The Wastrels of the Western World
Envy?
Elon Musk Praises England As It Never Did Exist
Downgrade Motherhood, Be Astonished at a Lack of Babies
Epstein and a Wider Malaise
Snippets
Sympathy for the ‘Devil’s Alternative’
From Russia With Self-Incrimination
Venezuela – Trump Lawless But Not Dumb
Guilty Hangovers from Puritanism
Nuremberg Trials – Lynch Law in Fancy Dress
Trumpism Without Trump?
Drug Barons and Drug Customers
The Wastrels of the Western World
Thatcher and Reagan sold us the lie that taxes and government regulations were stifling us.
That if the Superior Rich Persons were only free to use their own money as they saw fit, wonderful wealth would trickle down to the rest of us.
They may have believed it. But their heirs evade or ignore the failure of the economy to grow any faster than when the half-socialist Mixed Economy was the norm.
We were promised a copy of US success. But they flourished by taking in gigantic numbers of new immigrants after scrapping racial quotas in 1965. Which they had room for, and the ‘White Race’ who killed most Native Americans had no right to hog North America. But actual growth might have been as good or better if they had stuck to the Mixed Economy.
US GDP increased by 184% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between 1945 and 1980. Between 1980 and 2015, it managed another 152%, according to AI Overview.
Deregulation and tax cuts brought no benefits.
“1945–1980; Real GDP increased by roughly +200% to +230%; The economy became about 3.0–3.3× larger; Average annual growth: ~3.8–4.0%
“1980–2015; Real GDP increased by roughly +140% to +170%; The economy became about 2.4–2.7× larger; Average annual growth: ~2.6–2.8%” (ChatGPT)
It might have been worse, had the New Right not kept the parts of the Mixed Economy that suited the rich. The West would have lost had it really returned to the failed capitalism it had hung onto in the 1920s and 1930s. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/.)
Britain also saw a decline, though less drastic. So after Thatcher, John Major tried to restore Normal Conservatism. But then Tony Blair chose to be a Capitulationist on economic matters.
He then joined the class of flourishing multi-millionaires, winners in the Thatcher / Reagan aberration.
“Blair has earned substantial fees for international speaking appearances.
“Fees have reportedly ranged from £100,000–£250,000 per speech at corporate and global events.
“He has spoken at business forums, universities, and leadership conferences worldwide…
“In 2010, he published his memoir, A Journey.
“He reportedly received an advance of around £4–6 million.” (ChatGPT)
All entirely legal. But the people who’d have a lot to lose if British politics had normalised must have seen the merits of using a small amount of that extra wealth to boost friendly politicians.
Setting an example that they could hope for later generations of politicians to follow.
And a false belief we needed to cherish the rich or else be ruined if we lost them. Entrepreneurs are needed, but there are always plenty. And they often do their best work before becoming rich.
From 1944 to 1980, the USA’s richest 1% got a smaller slice of a larger cake. 20% to 40%. Since 1980, 180% to 250%. Entirely at the expense of 90% of us, with the ‘Next Nine’ neither gaining nor losing.
In Britain, this 1% went from 0–0.8% per year to 2.7–3.5%.
I’d not mind people having millions if they had earned it by doing things that really benefited others. But in as far as business people are useful, they managed when they only got 10 or 20 times as much as the people whose work were the basis for that wealth. There was no need to give the Superior Rich Persons hundreds of times as much as the rest of us.
They don’t do a better job for others. They find ways of getting more for themselves, sometimes by wrecking the long-term prospects of a corporation that once had much to be proud of. Boeing is a sad recent example. Not just Artificial Intelligence systems that override the pilot and insist on plunging into a fatal crash. But also their part in the program to return the USA to the moon has been almost unusable. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2x3nlxg9jo).
Elon Musk has done a respectable job, but that’s because his grand idea is to get humans to Mars, or at least a few superior humans. The parts of his project needed to get people to the moon are behind schedule. His brilliant achievements with reusable rockets might have waited, except that they are part of his dreams of Mars.
