In this episode of The Lotus Eaters: Episode 1066, the lads discuss the increasing calls for deportation in the UK and Germany, Labour's never-ending plan for democracy, and why the Millennials are supporting the United Healthcare CEO shooting.
00:32:42.780Yeah, that's exactly it, because I know people on local councils, and this is one of the things
00:32:47.960they do all the time. Because, of course, the locals don't want, actually, a massive
00:32:52.100tenement full of weird foreigners running around the countryside.
00:32:55.240Well, if I jump to the actual devolution white paper, which is published on the government
00:32:59.300website, it is all about the 1.5 million homes.
00:33:03.320They literally say this word for word.
00:33:04.800Yeah. Mayors, they say, are integral to delivering the 1.5 million homes committed to in this parliament.
00:33:12.340Therefore, we will support these new powers, where all areas, with or without a strategic
00:33:17.480authority, will have to produce a spatial development strategy, which will be adopted with support
00:33:22.500from a majority of constituent members. This policy change means that more homes will get
00:33:27.780built. Mayors will also be given new development management powers, similar to those exercised
00:33:33.560by the Mayor of London. This will include the ability to call in planning applications
00:33:37.600of strategic importance. In conjunction with these powers, mayors will be able to charge
00:33:42.520developers a mayoral levy to ensure that new developments come with the necessary associated
00:33:46.980infrastructure, etc., etc., so just like in Greater London with the Elizabeth line.
00:33:52.460To enable mayors to deliver on their plans, we will forge a stronger partnership between
00:33:56.080Homes England and established mayoral strategic authorities, increasing Homes England's
00:34:00.740accountability to mayors. So it sounds like these mayors are going to have, in their areas,
00:34:05.140a hell of a lot of power. And you brought up an interesting point, Connor, which was about
00:34:08.900the actual low turnout of local elections already as it is. If you all of a sudden have all of
00:34:14.160these new different regional places which you have to start voting for on a yearly basis,
00:34:20.360shall we? Well, potentially. Potentially, yeah. Right. How much lower is local council elections
00:34:27.020going to turn out be? People don't care now. Yeah. If it's more of a constant process, the actual
00:34:32.920idea of this never-ending democracy is not that politicians are held more accountable, it's that
00:34:37.800voters become more apathetic. Yeah, weary. Yes, because they don't want to involve themselves in
00:34:42.900the process, especially when they begin to see that the process doesn't actually have much of an
00:34:47.520effect on what they get out of the other end of it. They're trying to anaesthetise you to manage
00:34:51.360decline. And if you want to talk about the more decentralised areas as well, so they say in here,
00:34:58.420new forums such as the Council of Nations and Regions, chaired by the Prime Minister and the
00:35:03.520Mayoral Council, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, will change the ability to do particular
00:35:09.740things. Mayors will have a statutory duty to produce local growth plans which will hardwire their
00:35:14.880local growth priorities into the way the UK government works. So infinity migrants to make
00:35:20.400sure that you've always got that line going up. And also, these new councils being chaired by the
00:35:26.120Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister does not sound particularly decentralised to me.
00:35:31.340Yeah, not very independent if the government is literally going to sit on the board and give them
00:35:35.260the orders. Yes. But back to some of the other stuff, you mentioned about how diffuse this whole
00:35:42.620thing will be. People have already started to worry about the fact that people will be living up to
00:35:47.080about 50 miles from their town hall under these new plans. They say here, critics warn the Prime
00:35:55.480Minister's devolution revolution could lead to mega councils and take the powers away from local
00:36:00.240communities. Districts have already been abolished in North Yorkshire, meaning that residents in Selby
00:36:05.760have to travel almost 50 miles to the county's headquarters in North Allerton. Now, if this is
00:36:11.520sounding familiar to any of the viewers right now, that's because I've basically covered this before
00:36:18.220with this document that was released back in late 2022, A New Britain Renewing Our Democracy and
00:36:25.180Rebuilding Our Economy. Now, this was a policy document that was supervised and written, I believe,
00:36:29.980by Gordon Brown. And it was essentially a way to completely upend the unwritten constitution of the
00:36:37.520UK and put in all of these new areas that can be made into Labour strongholds to make sure that
00:36:44.140Blair's revolution can later never be changed. It also instantiates a constitutional right to the NHS
00:36:50.640and a constitutional right to apply for welfare if you are just on the soil, regardless of citizenship.
