https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/06/07/d-day-dummies/

Zero Seats is real

The Tory Party’s eighty-year mission to destroy Britain has finally been achieved. Despite the promises of alternative parties, the efforts of central bankers, and the hopes of many British people, collapse is now inevitable. And so, apparently, The Tory Party is determined to wipe itself out before the angry mob comes for it…

This, at least, is what the tongue-in-cheek Zero Seats Tory election broadcast suggests. It is satire of course, but this is turning out to be one of those occasions when the satirists are closer to the truth than the professional pundits. From the rain-drenched beginning of the election campaign, prime minister Sunak has lurched from one disaster to another, seemingly oblivious to the negative impact this is having on Tory fortunes:

Indeed, polls conducted after Nigel Farage took over as Reform leader show the Tories within a few percentage points of being voted into third place… but not quite, so Sunak’s campaign team had to look for something new to lose another 50 Tory seats.

D-Day has a central place in the story British people tell themselves – and it is particularly important to the Tory voter base (less so to the younger generations who are more likely to vote Green or Labour anyway). And so, in a move guaranteed to persuade most of their remaining voters to at least stay at home on election day, Team Sunak persuaded their man to leave the D-Day commemoration service early to conduct an unimportant and easily rescheduled election interview. Short of inviting the media to film inside his Downing Street toilet, it is hard to imagine more politically inept messaging…

Hopefully it will continue right up until 4 July.

Not what they fought for

Eighty years ago, young men from the USA, Canada, Britain, and France landed on the beaches of Normandy. That much at least, we can agree upon. But there is a certain dissonance with the presence of Justin Trudeau at the official ceremony less than a year after he referred to a veteran of the Nazi SS Galicia Division (which carried out atrocities in Ukraine) as a hero.

There is also a large dose of rationalisation in US President Biden’s claim that the young men landing on the Normandy beaches were doing so to defend freedom and democracy against Naziism – as (by applying a huge dose of denial) Ukrainian troops (the elites of which are descendants of that SS ethos) are apparently doing today. At best, this demonstrates that Biden has less of a clue about D-Day than Trudeau, and probably imagines that FDR was a US government agency while Eisenhower was a steelworks in Pennsylvania.

Whatever, the one thing we can be sure of is that the troops landing on D-Day knew very little (beyond the basic propaganda dished out to the wider public) about Nazi atrocities, which were kept secret by western intelligence agencies for fear of tipping the Germans off about western spies and western code breaking. In any case, because of the way troops are trained, using a buddy system, what caused them to fight where, one suspects, today’s young men would turn and flee, was solely their loyalty to one another. It was the knowledge that they could not have looked their comrades in the eye if they turned tail, which caused so many of them to run (while carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment) across beaches strafed by machinegun fire from the German’s fearsome MG-42.

While Red Army troops had seen evidence of Nazi atrocities first hand as they liberated thousands of miles of Soviet territory in 1943 and 1944, this remained largely unknown in the west. Indeed, even the Red Army liberation of the death camps in late-1944 and early-1945 was ignored and dismissed in the west. And so, it was only after the western allies crossed the Rhine into the interior of Germany in March 1945, that western troops and western media began to realise the full horror of the Nazi regime. As Eisenhower was moved to announce following a visit to the Buchenwald camps, “They say the American GI doesn’t know what he is fighting for. At least now he knows what he is fighting against.”

This, of course, gives the lie to the “good war” narrative which Biden was tediously repeating… the one which the western empire has used to justify its long list of oil, resource, and currency wars in the eight decades since the end of World War Two. Except that these days, particularly in the west’s support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, it is the western empire itself which is looking a lot like the kind of regime that those young men were landed on the Normandy coast to begin the defeat of.

(Fun D-Day fact: the beaches in the British sector – from west to east, Gold, Juno, and Sword, along with the unused Band – were named after fish. But the original Canadian beach name “Jelly” was considered too weak and was changed)

Advertising doesn’t work that way

In another example of the idiocy of elites, on 6 June, UN Secretary General António Guterres has called for a ban on fossil fuel advertising, drawing a parallel with bans on tobacco advertising. While Guterres is undoubtedly correct that this will overcome the widespread “greenwashing” deployed by the energy corporations (who often turn out to be big players in deploying “green” i.e., non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies too). However, an advertising ban is highly unlikely to deliver the results that Guterres is claiming. Indeed, his parallel with tobacco advertising may be inadvertently closer to reality than he would like.

Smoking proved to be one of the greatest public health failures of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Long after the link to lung cancer and circulatory diseases had been established (although the tobacco corporations continue to deny the link) people continued smoking anyway, although the proportion fell gradually from 46 percent of the population in the late-1970s to 20 percent in 2010. Even today, there are more than 6 million smokers in the UK despite a barrage of measures designed to force people to stop – with the ban on smoking in public places and the increasingly high price of cigarettes (which includes deliberately high taxes) having a far greater impact than advertising bans (which, in the UK, include mandatory plain packaging).

Tobacco is an odd substance from an economic point of view, since while it is a discretionary good, its addictive qualities cause many users to treat it as an essential. Indeed, among the 12 percent of people in the UK who continue to smoke will be a large number who will skip meals in order to buy tobacco. And this, in turn, gives us an indication of what will happen in the event that fossil fuel advertising is banned.

Fossil fuels – or at least gas and oil products – are even more essential to most people than tobacco. Sixty-eight percent of the UK workforce commute to work by car. And even if they wanted to switch to an alternative mode of transport, the UK’s outdated and overcrowded public transport does not have the capacity to accommodate them. Worldwide, there are some 2.6 billion car journeys every day – again, a high percentage of them people commuting to and from work. Just 2.2 percent of the cars used to make these journeys is electric. And while EVs make up some 18 percent of new car sales worldwide (95% of these in Europe) the recent withdrawal of state subsidies, concerns about the used value of EVs, and the general decline in real incomes, has brought a big slump in EV sales.

Suffice to say that demand for fuels refined from oil is not going away any time soon… and certainly not from any new law which insists that filling stations – like cigarette packages – come with no branding and perhaps pictures of hungry polar bears.

The same goes for the consumption of gas in regions north of the tropics, where the alternative to gas is hypothermia for millions of people. Indeed, even the huge spike in gas prices following the self-destructive sanctions on Russian gas, did not result in people giving up gas for cooking and heating (although far more people donned extra clothing and turned the thermostat down). Instead, people looked to make spending cuts elsewhere – spending more on essentials and less on discretionary goods and services. Moreover, as with EVs, the “green” alternative to gas – extremely expensive and less useful heat pumps – has had little take-up despite big state subsidies… most households preferring to stick with existing heating systems at least until they need replacing.

As with oil, a ban on gas advertising may curb competition between supply companies (since, presumably, discounted deals will count as advertising) but it will do nothing to stop households and businesses from using gas. As with smoking, only prohibitive prices will cause people to give up… but this will not result from higher prices but from the ongoing decline in prosperity for the majority of the population.

It is likely, for example, that the trend toward working from home will be accompanied by a decline in the average commuting radius, with more people settling for lower incomes from local jobs than seeking higher incomes which come at the price of increasing motoring costs. Similarly, wearing additional clothing to save on heating is going to become far more commonplace as households are obliged to alter their spending patterns… But only real shortages and unaffordability (which is coming anyway) will stop people using fossil fuels.