Envy?
I’ve just described the limits of the Superior Rich Persons. But the rest of us get accused of ‘politics of envy’ when we point out such things.
No envy on my part, for certain. I am living an ordinary middle-class life, because my mother’s mother cared more about human values than becoming rich. She was an owner of a large chunk of urban housing. A widow with six children, she also did not want to squeeze her tenants to get the best return.
Another reason for my lack of wealth is that when my father Raymond Williams unexpectedly became famous for serious academic work, he continued to work modestly for Moderate Socialism. He could have made a lot more money, had he been willing to twist what he knew in the service of the rich and powerful.
Had he done what a lot of supposed socialists or lapsed once-honest individuals have done with whatever share of intellectual credibility they might once have had.
Had things been otherwise, I might have inherited substantial wealth without having done anything extra to justify me having it.
In this generation, neither my sister nor I were the sort of person likely to become rich: nor did we ever wish to be. My brother did quite well for himself, but nothing like what he might have got had he compromised with his own principles.
So why should I feel inferior? Why look up to people who are massively overpaid for whatever useful work they have actually done?
Most of them just learned how to make a lot of money out of things that others discovered, and which were going to happen anyway.
Are happening and perhaps superior in China, where the super-rich are made to obey the rules.
Elon Musk Praises England As It Never Did Exist
“For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to defend a ‘multicultural economic zone’! American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish [sic] origin, is great and worth fighting for. Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here” (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2022919799752294493).
He mis-spells Scots, and omits the Welsh. The Kingdom of England, which had absorbed Wales, first settled North America under the Tudor dynasty. Tudors and the Cecils had Welsh origins. Likewise scientist / magician John Dee, grandson of Bedo Ddu of Nant-y-groes, Radnorshire. England flourished because it was always willing to take in unfamiliar elements, including those they had conquered Britain from.
Failed with Ireland when the older population stuck to Roman Catholicism, but the new USA started out secular and incorporated them.
Beyond Britain, the Roman Empire, the Hapsburg realms, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire all had plenty of people ready to die for multicultural political units.
Much of its global cultural dominance is based on the work of Jews of Eastern European origin.
Someone should do a project to work out just who would be missing if the Know-Nothings had won out in the 1850s and stopped further immigration. Most of the people valued beyond the USA would be missing in such an Alternate Reality,
In the USA as it is, the white working class is discontent, but blames the wrong people. People like Elon Musk profit from the lack of the Trade Unions that once gave such people secure lives. And rich media owners stop the downcast working class from seeing it so.
Downgrade Motherhood, Be Astonished at a Lack of Babies
From our beginnings as stone-age hunter-gatherers to the start of modern life, women lived in communities where everyone knew everyone else, with newcomers quickly absorbed. And where it was indeed ‘a whole village to bring up a child’.
The immediate profits of modern society undermined that.
“Pursuing his researches into the state of the population in France, M. Lagneau, at the last meeting of the Acadamie de Sciences, stated that the number of marriages is decreasing and that the proportion now is not more than seven in the thousand, while the average age of those marrying is 30 for men and 25 for women. People residing in towns marry later than those in the country, while out of 1,000 men over 20 there are only 570 married in Paris and 609 for the whole of France. Births also continue to decrease, there being last year only one to every 42 inhabitants, while in the large towns the births are proportionately fewer than in the country – out of 100 married women between the ages of 15 and 45 there are annually only 19 births, while the number of illegitimate children born,- which is as much as 28 per cent. of the whole in the large cities, is also decreasing.
“M. Lagneau attributes this voluntary limitation of offspring to the desire of the parents to make ample provision for the children which they do have… The excess of births over deaths is little more than one in a thousand as against 13.7 per thousand in England, ten per 1,000 in Germany, and 12.9 per thousand in Russia. This slow rate of increase compared to that of the other great nations would, in the course of half a century place France in a very disadvantageous position, and M. Lagneau intends to indicate at the next meeting what he considers may be done to accelerate the progress.” (From: The Times, 22 July 1890, p.9. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/96954802/9485970.)
