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From 537 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments to central bank digital currency and digital IDs to 15-minute cities to collaborating in US acts of sabotage against Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, Simon Elmer has 20 questions for our “democracy” which challenge us to think about where we are now, how we got here, and where we are heading. 

These are questions that should be asked of every Member of Parliament.  We challenge each of them to respond, publicly.

In the absence of a response from those elected and paid to govern affairs on our behalf, we must answer them for ourselves. And taken together, the answers to these questions compel us to ask a single one: Are we still living in a democracy?

Twenty Questions for Our Democracy

By Simon Elmer

The past three years have exposed the structural flaw in Western democracy with more disastrous consequences for its populations than at any time in recent history.

It’s generally known that democracy, from the Ancient Greek dēmokratia, means ‘rule by the people’; but it is perhaps less widely known that the fifth-century city-state of Athens on which the West modelled its democracy was a slave-owning society in which only adult males and hereditary citizens comprising maybe 10-15 per cent of the population had the right to vote.

The universal suffrage we have in the UK today was only attained through centuries of political struggle and is predicated, at least in principle, on an equally universal education. One of the arguments against extending rights of suffrage – that were originally restricted to landowners, then to property owners, then to heads of households, then to men over twenty-one, then to propertied women over thirty, and only eventually made a universal right – was that according equal votes to individuals with vastly unequal levels of education, influence and understanding of policy was politically suicidal. The counterargument, which eventually won out, is that those who, because of their wealth or education or age or gender, had the right to vote, were unlikely to do so against their interests, making their political franchise a guarantee of hegemony. The eventual concession to universal suffrage, however, gave those who grudgingly conceded it ample time to turn this threat to their advantage and make the vastly expanded electorate the object of demographically targeted political strategies. It was from this necessity, and from the opportunity it afforded, that the modern mass media were born.

A century later, universal suffrage has produced not the Platonic ideal of a universally educated, socially conscientious and politically informed demos but, to the contrary, a people governed by virtue and terror. It is not only in the interests of a Government and its beneficiaries to keep the electorate both ignorant and stupid; it is necessary in order to maintain its grip on power – and not only a sitting Government but every political party that hopes to form one. This hardly needs to be argued, as the evidence of the erasure of our politics, which every year descends to new lows of populism, is denied only by those who strut on its stages, script its tragedies and direct their endings from behind the scenes.

For the same reason, universal education, which has always served to indoctrinate citizens into the dominant ideology, has been transformed into more or less explicit propaganda for the changing values and pressing needs of Western capitalism far beyond how we vote. Globalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics, environmental fundamentalism, the orthodoxies of woke and now the dogma and cultic practices of biosecurity are all products of the neo-liberalisation of our education, media and culture industries. The result of this ideological coordination of every sector of our society is that the most educated demographic in human history, the middle classes of the West, is now the most easily manipulated populace in history. A century and more of universal suffrage and education has created not ‘rule by the people’ but a demos in thrall to the ever-expanding technologies of biopower.

The systemic exploitation of this flaw in our democracy means that our lives are now effectively ruled by the most gullible, the most afraid, the most obedient and the most compliant members of our society, on the grounds that they constitute a democratic consensus. It is not by chance that every crisis manufactured to justify removing our freedoms – from climate change and racism to the cost of living and war in the Ukraine – is turned into a “health crisis”. Just as our human rights, discarded on the justification of the health and safety of the “people,” have become the means by which our lives have been taken into the protective custody of the state, so too our democracy has become the means by which the institutions and processes of democratic oversight and accountability have been dismantled and replaced by the rule of a global technocracy implementing a totalitarian system of governance.

As evidence of this, here are twenty questions we should be asking about our democracy – about where we are now, how we got here, and where we are heading. This, if you like, is my “State of the Nation” address, and it paints a very different picture of the UK in 2023 to that presented by our unelected Prime Minister.

1. First, how was it possible for the Bank of England to create a quantitative easing programme that by November 2020 had reached £895 billion in government and corporate bonds, and yet two years later the UK Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, can dismiss the ensuing and inevitable inflation, that in the Consumer Price Index has reached a 45-year high of nearly 12 per cent, as the result of the coronavirus “pandemic” and “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”?

