The financial industry deploys capital solely on the basis of its profit.

The vast majority of £'s in existence are created by banks and deployed for the purposes of their profit. Government spending is a relative drop in the ocean. This is the basis for the ‘development’ of our society.

The UK have experienced a slow motion version of Musk and Trump’s slash and burn, except we are coming to the back end of fifty years of it.

We haven’t needed to sell bonds for more than fifty years now. We don’t have to have an grossly underfunded NHS and public services, and collapsing quality of life on a contracting basis. It is going into the city of London’s pockets instead.

It isn’t just that neoliberal ideology has captured both main parties, and the lib dems. There is such a lack of talent, even intelligence, in government.

We see the criminalisation of what should be lawful protest.The powers that be want us to quietly accept being stripped of material and environmental wealth so that they can get fat, and insulate themselves against the coming disaster of climate change their over-consumption is the primary driver of.

Neoliberalism has taught, for decades, that ‘the hidden hand of the market’ meant that ‘enlightened self interest’ lead to the bet outcomes for everybody. So, yeah, they were told literally this.

Clearly you didn’t. You have now.

paywall

So just got to wait around 45 years on the off chance they don’t come up with a technology to shore up houses that are facing subsidence due to drying out?

Got it.

Anyway, by the time we get to 2070, the reality of climate change will surely have started to hit home, and even though ‘the market can stay irrational longer than [any individual] can remain solvent’, subsidence will be understood to be the least of London’s problems.

Farage was on telly for years prior to the brexit referendum. Despite having mp’s the green were not.

The lib dems campaigned on proportional representation and cutting tuition fees in 2010, then immediately scrapped those ideas when they got into coalition government.

Please don’t waste my time, thanks.

I presume they will lumber on for however many years or decades, but they were done a long time ago.

Offering nothing but a fake opposition to neo-liberals is just harmful. They won’t just merge with the Conservative party, but that is the honest thing to do.

And now we have Andy Burnham, literally an officer of the conservative party until he left college now being touted as the next leader of the Labour party. There is literally no option for people to vote for. Implicit in the acting of voting is the giving of consent. If you give consent to this fake Tory v. Tory choice you do not have a right to complain when you get neoliberalism playing out, more cuts, and the UK steadily falling down the ranks of wealthy nations.

Bloody grey squirrels, coming over here stealing our nuts.

Reform are the only alternative presented by the bbc and mainstream media to the red and blue tories. The Labour party smearing Corbyn, causing him to lose is precisely what I am talking about.

Please don’t waste my time.

Cuts to disabled people and civil servants. Hand money to silicone valley broligarchs.

Red Tories.

One person’s ‘almost’ is another person’s ‘no chance’. But seeing as how you are referring to something that didn’t happen, it is completely irrelevant. Meanwhile neoliberalism continues regardless.

Humans’ inability to deal with reality is almost endless.

It is because when presented with a fact that doesn’t conform to the reality that somebody has (co-)constructed, they have to reject the fact, because they can’t reject reality. Reality changes slowly.

Deal with reality, as quickly as possible, because otherwise it is going to deal with us.

What are you going on about? Go and take your anger out smoewhere else. I am not your punchbag.

Well of course, I mean the thread is about UK politics, but please enjoy your useless alternative party suggested by neoliberals.

It has been Red Tory v Blue Tory for decades. The only difference between the two being the more or less thin veneer of socially liberal policy covering the hard fist of economic liberalism.

The only alternative presented to the public for years and years, in spite of the fact they had no MP’s, was and is the pro Trump pro Russian Reform Party.

Sound familiar?

In Darwin’s terms, the ‘survival of the fittest’ you referred to means something like ‘those most able to adapt to evolutionary change’.

In this context, your inability to adapt to a change that improves life for everybody, from the direct reduction in deaths, to reduced micro plastics (of which car tyres are something like 25%) makes you the unfit one. You are the idiot.