France was the mother country for Bourgeois Radicalism. This is anti-family in practice, while sometimes praising it in the abstract.
I also find it amazing that right-wingers believe that slum-dwellers are responsible for living in a slum. Slums will always have landlords, who drain the place of as much as they can. Tribal peoples will always look elegant and have nice dwellings, even when they are extremely poor. Likewise villagers.
Modern society and city life can improve on that, but it needs care. And it needs cash. Taxes.
France after World War Two had a huge Communist Party and a strong Socialist Party, and also a recovery in births. Which declined again when those things declined.
And if China has the same problem, they also conceded too much with Deng’s opening-up. Being reversed by Xi, but perhaps not enough.
Epstein and a Wider Malaise
“What links Jeffrey Epstein and Keir Starmer’s government? A thick seam of contempt…
“Contempt everywhere. From Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges to the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, contempt radiates. Contempt for women and girls, for the law, for the public. A continuum of disdain runs from Epstein on the one end to our political establishment on the other. The other thing that joins them is a restless pursuit of power.
“Contempt is not a byproduct of that power, it is the point of it. Procuring, trading, objectifying and violating women and girls is the summit of potency for those who already have everything else: money, status, respect. To subordinate another human being to your urges, to reduce her in all ways, is to be initiated into a club of super-predators who are above the law. The Epstein emails are a demonstration of how misogyny – there really should be a stronger word for it in this context – is a currency, lavishly spent to show how much power you have. The gut-twisting way that casual references to body parts would come up in correspondence is part of a whole language of signalling. Referring to women as ‘pussy’ – or just ‘P’ – is to flash your exclusive club membership card.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/09/jeffrey-epstein-keir-starmer-government-peter-mandelson
The ongoing troubles of the Former Prince Andrew have pushed out of the news a separate royal scandal in Norway:
“This latest embarrassment for the royal family comes on the eve of her son’s seven-week trial in Oslo on 38 charges including rape and assault.
“Princess Mette-Marit married Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon as a commoner when her son Marius Borg Høiby was four and is in line to become queen when her husband accedes to the throne.” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1508llzw4qo).
The lady grew up among minor criminals and drug abusers. Uplifted, her son functioned as one of the Entitled. And like many more of them, got caught.
Snippets
Sympathy for the ‘Devil’s Alternative’
How low can BBC News go? On 23rd February, they hyped Zelensky’s claim that Putin has started WW3 and must be stopped. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgj9p15y87o.)
Putin in 2014 acepted the request of the elected regional government of Crimea that he annex them. This saved the vital naval base at Sevastapol, and it had anyway been part of Russia till Khrushchev moved it in 1954.
He wanted the Donbass to be autonomous within Ukraine. Sticking to Lenin’s concession to the Ukrainian nationalism that Imperial Germany had encouraged when they held what had been two separate Tsarist provinces.
New Russia, East Ukraine, is east of what Kievian Rus had been before the Mongols conquered the Kievian part of it. Lands devastated by slave raids from Crimea when it was run by Tartars who were an outlying part of the Ottoman Empire. Settled by a mix of people who might identify as either Russian or Ukrainian.
A fluid mix that included the ancestors of Leonid Brezhnev. From a Russian-speaking region, but one west of the Ukraine oblasts (regions) that Moscow demands.
That Zelensky says cannot be conceded, even though he got elected with a promise of moderation on the issue.
Back in 1979, the dramatically successful novelist Frederick Forsyth had Ukrainian nationalists as villains in his 4th novel, ‘The Devil’s Alternative’. A novel scornful of Soviet values, but not thinking then of breaking up a fairly harmonious multi-national state.
