Vox Populi, Vox Vax?

The coming totalitarianism (and why some journalists just don't seem that arsed about it...)

There’s a video on The Rubin Report’s YouTube channel in which the Editor of Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, describes himself as a ‘Marxist Libertarian.’  If you get a chance, you should watch it.  He seems jolly pleased with himself for having stumbled upon this political moniker, and it’s wonderful to see his eyes glinting like those of a salesman who’s just spotted a gap in the market for vegan snake oil.  I must confess, though, that however much it pleases Brendan, it probably comes across to most people as a stone-cold oxymoron.  After all, Marxists want the state to dictate virtually every aspect of a person’s economic, social and cultural life, whilst libertarians believe that phenomena like freedom, choice and self-responsibility are best located at the level of the individual.  Can you advocate for enslavement and emancipation?  It just doesn’t seem like a particularly workable both/and type deal to me.  Not even Alastair Campbell in his Third Way pomp could have gotten both ideas past middle England’s swing voters (… at least, not at the same time).  Still, perhaps there was a time when O’Neill liked adding a dash of libertarianism to his prose as a means to counteract that instinctive tendency towards authoritarianism that’s felt by all good Marxists. 

I write that ‘there was a time’ because Brendan’s latest piece for Spiked ('Yes, care home workers must be vaccinated’) can leave none of us in any doubt that his oxymoronic moniker has recently fractalized, leaving us with… well, just the moron, really.  The title of the piece gives the game away.  There’s the auxiliary verb ‘must,’ for starters, and then there’s the statement’s declarative mood… yes that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Brendan O’Neill, that once staunch critic of ‘lockdown’ as a deeply illiberal policy, is now arguing that any immiserated care workers who refuse to take an experimental vaccine at the behest of their bourgeoisie, capitalist paymasters should – sorry Brendan, I mean ‘must’! – be sacked in order to protect vulnerable patients.  It seems that for Brendan, the libertarian part of ‘Marxist Libertarianism’ is only really worth making a lot of fuss and bother about if you can be sure that people are free from sore throats, tickly coughs and sniffly noses.  Sadly, you see, during a global pandemic, the collectivist spirit of the Marxist must inevitably overpower and then asphyxiate the individualist zeal of the libertarian. 

‘Clean the air!’, one pictures this extraordinary political changeling shrieking at passing officers of the state having just spotted a man on the cusp of sneezing in a public park whilst, nearby, an elderly couple feed the ducks.  ‘Clean the air, officer! Clean the sky! Wash the wind! Disinfect the grass! Take the paving stones from the paving stones and vaccinate them all, one by one; take the lining from his respiratory tract and wash it, wash the brain, cleanse the lungs; prise the muscles from his bones and vaccinate them; wash the bones – sternum, clavicle, femur; bleach them, purify them, jab jab jab, officer! Wash all the clocks, wash the phones, wash the dog that barks with a juicy bone; for nothing now will come to any good, officer, unless we jab jab jab; wash the thronging masses; wash the ducks, jab the pigeons, carrion crows, cats, tricycles, prams; wash the old and the infirm, the disobedient and the refuseniks, wash them, wash them, jab jab jab officer!’, and so on. 

Poor old Brendan.  Then again, perhaps we should thank him for finally resolving a personal political tension that’s kept so many of us interested in what he had to say for so many years – indeed, as James Delingpole has noted, those among us who actually believe in things like liberty, freedom and self-responsibility can now give Spiked a wide berth without feeling we’re missing out on any intellectual nourishment. 