00:36:55.800Can we also take a moment to appreciate just how representative this image is of the bureaucratic
00:37:02.980managerial mindset? It is a series of lines and nodes. There is nothing natural about this. It is the country
00:37:14.840with everything important drained out of it so that the manager can literally, this is how the spreadsheet
00:37:20.820would look. Right, okay, well, I need to know what these, it's just the managerial perspective.
00:37:25.560It's like it's got slight heat map dots underneath it as well. So we will allocate resources according
00:37:31.440to the heat map. You might as well just run governments through an AI. It also looks like
00:37:36.260Shelob has captured the entire country. It does. But like, there's nothing natural or normal or
00:37:41.740traditional. This is a literally, like you say, an AI map of like the important nodes for the
00:37:47.800bureaucratic managers. That's all this is. That's their worldview perfectly encapsulated here.
00:37:53.980Oh, absolutely. And when I say that they want to make sure that this is put in place so that it
00:37:58.560can never be changed in the future, well, they're making sure of that because they're already starting
00:38:04.040to delay local elections in preparation for these changes. So as part of her white paper,
00:38:11.800every area governed by two-tier county and district councils will be asked to submit plans for mergers
00:38:17.060to create larger unitary authorities with about 500,000 people in each. Ministers say such a change will
00:38:22.460help empower authorities, but it's also likely to mean elections in some areas will have to be
00:38:27.780delayed. Jim McMahon, the local government minister, said on Monday that the government may look at
00:38:33.740postponing some elections till next year, but added, it won't be for longer than a couple of months a
00:38:39.120year, which means indeterminate amount of time until it's already irreversible.
00:38:44.040Well, that's because these local government elections are referenda on Keir Starmer's very
00:38:49.500unpopular prime ministership. So if Labour are defeated in local elections and mayoral elections
00:38:54.740across the country, it sends a very strong message that their policies are unpopular. So they also
00:38:58.540don't want the bad PR. Well, also, just to point out as well, this New Britain document that they're
00:39:03.800basing all of this off was not in their manifesto, was not a promise at the election.
00:39:10.000They didn't, yeah, they didn't exactly spend a lot of time rhetorically arguing for it, did they?
00:39:14.120No, this was not mentioned. This is nothing that anybody voted for. So they, if you want to talk
00:39:18.340about, excuse me, democracy, they do not have a democratic mandate to do such a thing. Although,
00:39:24.940to be fair, I will say this has also been done under the Tories because they also did it in Cumbria,
00:39:30.620Somerset and North Yorkshire, who all delayed their 2021 elections by a year as they went through
00:39:36.120similar reorganisation. Now, again, it's a bit complicated to envision. So happily, I was actually
00:39:42.000pointed towards this video, which obviously does not have many views. I'm not familiar with the
00:39:49.200gentleman who made it, but it was a pretty good video and had a bit where he goes through the
00:39:54.480different layout of government in the UK up until now. So this was before Blair, where you, the voter,
00:40:03.280vote for your local council, and you, the voter, vote for, you know, MPs, and it gives power to the
00:40:09.620government who give bills to the lords who have any ability to veto if they want. After Blair's
00:40:16.920revolution, what happened was more like this, where they don't have it as hereditary, the rest are
00:40:23.040appointed to the ruling party. So what's it going to look like under this, under the New Britain
00:40:28.100document? Well, it's going to actually just look like this. Okay, so you, the voter, yeah, you vote
00:40:34.760for your local MPs, but then you also vote for your metro mayors, your local council, also potentially
00:40:39.760trade unions will be involved directly in this. And then obviously, if you're in the devolved
00:40:45.280assemblies like Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, you also vote for those. They all have to
00:40:50.120speak to the Council of England, who then report to the Council of the UK. They report to the Council of
00:40:54.840the Nations and the Regions, and they have a back and forth with the Assembly of the Nations and Regions.
