tracked and stopped at point of sale if specific items are detected. This could apply at a lower level to all your regular associates. The associate would be informed that X person who they associate with in X way is now on a watch list for X reason and as a result they too are subject to X monitoring a restrictions. Which makes the original offender toxic. All of this is doable and combined with AI to do pattern recognition and other analysis would make these types of events borderline impossible to do at scale. DEACTIVATE BLAIR MODE.
This isn’t dissimilar to what’s done in China now and I’d imagine there’s something like this in Singapore too that isn’t spoken about. If we had benevolent leadership, the bar for getting on that list was high enough and and there were constitutional unmovable safeguards in place - real ones not politician ones - then I’d be fairly ok with most of the above, which may surprise you. The problem is that we don’t have those things. We have idiots who will use it to attack their political enemies and control the populace. It’s the very definition of the - this is why we can’t have nice things - meme. It’s not saying surveillance etc is the nice things, but we have the ability to solve the problem of turds to a great extent and make daily life nice for most people, we just can’t use it because we can’t trust our leaders.
Speaking of the Dark Lord
I think the comment I made here is true. Starmer is failing at rolling out policy that Blair and players from his TBI are advising on because he’s an obvious robot with no personal skills, a charisma vacuum who cannot lead. His popularity rating is getting further round the U bend each day and there’s literally zero viable replacement that doesn’t come with its own shitty smell. Rayner? LAMMY!? Ridiculous idea. So unless Blair can manoeuvre one of his competent people into a position where he can challenge the leadership over the next two years (any sooner looks REAL bad) and become a better puppet, The Dark Lord might have to throw his hat back in the ring. I think the only true barrier to that for someone as effective as Blair is that he can’t be arsed, is enjoying the influence he has globally and it would feel like he’s going backwards. The flip side to that is that he feels the TBI is sentient now, doesn’t need his overwatch and actually it’d be nice to get his hands proper dirty again, but with the added cheat codes he has now that he didn’t have in 1997.
Make of this what you will.. let’s hear the suggestions.
Bacon and people like him are good weathervanes for seeing what the regime line on things is and there’s usually a few potential reasons you can point to. Firstly they tend to be genuinely disconnected from normal people. Their circles are all like them, have a habit of being in the metropolitan liberal bubble of whatever city they live in - usually London. The also tend to have their employment linked to what they say and do, ie. say something counter to what’s expected and you’ll likely be cast out. They also, like in Bacons’ case, often have a ‘something’ either in their past that has already come out that they’ve been given forgiveness for, or something not yet public that they’d prefer not come out. This isn’t some huge conspiracy of puppets who are controlled by a Bond villain, it’s just human nature and in group out group politics acting as nodes, leveraged on occasion to keep the ship moving in one direction. Landing one of these public rent-a-voice spots is a career choice for some people with weak character and low morals who will do as required as long as the cheques keep coming - this is completely obvious sometimes when you see someone voicing an opinion that contradicts their previous behaviour or comments so blatantly - usually when linked to an important public event. They’ve had the call. C19 was ground zero for this. Many organisations and institutions also either specifically recruit individuals with something to hide -cough, BBC- or ensure something is found or ‘found’ once they take up a post. The Whip system in political parties has always run in this way, their job is to know where the bodies are buried and use that knowledge to influence MP voting. This may now be another of those things you can’t un-see.
Just to comment on the fungible humans thing, it should be obvious at this point in history that humans, their cultures and the countries they build are different and do have differing value, some are a net positive, some a net negative. There is obviously potential in a human being for growth, but we are not all the same and pretending we are is a failure mode. I don’t think many people want to admit that, but you can have reality or a cuddle that makes you feel nice.