As it happens, I'm not that shocked that an ex-communist like Brendan could take such a dismissive, anti-empathetic stance towards the prole porridge, those massed ranks of filthy, state-educated oiks who’ve consistently let him down by refusing to play their allocated role in the historical materialist shitshow; that is, by refusing to get shot to pieces on the streets so that he and his chums in the intellectual vanguard of Trotskyism might take over from the capitalists and exploit them in new, slightly different ways.  What does shock me, however, is the supercilious, mummy-always-told-me-the-sun-shined-out-of-my-arsehole tone he's chosen to adopt in this article.  It's like having to listen to a particularly soupy-sounding Lord of the Manor explaining why he had no choice but to enforce droit du seigneur on your wedding night and that, for your own good, he's now going to turf you, your husband and your dying grandma out of the hovel he's condescended, against his better judgement, to provide in lieu of any formal salary these past 24 years, and let you experience the happy thrill of having to fend for yourselves.  As he’s just stopped shagging you.  And is now stood over you.  Panting heavily and looking at you.  Disgustedly.  And your husband's doing his belt back up for him.  At gunpoint.

'The bodily autonomy of anti-vaccination care-home workers,' this appalling old Bolshevik gargoyle intones at one point, 'Is not impacted upon by these new regulations...  [w]hat will happen is that some care-home workers will have to live with the consequences of exercising their bodily autonomy - in this instance, the consequence of having to seek a different form of employment.’  It’s always so effortless for communists, isn’t it – so redolent of the old droit du seigneur spirit.  This social, personal and political change-y type stuff, I mean.  Cultural revolutions, purges, great leaps forward, political re-educations, mass indoctrinations, sterilisations, Gulags… with a track record like this, one images that to make care-workers redundant simply because they won't allow their bodies to be injected with an experimental form of gene therapy is a mere bagatelle.  So that’s that then, I suppose. ‘Care workers of the world, vaccinate! You have nothing to lose but your jobs.’  Or, as Brendan’s intellectual bedfellows over at Nike would no doubt want to moronically sloganize the whole thing: Just do it!

And thus, as it is written in the tablets of Spiked, so shalt the biographies of the low-skilled, the vulnerable, the breakage from this, our newfound totalitarianism, unfurl themselves with all the grim inevitability of Greek tragedy:

‘No jab, no job. Sorry you won’t do the right thing; sorry you won’t save lives; sorry you’ve decided to kill people.  Oh well.  What can we do?  Here’s your P45.  Never mind.  Eggs and omelettes.  You win some, you lose some.  Swings and roundabouts.  Into each life some rain must fall.  Build back better.  God moves in mysterious ways.  Maybe you’d enjoy begging? Life's rich tapestry.  Smile and the world smiles with you?! 😊 All the best, then! Bye now… Your rent’s late. I’m sorry, Sir, your card’s been rejected. I’m sorry, Sir, you don’t have the necessary qualifications. I’m sorry, Sir. I’m sorry, Sir. I’m… the next available GP’s appointment is in eight weeks. Based on your online answers to questions 1-8 you’re experiencing many of the symptoms of depression. Take two of these four times a day. “Hello, The Samaritans?” Is he breathing? Someone call an ambulance. Who’s the next of kin? We are gathered here today in memory of… loving husband… three kids… Amen, and thank you, NHS.’

Or then again, no. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’ll all turn out alright. Now, let me see...  who was it back in the 1980s who used to think a bit like Brendan?  Hmm.  Frictionless labour markets, ‘flexible’ employment practices, people as cipher-like pawns to be pushed around on a megalomaniac’s chessboard… ah yes, I’ve got it: that well known devotee of Mao's Little Red Book and purveyor of all things redistributive, Norman Tebbit.  Who can forget that iconic moment from his speech to the British Communist Party Conference in 1982: 'My father’s care home workers didn't riot when they lost their jobs,’ he thundered, ‘they got on their bikes and looked for a vaccination centre and kept looking until they found one'.  Maybe Brendan Tebbit’s right; maybe it’s all just one long, happy journey of discovery when you’re unemployed: biking about hither and yon, seeing the sights, meeting new people, getting fit, helping the government remain on target to slash the country’s carbon emissions by 78% by 2035. Besides, universal credit payments for the recently unemployed must now be about, what… £3,000 a month?  Something like that, anyway.  No, they'll be fine, these care people worker-things, or whatever they’re called.  Their landlords and mortgage providers will all show understanding, tolerance and empathy, and we shouldn’t forget, either, that the local foodbank is always a wonderful place to network, hand out CVs and business cards, and, I don’t know, form fin-tech start-ups, say, or maybe even hook up with venture capitalists who’re ready and willing to help them float their fledgling companies on the stock exchange. 