Let’s not ban all cars, even though it would be a positive development, let’s just ban idiots (to use your word) like you. It is clear by your attitude that you are not safe.

This ended up long.

There are many reasons why I think fascism is inevitable. I can only throw a few ideas at this post. It is a bit scatter-gun, hopefully it paints something of a picture of the various conditions we are facing. I don’t like pretty much any of the reality of our global situation, but I am looking at dealing with reality rather than the world I would like to be in.

tl/dr: the currently rich and powerful prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which their and their children’s advantage is taken away. The conditions for totalitarian fascism have been created and are in use. Exploitation of fossil fuels (and the green revolution) has resulted in several billion too many of us as we approach a resource constrained future and huge biospheric degradation. World War 3 is hotting up, meaning some degree of fascism might be necessary for simple self-defence. Impoverished former working class people are given no other credible alternative. Climate change is a crisis multiplier whose impact is going to intensify dramatically over the coming years and decades.

A definition of ‘fascism’ I arrived at (that might be commonly held I don’t know) is: ‘the extremism of the centre ground’. I know that this doesn’t encompass all aspects of fascism. It helps inform my conclusion regarding its inevitability here in the UK and more broadly.

At one point, amongst a lot of other reading, I listened to fifteen or twenty hours of podcasts that Roger Hallam (one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) recorded about creating a social movement to try and tackle climate change.

Hallam spent a couple of years studying for a PhD, researching how to achieve social change through civil disobedience and radical movements. I get the impression he decided to act rather than be an academic. I don’t agree with him in terms of the timeline for climate change, but he has studied protest and social movements, and has put his money where his mouth is. He might be in prison now, he was sentenced last year to five years.

Anyway, I got the impression that he wants to have a social movement in place for when, if, we get to an inflection point where mass civil disobedience (and thousands of prison sentences) could lead to the change that is necessary to try and avoid the worst-case scenarios for climate change that we are currently accelerating towards. There is a societal equivalent to this, in terms of the rise of the far right, that is relevant to this post.

The British government has responded to civil disobedience over the failure to address climate change with increased authoritarianism. We live in a data-totalitarian, almost permanent surveillance society: from mobile phones, obviously, to the decline of paper currency, cctv and npr, to ‘smart’ electricity meters (whose surveillance capability doesn’t seem to be widely discussed but is absolutely a factor in its roleout) and on and on. It is far more intrusive than even Soviet era East Germany. It is an ideal state precursor to fascism: the state apparatus has been built and is being ‘improved’. You can’t have the opposite with that apparatus in place. How would any social movement disband all of it?

I can’t remember whether I first heard from Roger Hallam that the common conditions necessary for ‘revolution’ throughout the 20th century are also the conditions in which fascism thrives: very briefly, former working class (an outdated term as the social contract those people previously enjoyed has been ripped up by neoliberalism), now working poor or precariat go hungry and have so little to lose that they are prepared to be locked or beaten up in protest. I get the impression he is hoping for a climate change analogue of the above conditions.

We are at the back end of 45 years of neoliberal economic/political ideology that has impoverished former working class people, following 250 years of fossil-fuel-powered capitalism whose decimation of the biosphere’s ability to support human life hasn’t even begun to really be felt. In the UK every benefit cut, every act of unnecessary austerity creates many thousand reform UK voters. The same scenario has played out in the US with poor former working class people being betrayed by the Democrats’ shift right. The coming climate change refugees (who have been created by the last several decades’ inaction) will be orders of magnitude greater than the UK’s currently nearly-a-London-a-decade. How will Europe deal with this? One of capitalism’s many ‘big lies’ is that is manages scarcity, when in fact it has come to exist in the period of greatest abundance (see primary energy consumption for incontrovertible evidence of this). Some combination of a genuine low energy society, and biospheric devastation is on the horizon. We are moving towards genuine scarcity and a collapse of the energy source that powered capitalism. What will follow fascism, in my opinion? Some form of feudalism.