00:40:59.740So what this gentleman shire strike describes this as is a setting up of a number of different Soviets.
00:41:05.160Well, this is the EU-ization of Britain. It's stakeholder governance. Yeah, but this is very, this very
00:41:11.980similar to the weird and insanely convoluted governance structure of the European Union, right?
00:41:19.020It's, you know, various things. And so the average person has just no idea how it works. And that's
00:41:25.420by design. And because I'll be honest, looking at this, looking at this diagram, I'm just looking at
00:41:30.440going, how on earth is this going to work? What will, what's the point of the Council of the UK and
00:41:35.380the Council of England, if they both have to report to these people, and they have to report to the
00:41:39.300Assembly of the Regions and Nations, who are in direct communication with the government back and
00:41:43.480forth? What's going to be the relationship between all of them? He also points out as well,
00:41:48.000there are other parts of it where they have the new rights in the New Britain document,
00:41:54.500which include health. Every person entitled to health care in the UK, not citizens, not
00:42:00.920people born in this country, not even people who were given a piece of paper, just every
00:42:06.100person will receive it free at the point of need where they are in any part of the UK.
00:42:11.140No person shall be denied emergency treatment education. Every child shall be entitled to
00:42:15.200free and primary, free primary and secondary education, wherever they are in any part of
00:42:19.600the UK, which is one of the reasons they're attacking the public schools. Poverty. So that
00:42:25.800no child, family or elderly citizen need live in poverty, every person legitimately present in
00:42:31.580the UK shall be entitled to social assistance in relation to periods of unemployment, disability or
00:42:37.420old age in accordance with the relevant laws. No person shall be left destitute. So being poor
00:42:44.700will be illegal. Nick Timothy, Conservative MP, actually put a question. That's just a funny way to frame it.
00:42:52.540Being poor will be illegal. Except not in a cool despotic way. In a really lame communist way, where everybody's just going to be poor. So nobody can technically be poor.
00:43:03.420Yeah, exactly. The government will make itself essentially in violation of the law if it doesn't provide them with money.
00:43:09.100Well, they're going to. So Nick Timothy put in a letter to the Home Office because he disputed Yvette Cooper's
00:43:14.700numbers on the asylum system, saying it's going to save billions. And it turns out it's going to cost an
00:43:18.540extra 17-odd trillion a year. Sorry, billion a year.
00:43:21.900I was going to say trillion. Sorry. We haven't got any money, bro. 17 billion a year. The reason is they're
00:43:27.580going to move the asylum budget to the welfare budget because every single legal migrant is going
00:43:31.340to be able to claim the full spectrum of welfare benefits as soon as they arrive, which has the
00:43:35.580convenient excuse of hiding the costs of asylum in the welfare budget. They don't need to differentiate
00:43:40.220because it looks bad. I've covered this on Tomlinson Talks before and this document as well.
00:43:44.220Yeah. And of course, it also says that every person shall be entitled to decent accommodation,
00:43:48.620that being housing, which 1.5 million homes, but in the same amount of time that we're expected to
00:43:53.820build those 1.5 million, we'll have 2.5 million new arrivals in the country. As you mentioned,
00:43:59.180five in seven of these new homes will be going to these new arrivals in the country. So it's a moot
00:44:03.980point and it's completely unmanageable, completely chaotic, but that doesn't matter. That doesn't
00:44:09.020matter because this is an insane cultural and governmental revolution of how the country works.
00:44:15.500Just the thing on this, what are they trying to achieve here? What are they actually trying to
00:44:20.540do? And this genuinely is the most extreme expression of the Rousseauian form of liberalism,
00:44:26.300where the government recreates the state of nature as Rousseau has envisioned it. As in Rousseau was like,
00:44:31.820oh no, nature provides man with everything he needs. He's always got somewhere to sleep,
00:44:36.300he's always got food, he's always got everything that he wants. And when you exchange your natural
00:44:42.140rights for civil rights, well then it becomes the government's job to provide everything that
00:44:47.420nature purportedly provided to pre-social man. And so that's exactly what we're seeing here.