It isn’t only in the Former Soviet Union that you ‘never know what’s going to happen yesterday’. As late as 2014, the West remembered that Ukrainians sometimes identified as Cossacks had been unusually brutal servants of the Nazis. But these days, you get denounced for mentoning such off-message facts.
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From Russia With Self-Incrimination
Back in 2019, I was very skeptical about the nerve gas attack on Sergei Skripal. A Russian dissident taking refuge in Britain, and with known criminal connections, so nothing odd if some hired gun shot him dead. But it seems the Russian state was determined to make it clear that it was them. And then failed to kill him. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/the-soviet-past/3151-2/.)
Alexey Navalny was in prison, where men are often killed by fellow prisoners. Or die of cancer or flu. But a bunch of European leaders affirm that the Russians showed a mysterious determination to incriminate themselves by using an exotic frog toxin.
Believable?
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Venezuela – Trump Lawless But Not Dumb
“Venezuela approves oil sector privatisation in major policy shift.
“Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez signed a law on Thursday opening the oil sector to privatisation, reversing two decades of socialist policy. Lawmakers approved the overhaul earlier as Washington eased sanctions, expanding US firms’ operations weeks after President Nicolas Maduro was seized in a US military raid in Caracas capital.” (https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260130-venezuela-oil-sector-privatisation-policy-shift).
In Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the USA demolished what existed. Had dreams of something better emerging spontaneoulsy, but it never did.
In Syria, Trump backed someone who could actually rule. Working so far.
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Guilty Hangovers from Puritanism
I’d seen Lord of the Flies once, and disbelieved. So I agree with this comment:
«It’s beautifully made, but it’s still telling the wrong story.
“A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island?
“It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on ‘Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding’s novel.
“These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time.
“Of course they fought too. But when they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That’s how we stayed friends.’…
«William Golding … was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world.
«I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn’t descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived…
«Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.» (https://x.com/rcbregman/status/2025144756775288947.)
I’d add that rich greedy people who do financial crimes and spread lies find it very consoling to be told stories about everyone actually being just as bad.
Nuremberg Trials – Lynch Law in Fancy Dress
I’m not going to rush to see the new film about the trial of the surviving Nazis. Long ago, I accepted Brendan Clifford’s judgement that it was a cover to punish some of the defeated.
Vengeance dressed up as law.
I’d add that most deserved it. But Mussolini being lynched by people he’d hurt was neater, though I wish they hadn’t also strung up one of his ladyfriends.
So I am pre-disposed to believe this account of the 2025 film:
“Watched this, do not recommend. The whole thing is just about the Holocaust, makes it seem like it was the focus. The International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials was structured primarily around crimes against peace, meaning who planned and launched aggressive war that ended up killing 30 million Soviets and 10 million Germans. Less than 15% of the trials covered the Holocaust…
“War crimes and crimes against humanity were prosecuted as well, including extensive documentation of SS Einsatzgruppen shootings in the USSR that killed roughly 1.3–1.5 of Soviet Jewish civilians, 14 million Soviet citizens total, the deportation of 12–14 million foreign laborers into forced labor inside the Reich with massive mortality (2 million), the mistreatment and death of Soviet POWs in the millions, and the operation of the concentration camp system.
“None of that is even mentioned…
“There really never has been a decent film about Nuremburg which is a shame because Crowe was a very good Göring.» (https://x.com/CDMorlock/status/2025508438130720933).
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Trumpism Without Trump?
News is coming in of a man shot after illegally entering one of President Trump’s homes. In Florida, and Trump was elsewhere. But he apparently pointed a shotgun at Secret Service agents, who then shot and killed him.
Justifiable by their rules, but also dead men tell no tales.
The same people who raised up Trump might now want him dead. For he gets automatically replaced by J D Vance, who seems free of Epstein taint.
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Drug Barons and Drug Customers
Riots in Mexico after soldiers kill a noted drug baron. Tragic for the society.
And shooting those evil characters fixes nothing. The problem is customers in the USA. The fabulous wealth from supplying them.
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Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
Labour Affairs 