Media owners, the rich and powerful, prefer fascism over an egalitarian society in which they lose their advantage. They want the vast majority toiling in a trickle-up economic system from which they profit. We see this playing out now as it has before. We saw during covid that actually most jobs are not ‘essential’. They exist because people are there to do them. Hyper-capitalist libertarian ‘tech bros’ are coming for those (many ‘middle class’) jobs with AI. If they get that together, the conditions for fascism are immediately in place.

World War 3 (previously playing out as proxy wars, and in the information, cyber, economic and no doubt other spheres) is in danger of hotting up. The 50 year petrodollar arrangement ended a few years ago, hastening the end of the dollar’s reserve currency era. The question was ‘could the US with the biggest army in the world, accept a much reduced global role (and portion of unearned global wealth) without using its military might?’ The US chose a leader who is clearly prepared to go to war. We don’t know how the next decade or so is going to play out, but the risk of a hot world war makes cooperation much less possible. Autocratic leaders whose concern is self-preservation in a global war scenario is a light form of fascism.

A bit bleak and depressing? Only if you haven’t come to terms with ideas such as progress being a fossil-fuel-powered capitalist myth. Every society creates them, of the past and the future. I suppose I hope I am wrong, and some sort of revolution to prevent the rise of the far right, of world war three, of biospheric collapse don’t play out. But I also think it is a mistake to fight battles that are already lost.

The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume.

It isn’t possible for the vast majority of people to fact-check the information they consume online. My guess: you’d conservatively have to spend two hours scanning through academic papers, or more specialist sources you trust, for every one hour on lemmy.

Around fifteen years ago I started learning about climate change. At that point it was an eye opener to repeatedly see almost diametrically opposing headlines based off the same academic paper that obviously had the same (admittedly usually multi-faceted) conclusion.

It was and is very clear that you never could trust ‘mainstream media’, never mind whatever sources are around now, or bots on social media. Forget ‘ai’.

If there is fault here it is in the amount of information we allow ourselves to be subjected to. A mitigating circumstance is that social media, and sites like feddit.uk, upon which I am reading your post, are addictive. There is a spectrum of addictive behaviour and less overwhelming addictive behaviour on a personal level has a huge impact on a mass scale.

Us humans are always seeking stuff that gives us a dopamine hit, and if it wasn’t social media it would be retail therapy, vaping, caffeine, sex or any number of other engineered substances or behaviours. But given who is controlling information now, the world really would be a much better place with a lot less internet use at this point.

It should go without saying that unelected people heavily involved in the writing of legislation, whether that is peers in the House of Lords, or corporate lobbyists in Brussels, fatally undermines the credibility of those institutions.

This situation is nothing new to Britain. What is maybe ‘new’, after nearly fifty years of neo-liberal economic and political policy, is a former working class of increasingly impoverished people primed to accept a far-right alternative that is the only option that has been presented to them: an alternative given airtime for years in spite of the fact that that party had not even one MP elected to parliament. This alternative is not going to be any better for those former working class people, which suits the wealthy and powerful who presented Nigel Farage as the alternative.

In the case of the US in 2016, you got Trump, or a continuation of the economics/politics that made Trump inevitable. Same here in Europe, playing out in its own way.

This appears to be the inevitable result of nearly fifty years of neo-liberal economic and political policy.

At the top of this post I wrote ‘it should go without saying’ because the reality is that we are so far from anything approaching idealism that the idea that we should worry about people buying peerages and writing laws that suit their mates, seems quaint.

I very clearly said “ultimately contributing to the rise of the far right” not “had had a major role in…”

My claim is that the economic inequality experienced in peripheral Eurozone countries will contribute to the rise of fascism in those countries.

The context being an economic/political liberalism that provides no credible alternative to arrest the reduction in quality of life for poor/former working class people.