***

Maybe Brendan’s views shouldn’t surprise us too much.  After all, if modern European history has taught us anything it’s that when you scratch anyone at either end of our political spectrum, when you get under their skin with a bit of epochal social disintegration, you’ll almost always find an authoritarian lurking beneath, ready and willing to pack the cattle trucks full of the deviant, the recalcitrant and the problematic in order that society might be saved. 

The question, though – and here you must forgive me for infringing Brendan’s communist copyright – is, ‘What is to be done?’  Because it seems to me that too many of those same journalists who raged against the dying of liberalism’s light in the name of ‘lockdown’ now seem a little too happy to accept that a similarly illiberal form of tyranny must be perpetrated on society in the name of ‘vaccination.’

Why is that I wonder?  Why is it that whenever erstwhile lockdown sceptics talk about mandatory vaccination, vaccine passports and social credit systems, their words seem a little half-hearted, shruggy-shouldered, complacent, resigned, accepting of the fact that, ‘Well, you know, I mean, what must be must be, sacrifices needed, NHS and all that, um, God save the Queen, just doing our duty, collective effort, wartime spirit, er, collective more important than any one individual, ah, no “I” in “We,” um, individual freedoms have to be curtailed at some point, don’t you know’? Is it because, this time, the stakes are a little higher; because the act of standing up for ideals they all profess to believe in – liberty, equality, fraternity – might require more than a bit of talking-loud-saying-nothing copy every now and then, a few controversial tweets and some regular remote appearances on Talk Radio?  Is it because this time it’d mean them having to put their bodies, their jobs, their beliefs on the line, just like the care workers who are now being forced to put their bodies, their jobs, their beliefs on the line?  Is it that, actually, what they’d quite like is for some other group, ideally some scummy, povvy group, one that no-one really cares about or stands up for, to be thrown under the mandatory vax bus first in the hope that that’ll do the trick, that that’ll satiate the government’s neuroticism and then they can all just go back to the dinner parties of yesteryear, and hey, who knows, maybe even get a book deal or a regular radio gig out of all of their ‘uncompromising’ and ‘heroic’ anti-lockdown work?  Is it because some of them live in fear of the censorship, the excommunication, the exile, the lost gigs, TV appearances, the reduced cashflow? 

Perhaps.  It certainly feels a bit like that.  And that would be fine, of course, wouldn’t it, except for the breakneck speed of change in our society; except for mandatory vaccination, jab for your job, medical apartheid, vaccine passports for travellers, vaccine passports for everyday life, the digitisation of currencies, digital passports, biomedical surveillance of health records, the spectre of social credit systems, the World Economic Forum, the build back better agenda, censorship of those deemed to be spreading misinformation, the green revolution, eco-cars that you can’t afford, gas boilers that you can’t use and so on and so, wearily, forth. 

Let’s get real about what’s happening here, shall we?  The sacked care workers of today are the cancelled and penniless journalists of tomorrow.  And that’s just tomorrow.  I doubt very much, for instance, that the concepts and ideas which, for the moment, seem to be buying most people’s acquiescence in what’s happening – an imminent return to prosperity, credit-based consumer spending splurges, hire-purchase petrol cars, wealth generation, individual fashion, wage growth, low unemployment, consumer choice, rising living standards, social mobility – will have any meaning to any of us a decade or two from now unless those whose responsibility it is to think about, reflect upon and articulate the nightmarish trajectory that our society is currently embarked upon stop genuflecting to an incremental, slowly-does-it, Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day, keep-the-idiots-docile-and-compliant-for-now totalitarianism.