The race for the leadership of the Conservative Party is a farce, says Neil Oliver

Across the political spectrum it is the same – a wholesale absence of truth – not their truth, the good old fashioned truth

Neil Oliver

PUBLISHED Saturday 16 July 2022 - 18:54

The race for the leadership of the Conservative Party is a farce. Like a soap opera, it is no more than another distraction, something to take our minds off what’s really important in the world. It’s not just a Conservative Party problem, of course.

Across the political spectrum it is the same – a wholesale absence of truth – not their truth, the good old fashioned truth. They might be describing themselves as rival camps – Tory, Labour, Liberal – but where it matters, they’re all on the same page of the same script, written by someone else and delivered to them one page at a time.

Whoever ends up with the leading role, in Number 10 Downing Street this time, they intend for the show to go on, week after week and year after year. Old characters will be written out and new characters will fill in the gaps.

It seemed like madness to me – encouraging belief in a fiction. Anyway, for that reason among others, but mostly because I had more to do, I stopped watching. That was the soaps, of course. More recently I’ve realised the drama of Westminster is even less believable. Westminster is a pantomime. I turned off the soaps and more recently I have turned off Westminster.

Now we’ve reached that recurrent moment of whipped up and confected high drama in any soap, that the writers, journalists among them, evidently really enjoy – like a fire, or a plane crash, or a murder. It’s the leadership race.

I watched as much as I could bear of the televised debate the other night, which was about five minutes. God help us all, they’re not even good actors. I’m prepared to accept that one or two might have their hearts in the right place, or near enough – might honestly still genuinely be labouring under the misapprehension that parliament is a place where important decisions are made. There are therefore moments of apparent sincerity now and again. For the most part, the rest of them just phoned in their performances.

In the manner of a soap opera, or a panto, the plot moves on so fast you could break your neck keeping up with it. Most alarming and dispiriting for those of us with any kind of memory of plot lines just past, is the way the disaster of the last two years has been dismissed as though it never happened. Already we're being offered a re-run, a repeat of an old series, all about five pence cuts on fuel duty and no mention at all of self-inflicted financial Armageddon.

Where, I want to know, is the candidate who will stand up and take some responsibility for the collective decision and disaster that was lockdown? Where is the candidate who will stand up and admit what we all know – what has been acknowledged across the board by economists, medics and a slew of other professionals – that lockdown was the most disastrous public policy decision of modern times? Most importantly of all, where is the candidate who will stand up and promise that while he or she is in Number 10, on no account will lockdown or anything remotely like lockdown be inflicted upon the people of these islands?

Where is the candidate who will speak out about what matters to the lives of people who live not on a stage or on a set, but in the real world? Where is the candidate who will declare that while she or he is in Downing Street, there will be no compulsory Digital IDs or vaccine passports or anything of the sort? Where is the candidate who will vow to protect the existence of real cash as the vital off ramp and alternative to any Digital Currency, programmable or otherwise?

Where is the candidate who will admit that the injections foisted upon billions of people around the world did not and do not work as advertised – cannot reasonably be described as vaccines because they do not prevent getting or transmitting the illness in question, getting sick with or dying from the illness in question? Where is the candidate who will declare that honest truth?

Where is the candidate who will say that while he or she is in office, there will be no mandated medical procedures for any man, woman or child?

Where is the candidate who will say that a woman is an adult human female, born that way? Where is the candidate who said that all along?

Where is the candidate who will say what we all know to be true – that the Green Agenda, Agenda 2030, Net Zero and the rest are the products of crippling stupidity that are already causing misery, and that can only cause much, much more misery in the months and years ahead if someone doesn’t find the brakes on this runaway train?

Where is the candidate who will stand up say it’s summer – and that for as long as there have been summers on this planet Earth, there have been some days, even here in these islands, that are uncomfortably hot? Where is the candidate who remembers when the TV weather maps used to have little celebratory suns dotted around them, instead of the islands coloured dark red as though on the point of bursting into flames at the same temperatures holiday makers jump on jet planes and head south in hope of finding and enjoying?