00:44:51.900These are all of the things that Rousseau would have us do through the state. And it's just, okay,
00:44:57.660great. We're finally moving into the sort of final phase of liberalism, where the government is
00:45:02.060literally the thing that provides everything to the country. Yes. But if we remember,
00:45:07.900some are more equal than others. That's true. And if you are a client group of the government,
00:45:13.420you still get yours. Or if you are a group that helps fund the government, for instance,
00:45:19.020you still get yours because union chiefs are already starting to draw up the industrial strategy
00:45:25.740for labor. Oh yeah. Have they been thinking a lot about the relationship to the means of production,
00:45:30.380have they? Maybe. Maybe not. I think they've mainly just been thinking about how much they can
00:45:34.380make from all this. Yeah, doubtless. Yeah. So that's the never-ending democracy. It is
00:45:38.860currently rolling forwards in motion. We've got the devolution plans moving forward nicely.
00:45:43.580And so next we just need, you know, housing to be made a human right and poverty to be outlawed.
00:45:49.900Well, I mean, they literally are saying that. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting how they outlaw poverty.
00:45:54.540Yeah. I look forward to seeing how they manage that. Well, you've got to remember that nature
00:45:59.100provides fruit just from the trees and, you know, fish in the rivers. If we live in the Garden of
00:46:03.580Eden, you don't need to go away. That's literally what they're thinking. What they're going to do is
00:46:08.140abolish relative poverty by making us all poor. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, destitute is a
00:46:14.140relative term. On a global scale, aren't we all super rich? Uh, yeah. Thank God. I'm just as rich
00:46:21.100as Nancy Pelosi. Um, Glee says, uh, so our glorious general secretary, Kier Stalin, is breaking the
00:46:27.660country into autonomous Soviet republics. Um, no, I think, I think it's much more like Europeanization
00:46:33.020of Britain, right? This is, this is what the French revolutionaries were trying to do to France,
00:46:36.620where they literally broke it up into equal numbered, uh, like autonomous. Yeah. The fact that they've
00:46:42.380specified it has to be 500,000 people per one of these, it feels very arbitrary. It feels like
00:46:48.220it's just like, oh, this feels rational. No, no, but that's exactly what it is. This is just
00:46:52.540the French revolution being applied finally to the United Kingdom through the Labour Party,
00:46:57.420because they're literally brainers who have just been programmed to do this. Uh, Ryan says,
00:47:01.260I've never seriously considered Peter Hitchens advice about leaving the UK, but with each passing
00:47:04.860day, it feels increasingly tempting. The direction this country is heading makes it hard to stay.
00:47:08.940Um, well, the thing is, uh, I don't want to give it up to them. Uh, I'm not happy about that,
00:47:13.900so I'm not going to. I don't know how bad it gets. Anyway, moving on. So, for the past 30 or so years,
00:47:24.620probably 40 really, it's been evident that there has been an increasing growth of what I'm just going
00:47:30.060to call the corporatocracy, which is giga side, international mega businesses in which you are a,
00:47:39.260just a functional cog in a machine. And everyone knows that this is the part of life where the,
00:47:46.300the rat race that you were essentially trying to escape. And when I was young, when I was in my,
00:47:50.700you know, late teens, early twenties, you've got many, many films representing this. And it was evident to
00:47:55.980the Gen Xers that actually the future was looking boring, really spiritually devoid,
00:48:04.140really uninspiring. And it wasn't going to be somewhere you really wanted to be, but it made
00:48:09.660you comfortable as Edward Norton's character in Fight Club, uh, lamented. He would have to go and
00:48:15.820do a job he hated every day. And then he'd sit on his fancy, um, furniture and watch rubbish TV until
00:48:23.260he just did it again the next day. And this, this is a basic theme for many of the really big and
00:48:28.380influential cultural touchstones of my generation. And there was a kind of despondency in it, a kind
00:48:34.460of despair. And that's why you wanted to join the Fight Club. That's why you went to eat gruel in
00:48:39.980Zion with Morpheus, right? So, okay, that sucks on a physical level. There's hardship, but at least
00:48:46.380there's spiritual fulfillment. You know why you're doing this thing.
