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Attila the Stockbroker Diary: December 17, 2024

Let’s be clear, the key to the growth in popularity of reactionary garbage lies in the way its proponents have managed to change the perceived meaning of certain words

LEFTOVER SPROUTS

They are Brussels Remainers
Still out to cause a stink
And it’s our job to eat them up
No matter what we think
The one true Xmas leveller
Of age and creeds and classes
For when we’ve had a plateful we
All talk out of our arses…

Straight outta Xmas and back into the fray as we head into the uncharted, potentially dystopian waters of 2025.

It is incredible that the government is even contemplating using the odious Nigel Farage as a fawning conduit to the unspeakable Donald Trump. Our place is side by side with Europe, not as the 51st state of a US heading towards fascism.

It is even more mind-boggling that government ministers are resisting calls for rule changes to stop Elon Musk’s mooted multimillion-pound donation to Farage on the grounds that it would play into a narrative that Reform UK was being “sabotaged by the Establishment.”

The key to the growth in popularity of reactionary garbage in recent times lies in the way its proponents have managed to change the perceived meaning of certain words in the minds of substantial swathes of the population.

Take “woke,” for instance. How a word defining an active, conscious state, the antonym of which is “asleep” and therefore passive and helpless, could possibly have become a pejorative term aimed at people who simply believe in basic human decency is beyond me. It’s nonsense, confronted head on in my limerick:

I’m a white 67-year-old bloke
And I’m proud to be totally woke
Rather that than asleep
A cap-doffing sheep
With the brains of a globe artichoke!

But far more pernicious than that is the twisting of terms fundamental to the basic understanding of power in society — words like “elite” and “Establishment.”

Let me make one thing clear. Those two words are synonyms for power, and the only yardstick by which power can be judged in a society like ours is wealth. Not accent, political background or even previous power tenure. That was certainly true in the days of the divine right of kings — but in today’s world where money can buy media technology specifically tailored to control the minds of millions, it is not.

The idea that Trump, Farage, Musk, Nick Candy or Richard Tice — far-right demagogues and their billionaire backers — can be considered in any way “anti-Establishment” is ludicrous. They are at its very centre, and the only difference between them and their “traditional” neoliberal counterparts is that their ideas are even more offensive and damaging — especially, of course, to the poor and disaffected who vote for them.

Equally, the idea that a left-wing teacher, social worker or civil servant could be part of a “liberal metropolitan elite” (even if they live in the countryside, it seems) is so utterly ridiculous it subverts the very meaning of language.

And billionaires using modern media outlets to farm the votes of the people made poor by the system which made them rich with divisive, offensive messaging subverts the very essence of representative democracy.

Change the donations law, declare Musk persona non grata and stand up to Trump.

The alternative is unspeakable.

And now to Wales, where a late contender for album of the year has just insinuated itself into my consciousness: it appears to have been made in the bedrooms of a bunch of people less than a third of my age, it’s in Welsh, and it sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard — apart from the greatest Welsh underground band of all time.

Tai Haf Heb Drigolyn means Unoccupied Summer Houses, an obvious dig at English second home owners there, their music can only be described as tunenoise — fine melodies subverted by subtle atonality — and they are the spiritual children of my great and now late friend David R Edwards of Datblygu, the great pioneer of the lo-fi underground Welsh language music scene.

I now have another reason to continue my attempts to learn Welsh via street signs and music lyrics. And best of all — in physical form their debut album Ein Albwm Cyntaf Ni (Our First Album) is only available on cassette, limited to 50 copies. That’s proper. 

Happy new year. Despite Everything — as Karl said…

 

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