2.. How was it possible that, during two years of restrictions on our previously universal, indivisible and inalienable human rights and freedoms, the UK Government was allowed to transform the UK from a parliamentary democracy into a constitutional dictatorship in which 537 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments containing thousands of regulations were made into UK law by Government Ministers before being laid before Parliament for scrutiny or approval, and without proof of their justification or proportionality or assessment of their impact?

3. How was it possible that, under cover of a politically declared “emergency period” it was in its power to extend indefinitely, the Government, by the end of March 2022, could spend £376 billion of present and future British taxpayers’ money on so-called covid-19 “measures” – including £147 billion on support for businesses, £89 billion for health and social care, £75 billion for other public services and emergency responses, £60 billion in support for individuals, £3 billion for “other” support, and £2 billion for operational costs – on the justification of combatting the spread of a virus with the infection fatality rate of seasonal influenza?

4. How was it possible for the Government, on the justification of waging “war” on a virus that represents a significant threat exclusively to the elderly and already ill, to impose scientifically meaningless and largely illegal medical “measures” of surveillance, registration, inspection, prohibition, exclusion, quarantine, incarceration and punishment not employed in Europe since the Seventeenth Century on the whole of the British public, causing poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy, psychological damage, and the ongoing deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens denied medical diagnosis, care and treatment by two years of “social distancing,” “lockdown,” mandatory “masking” and “vaccination”?

5. How was it possible that multiple injections with a mix of experimental adenovirus vector and mRNA gene therapies that introduce DNA sequences into our cells – the clinical trials for which are still incomplete, whose developers and producers have admitted they do nothing to stop transmission of the coronavirus, that have demonstrably failed either to protect the injected from infection or to lessen the symptoms of disease, and which have already killed thousands of Britons, caused millions of serious injuries, and are having long-term negative consequences for the health and lives of unknown millions of people across the globe – could be made a condition of restoring our constitutional rights and freedoms under UK and international law, and despite all the data on their lack of effectiveness and dangers are still being injected into the UK public, and were recently extended to children as young as 6 months old on the justification of protecting them from a disease to which they are statistically immune?

6. How is it possible that the British people, like the populations of every Western nation, are being forcibly subjected to a process of deliberate impoverishment and erasure of our rights and freedoms through policies for which our Government does not have a mandate from the electorate, which have not been voted for by our democratically elected representatives in Parliament, or even been debated in the national media, on the spurious justification of “saving the planet” from a constantly deferred environmental catastrophe about whose nature or cause or threat or imminence or even existence there is no scientific consensus, but for the lobbying, marketing and promotion of which there has been vast corporate and government investment?

7. How is it possible that, following the lead of the London Mayor’s road closure scheme and an Ultra-Low Emission Zone that this year will encompass the entire capital, the municipal authorities of Oxford City and Canterbury City have announced they are going to enforce restrictions on the movement of motorists in and out of their civic jurisdiction, in violation of our freedom of movement under Protocol No. 4, Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but in compliance with the concept of the “15-minute city” formulated by the World Economic Forum, a privately-funded think-tank without democratic mandate or legal jurisdiction?

8. How is it possible that, on the justification of “tackling” numerous manufactured health, environmental, energy, food, security and geopolitical “crises,” the elected national governments of Western states are openly and even insistently forming what the French President, Emmanuel Macron, recently called a “Single Global Order” fronted by unelected transnational organisations like the United Nations, the European Council, the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum and the International Panel on Climate Change, but whose policies are being dictated by global financial institutions like the US Federal Reserve, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and US-based asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard Group and State Street Global Advisors?

9. How is it possible that the biologically nonsensical, socially unaccepted, medically mutilating, child abusing, violently misogynist and implicitly homophobic orthodoxies of so-called “trans-rights,” formulated by a previously marginal subculture associated with body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria and self-harming, are being written into more and more UK policy and legislation, indoctrinated into children without parental approval, normalised by our institutions of education, propagated by our institutions of art, culture and entertainment, imposed on employees through intellectually vacuous but now mandatory programmes such as “unconscious bias” and “equality, diversity and inclusion” training, and enforced on the non-compliant through new police powers?