00:48:49.580Well, it provides a struggle, which is something that the modern world tries desperately to prevent
00:48:56.220from people having. It makes, it wants to make people as comfortable as possible. The problem
00:49:01.020is that if you're as comfortable as possible, you may as well be dead.
00:49:04.860Well, that's the lament of Blade Runner, isn't it? It's that the androids were made to be
00:49:10.460heavy labor simulacra of human beings. And the human beings in living in a corporate
00:49:15.180dystopia have lost their humanity. But the androids are attempting to do some sort of
00:49:20.460existential revolution to ensure that they get longer lifespans and they can see
00:49:25.660incredibly beautiful feats like starships on fire and entire galaxies and be remembered.
00:49:30.620And it's that the cruelty is that the human beings have been rendered
00:49:35.020these agents of the state to hunt down these few people with the last spark of human divinity in them.
00:49:40.380And that's why Decker tries to leave it. It's about leaving the corporate dystopia.
00:49:44.460Yeah. And so the the the Gen X position is, well,
00:49:49.980we're going to have no meaning in our lives. And so we're gonna have to try and find meaning in some way.
00:49:55.340But at least we will be able to work, make some money, buy a house, get married, do whatever.
00:50:04.940The future was boring, but it wasn't bleak. And the dystopia was kind of abstract.
00:50:11.740It's like, yeah, OK, it's going to be, you know, I'm going to be in the mouse utopia.
00:50:16.060And that's going to be kind of depressing. But it's not a crushing sense of failure,
00:50:21.500inevitability and a black hole in which nothing will ever come out of.
00:50:26.540The prospect of retirement was in reach after you'd done your 40 years in the rat race.
00:50:30.140Exactly. It's not that there was nothing that you could gain out of this. This system could,
00:50:36.380you could make it pay off for you. It was just going to be insanely depressing to do it.
00:50:40.780Right. But you could look and go, OK, I have a plan. It's going to take 40 years, but I have a plan.
00:50:45.420And fine. And the millennials didn't take that approach to corporations.
00:50:50.940They were, they, they didn't like the kind of resignation and inevitability that the Gen Xers took
00:50:58.540towards corporations and decided, no, what we're going to do is essentially grab hold of these
00:51:03.180corporations and make them moral. Because the Gen Xers never felt that corporations could be used in
00:51:08.380a moral way. Which just, which just meant make them gay race communists.
00:51:11.820Yes, that's exactly what it meant. Right. And that's why all of these corporations,
00:51:15.980as soon as millennials started entering the workforce and making demands on that, well,
00:51:19.180yeah, I mean, of course we can agree to gay race communism because frankly,
00:51:22.380it's not going to attack our bottom line. But of course, as soon as it starts attacking
00:51:25.900the bottom line, then actually we're not going to listen to that so much.
00:51:29.900But then you've got the Zoomers, especially the younger Zoomers. I think the older Zoomers
00:51:35.420aren't doing too badly, but the younger Zoomers, I think, are looking at the world. They've
00:51:39.180just finished university. They look at the world and go, okay, why am I here? What prospects do I
00:51:45.500have? And I think this is one of the issues that underpins Luigi Mangione's
00:51:55.820Italian assassination of Brian Thompson. Because in them, I think there is a kind of symbolic
00:52:02.940representation of the past and the future coming into conflict. And it's not like they haven't
00:52:10.780seen this coming, right? So as you may not know, because this has only been really reported in
00:52:16.940left-wing media, UnitedHealth aren't exactly a very nice company. They provide a huge amount of
00:52:23.980healthcare in the United States, and of course there's a private corporation. And ProPublica got
00:52:28.700leaked documents that outline the company's strategic playbook for withholding treatment
00:52:33.420to, in this case, autistic children, because it's going to save them money.
00:52:37.580Hang on. So, look, I'm very suspicious of this, just because the narrative is often that every
00:52:43.340single health insurance company should take on all the claims, no matter the...
01:23:04.460All of this policy through devolution is trying to do is allow the government to escape accountability through post-bureaucracy and bickering at the local level, making the plebs fight amongst themselves while ignoring their masters.