People’s lives and livelihoods are being destroyed – or shortly will be destroyed – unless someone is brave enough to admit that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. For as long as all the candidates just clap along with the rest of the wilfully blind – those that see the obvious and yet refuse to say so – then the cost of lockdown crisis will only deepen until none but the self-defined elite are clear of the rising floodwater.

I say that’s the least we might hope for, because it is my heartfelt belief that calling out the fiction of our present parliament is as much as any candidate might do for now. The meaningful decisions are taken elsewhere – by The City of London, by bankers, by the CEOs of planet-spanning corporate entities like Vanguard and Black Rock, by the place men fronting transnational NGOs – Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, the WHO, the UN.

You don’t even have to subscribe to the idea of a one world government to acknowledge that our elected representatives are trumped by the agendas of big business and bigger banks in control of the world’s money supply. That our small fry are swimming in water dominated by whales and sharks who tell them what’s what is made plain by their use of language – always the same lines from one leader after another – great reset, build back better, rules based liberal order. The theatrical parallels just keep coming – soap opera, pantomime, now a chorus line of high kicking dancers in perfect time.

In the real world – the world we are discouraged from watching – farmers are rising in rebellion all across Europe – in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland and many other places besides. Others are rising in support – the people of those countries, the truckers, the firemen.

These are real lives, real fightbacks against real imminent disasters, but we are supposed to look away and to be satisfied instead by watching to see who next warms her or his behind on the seat at the desk in Number 10 – anxiously opening the email every day that delivers the latest script – will he or she be written out next?

On the other side of the Atlantic is a soap opera that couldn’t be broadcast over here until after the watershed. President Joe Biden has to carry a cheat sheet to remind him of the script he can’t even remember from moment to moment. He has Ron Burgundy moments – Ron Burgundy, the legendary fictional news reader from the movie Anchor Man – who will read whatever is on the autocue, including his minders’ instructions about which lines to repeat for emphasis.

And then there’s the utterly compelling car crash role in the soap opera currently being performed by Biden’ own son, Hunter, not that we’re meant to tune in to that particular drama. Every day social media carries clips – apparently culled from that laptop of his, the one we’re still not supposed to know about, far less talk about – of a naked Hunter Biden, handgun in hand, or with prostitutes, or counting and weighing rocks of crack cocaine. Every time a clip is circulated, the social media platforms take them down. And then another crops up. And all the while Hunter is still at large, at events in plain view, at which the US media sees him and simply leaves him be, no questions asked either about his dodgy deals in China, Russia and Ukraine.

If we’ve got Downing Street, or The Only Way is Westminster, our cousins stateside seem to have Breaking Baddest.

I ask again – where is the candidate who will say that the sickness we need to talk about is the ideology that has infected all of our institutions, our politics, our schools, our universities, our civil service, our judiciary – the whole damned lot? Where is the candidate who will concede that we need to start again with fresh alternatives to those institutions that are beyond fixing, terminal cases?

Here is what’s needed. Here is the truth as I see it: the truckers who rose in Canada … the farmers rising in the Netherlands and across Europe … the people of Sri Lanka casting out their president … all of those are simply real people, flesh and blood with real lives, livelihoods, families, hopes and dreams, a sense of their own dignity and sovereignty. Power belongs with the people, with us. What is wrong – and what more and more people are understanding is wrong – is control imposed upon people by corrupt institutions that long ago seized control of the creation of money.

The beginning and end of all that’s wrong now depends upon the people, the real people, regaining that control. This means remembering that governments exist to do what we tell them, not the other way around. We need a government that understands as much and that furthermore takes back control of money. Not the fantasy money banks create from nowhere and that doesn’t exist, anyway, until we pay it back with interest. I am talking about money that represents and is made real by its connection to the real wealth of the nation – its natural assets and, most of all, the creative potential of the people. Here in sovereign Britain that might be hundreds of trillions of pounds of debt-free money, unsullied by bankers’ hands.

What we’re being told and shown now … we’ve seen and heard it all before – delivered by better actors and dancers. Surely it’s time for the unalloyed truth – no fiction and no pretence. The honest truth delivered from the heart by someone real who properly cares about the people. Surely there are better songs to sing.