10. How is it possible that, on the justification of combatting the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia in a proxy war waged by a government installed in 2014 by a US-engineered coup, which until recently was denounced across the West as Neo-Nazi, and whose puppet President has banned opposition political parties, worker unions and independent media platforms and issued hit lists on journalists and academics who have criticised its actions, the UK Government has not only committed £4.6 billion in military, financial and humanitarian aid to the Ukraine but has collaborated in US acts of sabotage against Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline to Europe, increasing our financial dependence on US energy sources and entrenching its political hegemony over the West?

11. How is it possible that private companies already making billions of pounds in profit from the privatisation of our utilities by successive neoliberal governments have been allowed to raise the price of energy in the UK to the extent that, this year, an estimated 65 per cent of UK households, over 45.5 million people, will be driven into fuel poverty – which means spending 10 per cent of their net income on fuel after housing costs?

12. How is it possible that environmental fundamentalist organisations like Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil that are funded by, among other corporate backers financing the Climate Emergency Fund, the heir to the J. Paul Getty oil fortune, are given free rein by the UK Government, municipal authorities, police forces and security services to block the country’s roads and bridges, cause criminal damage to the UK offices of some of the world’s most powerful and high-security companies, and enter and vandalise the nation’s political, cultural and artistic institutions?

13. How is it possible that, nearly three years into the “pandemic,” when a Member of Parliament finally found the courage to point out that more people have reported adverse reactions to mRNA “vaccines” for covid-19 than had from all the other vaccines combined over the previous forty years and called on the Prime Minister to halt the UK “vaccination” programme, his comments were condemned by his fellow MPs first as “dangerous” and then as “anti-Semitic,” and he himself was dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist,” suspended from Parliament and eventually expelled from his Party?

14. How is it possible that the worst and most corrupt Parliament in modern British history, and the three Governments it has failed to scrutinise or hold to account during the biggest changes to our society and politics since at least the Second World War, have permitted the outsourcing of the authority and duties of the UK state to multinational corporations, including the right of information technology companies, under the Online Safety Bill, to censor anything Western governments and the international technocracies they form want silenced, creating the basis for a new form of totalitarian surveillance and control over our freedom of thought and expression?

15. How is it possible that, in less than three years, our political, state and civil institutions have not only not opposed, but have willingly collaborated, in the revolution in the governance of Western democracies from the nation state, in which the actions of the executive are overseen by the legislature and judiciary, into global governance by international technocracies of corporate board members, bankers and unelected government bureaucrats appointed outside of any democratic process of election, scrutiny or accountability?

16. How is it possible that, under cover of unprecedented levels of public expenditure in response to a public health “crisis” they were responsible for manufacturing, the financial institutions and governments of Western capitalism have overseen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in modern history, with the wealth of the world’s 2,668 billionaires rising from $8.6 trillion to $13.8 trillion over the two years of lockdown restrictions in which 250 million people were driven into extreme poverty.

17. How is it possible that our latest Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who was not elected by the British people or even by his own political party but was appointed to the role following the disapproval of his predecessor by unknown figures in the financial sectors of the UK, Europe or the world, no sooner took office than he unilaterally announced the “roll-out” of Central Bank Digital Currency employing blockchain technology to log every transaction we ever make, and which is programmable with restrictions and limits on expenditure contingent on our biosecurity status, carbon footprint and social compliance?

18. How is it possible that, in response to a campaign of fear orchestrated by the UK media, the police and the Home Secretary, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition can declare that, in order to control illegal immigration and as a condition of access to the rights of citizenship in the UK – including our freedom of movement and, under future “crises,” our freedom of association and assembly, and perhaps, if the covid faithful have their way, our right to education, work, medical treatment and liberty – the never realised threat of “vaccine” passports should be expanded into a programme of Digital Identity containing our biometric data, including our compliance with the constantly updated requirements to be injected as many times and with whatever the state tells us?