01:23:15.460That's definitely going to be one effect of it, but there's also the abstracting away from normal people's view of local politics to create the kind of bureaucratic EU style somewhere else run by someone else for something for the government's own benefit.
01:23:31.760That's what the eventual effect of it is going to be.
01:23:33.520It hides the agenda and the banality of procedures.
01:23:36.340And it's literally going to become like the EU, where it's like, something has happened, who's made the decision?
01:23:42.040Well, some nameless, faceless bureaucrat.
01:23:44.040It's like the film Brazil, where the entire apparatus exists to pass forms around, where there's actually no accountability in any one given person.
01:23:51.200And the people who are actually making the decisions will not be the elected.
01:23:54.140Remember in that how the entire situation in that film is set off because a fly falls into one of the photocopiers or one of the printers?
01:25:01.540Because, literally, it's like, yeah, we've just got loads of councils that deal with councils that are all passing, you know, bureaucrats passing notes to each other.
01:25:08.600Nothing's happening, and no one knows who's in control of it.
01:25:11.740So this is like one of my friends, her Ukrainian dad, who grew up in the Soviet Union.
01:25:18.180When he came over here, he told me once that, you know, he was asked, oh, why did you come to escape communism and socialism?
01:25:25.480And he was like, have you seen your school system?
01:25:48.620Greg says, I work in a doctor's office and I confirm the UnitedHealthcare does arbitrarily deny coverage for well-established but costly treatments, forcing us to jump through hoops to get claims paid.
01:25:57.680We just had a patient die recently because we had to pause treatment because one of these denials.
01:26:02.220Not only has the patient died, but our practice is out tens of thousands of dollars for the cost of the materials we've already used.
01:26:37.600Yeah, whenever I speak to people who aren't familiar with my own political views, they always just assume that I'm some kind of corporatist Tory.
01:27:16.020Political parties that want limited government need to do a better job of explaining how the administrative state and their regulations are responsible for most of the things they hear about companies.
01:27:24.900Yes, but it's a complex thing that most people don't really have a solid grounding in theory to understand.
01:27:33.580I mean, Harry's segment, in fact, is a perfect example where it's like, you know, you've got this really complicated diagram, and it seems that the person who made the diagram doesn't really understand it.
01:27:44.560The whole point of the process is to make sure that you do not understand it.
01:27:47.960And oftentimes, if you speak to the people who exist within it, they don't really understand it either.
01:27:54.200Because if you're voting for local elections, oftentimes those people will not be, like, careerist politicians in the same way that your MP might end up being, or somebody in Whitehall or the government.
01:28:06.100So, they get in, and they're like, wait, how does this work?
01:28:16.600It's not that they weren't doing their job or anything.
01:28:18.760It's just the system is so Byzantine on purpose that even, like, you know, their professional aides, they don't know exactly how these things work.
01:28:27.300And so they're like, well, I think it's going to go there.
01:28:29.900But we'll wait and find out, basically.
01:28:31.740It's like, surely the system should have some predictability built into it, you know, especially if there's so many bloody emails and bits of paper that we're passing around.
01:28:40.300But, yeah, no, it wasn't a criticism saying you don't understand it.
01:28:45.420I said, I was looking at it going, like, no, I don't think anybody is going to understand how it works, and the government will just be able to do whatever they want.
01:28:53.400Because if you complain about it, the government will say, well, in that case, very Brazil or maybe even Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
01:29:00.360you need to fill out form B143, and then you need to route it through this department, who will cross-check it, countersign it, then send it back to you,
01:29:10.000and then you need to take it to this department, and you'll need to go through all these bureaucratic processes,
01:29:14.220and all the while, the government will just fast-track everything that they want to do through.
01:29:18.040Oh, and by the way, if you complain about it, you're on a home office extremist watch list under the cabinet office.
01:29:23.200It's a brilliant way of avoiding accountability.
01:29:24.820Well, you can't hold me accountable if you don't know what I've done or how you're supposed to even do it.
01:29:28.960But, anyway, I think we're out of time, though.