19. How is it possible that, after the clinical trial on the population of the world lasting three years has irrefutably demonstrated that face masks do absolutely nothing to stop the spread of a virus one-ten-thousandth of a millimetre wide, and in the face of the overwhelming evidence of their physical and psychological harms – in particular to the mental health and development of infants and children – the covid-faithful, including numerous medical professionals, continue not only to wear them but to call for their enforced imposition on the populations of the world, in some cases on a permanent basis?

20. How is it possible that, three years since the “pandemic” was officially declared by the World Health Organisation on 11 March 2020, we have implemented or are on the cusp of implementing the programmes and technologies of a Global Biosecurity State, including not only Digital Identity and Central Bank Digital Currency, but also Universal Basic Income for the millions of workers, primarily from white-collar jobs, who will be made redundant by the new technologies, markets and programmes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset of Western capitalism it has enabled; a system of Social Credit modelled on that currently employed in the People’s Republic of China, in which individuals and companies are given a rating based on their compliance not only with the laws but also with the behavioural norms of the state, all of which will be established through access to our online browsing, search and purchase history; the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty that will allow national governments to justify imposing lockdowns, masking, “vaccine” mandates and other programmes of biosecurity as the technical decisions of an international health technocracy; Smart Cities, in which our freedom of movement, assembly, association, access, business, consumption, ownership, privacy, expression and thought will be monitored, analysed and controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms linking the Internet of Things by which we are surrounded to the Internet of Bodies by which we are connected to it; and facial recognition technology that identifies citizens not compliant with regulations of biosecurity made not by our governments but by international technocracies overseeing global finance, expenditure, consumption, health, agriculture, animal husbandry, education and war?

Behind their health-and-safety, planet-saving, Putin-defeating branding, all these programmes are instruments of the new global technocracy and the international corporations, central banks and transnational institutions that compose it. We know who these are, because on 11 March 2020, the same day the World Health Organisation declared the “pandemic,” the World Economic Forum launched the Covid-19 Action Platform, a coalition of over 1,100 of the world’s most powerful businesses.

These include, in banking and capital markets, the Agricultural Bank of China, Allianz, the Bank of America, the Bank of China, Bank Santander, Barclays, the China Construction Bank, the China Merchants Group, Citi Bank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, HSBC, the Industrial Commercial Bank of China, JPMorgan Chase, the Lloyds Banking Group, the London Stock Exchange Group, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, PayPal, the Qatar National Bank, the Qatar Investment Authority, the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, the Saudi National Bank, the State Bank of India, UBS and Visa; in asset management, BlackRock, Bridgewater Associates, Fidelity International and State Street Global Advisors; in healthcare, the American Heart Foundation, AstraZeneca, Bayer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, the Serum Institute of India, Sanofi, Thermo Fisher Scientific and the Wellcome Trust; and, in information technology, Accenture, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Google, IBM, Intel, Meta and Microsoft.

These are the stakeholders and this is the prototype for what the World Economic Forum calls “stakeholder capitalism,” the new political economy of Western capitalism, through which our democratically elected governments are being replaced as the final arbiters of the policies of the nation state and the rights and freedoms of its citizens, and in their place international corporations and financial institutions, through their macro-management of the global economy, will constitute a new form of global governance. Based on this technocratic model, the programmes of the Great Reset of Western capitalism are being implemented as mere upgrades in the technological infrastructure of the nation state; but in practice they are bringing about a qualitative and perhaps irreversible shift in the power of the state over the population and the unaccountability of the rulers to the ruled. And yet, all this is being implemented as I write, largely without the knowledge and certainly without the vote of the British people.

Taken together, the answers to these questions compel us to ask a single one, in which they are compounded. Are we, in the UK as in every country in the neoliberal democracies of the West, still living in a democracy in anything more than name; and, if we aren’t, how do we go about restoring it? Because, if it isn’t already too late to do so, it soon will be.

About the Author

Simon Elmer is the author of two new volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, which are available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. This article is an extract from the Introduction to Volume 1. Please click on these links for the contents page, introduction and purchase options. On 11 March 2023, to mark the third anniversary since the declaration of the “pandemic,” he will be holding a book launch at the Star & Garter, 62 Poland Street, W1F 7NX, upstairs in the William Blake room from 6-8pm. Entry is free, with book signings, a reading and open-mic discussion.