Götterdämmerung
  1. (Germanic mythology) 'The twilight of the gods'. The myth of the destruction of the gods in a final battle with the forces of evil; the apocalypse.
  2. Any cataclysmic downfall or momentous, apocalyptic event, especially of a regime or an institution.
grenfell tower
The UK's cascading constitutional crisis continues. The horrific fire at Grenfell Tower in London on June 14th, which occurred just 6 days after a snap election delivered a 'shock' hung parliament (the UK's second in just 7 years), has shaken the country to its core at a time when trust in the authorities is already teetering.

Up to 600 people lived in 120 flats in Grenfell Tower. The fire started at 1am (when it was probably almost fully occupied by sleeping residents) on the 4th floor. All 20 floors above that went up in flames in just 15 minutes. The government says the death toll stands at 79, but the names of not even half of those have been released. The true death toll is likely closer to 379. Locals are certain the death toll is being covered up. British MP David Lammy stated that the death toll is being covered up by Theresa May's party to prevent riots.The official line that '79 are dead and the toll is likely to rise' is the best the government can do to 'handle this till it goes away'.

But the fallout from this isn't going to just 'go away'.

Multiple terror attacks prior to the election, and the non-stop media coverage they received, were dwarfed in their impact on UK society by this accidental fire, the effects of which the state and media has been frantically trying to cover up or - please excuse the pun - put out. But that attempt is largely irrelevant at this point. We live in an age of instant digital communications, and while the government figured out how to 'manage' the fire's consequences, the people are talking directly with each other via social media and uploading hundreds of eyewitness accounts and commentaries on the event - many of which have gone viral - that bypass all central efforts to control the information flow.

We're starting to see how the 'controlled burn' of social control methods like terrorism are completely backfiring in the elites' faces. The terror attacks that are used to 'remind the people why they need us', have been rendered almost useless in the face of a surprise event that has people directing their outrage at the authorities. The timing of the Grenfell disaster, so soon after the Manchester and London terror attacks, apparently supercharged the backlash.

Assuming the cynical view that 'ISIS' had inside help with strategically injecting terror into the middle of arguably the UK's most important ever election campaign, and that the purpose was to encourage British people to look to the 'established' authorities for protection from Muslim terrorists that are murdering them, the Grenfell fire has completely reversed that narrative with many British people now accusing their government of murdering them.

Grenfell Tower was refurbished to the tune of £10 million last year with flammable plastic cladding that cost £22 per square meter. Non-flammable cladding cost £24 per sq meter. The flammable cladding was mounted on the exterior of the building because it was deemed an 'eyesore' to some residents of the surrounding wealthy borough of Kensington. In all their wishful thinking, their slashing of social services (including fire services) while enriching their friends, and their hubris in believing they could 'manage' events to keep Corbyn out and keep the country 'together' - they never saw this one coming.

It's not that they couldn't have foreseen the risk of a fatal fire: they had ample opportunity because for years the towers' residents were warning local authorities about fire hazards. What they couldn't foresee is the backlash and the socio-political consequences. Patrick Cockburn writes on the utter fecklessness of the UK regime as it scrambles for scapegoats:
"A sprinkler system, which would have suppressed the original blaze before it spread, was never installed because it would have cost a small amount of money. The Government is quoted, in words that it may come to regret, as saying that "it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire-sprinkling systems effectively."
So Grenfell has had the reverse effect of all that pre-election terror: it has exposed the only real faultline in society - that between the people and the elite. All efforts to render Muslims untermenschen are certainly void in London where, for now at least, the great majority is united in grief with the victims, who were largely Muslim or black, and certainly all among society's poorest, and united in rage against "those who know the price of everything but the value of nothing," as one MP put it.

Neo-liberalism, the ideological vehicle of US-dominated 'globalization', arguably began in London with the election of Thatcher back in 1979. There were twists and turns from there to here, but by the time the 2008 financial crisis flared on Wall Street, the UK joined eurozone countries in imposing the 'cure' to the crisis - austerity - whose terrible toll provoked public backlash in the form of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 (an event the UK only survived thanks, I am quite certain, to massive postal vote rigging by the security services), the election of Jeremy Corbyn to leader of the Labour party, the decision to call an in/out EU referendum, and the bombshell result of that referendum.

From crisis to crisis - some manufactured, others completely outside the security services' control - the UK is stumbling into an uncertain future. Like the political schizophrenia exposed in the US by the deep state's reaction to a reasonably honest independent coming to power, the British establishment is desperately clinging to power.

Another Hung Parliament
The Tower card

"The Tower is commonly interpreted as meaning danger, crisis, sudden change, destruction, higher learning, and liberation. In the Rider-Waite deck, the top of The Tower is a crown, which symbolizes materialistic thought being brought low."
the tower card
The Tower in the 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck.
Labour's success on June 8th was a shock to the British intelligentsia, but not surprising to us. If anything, we're surprised Corbyn's party didn't win by a landslide. It's not just that Conservatives got as many seats as they did, but where they got them from: a dozen Scottish SNP seats. Around a third of Scots, the elections results told us, have apparently, sometime in the two years since the UK's last general election, fully reversed their support for breaking away from London-imposed austerity to asking for 'more please, sir.'

Another notable result was the consolidation of an almost 50-50 split between Irish nationalist Sinn Fein and British loyalist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland. That the English Conservatives are now relying on minority Scottish Conservatives and (barely) majority 'Irish Conservatives' to form an all-UK government serves to highlight - and will almost certainly accentuate - the 'united' Kingdom's overall constitutional crisis.

Last week the 'victor' in the election, Theresa May, presented her incoming government's program to the queen, a formality that was rendered doubly hollow this year by the fact that the Conservatives have had to gut their election manifesto due to losing their majority share of seats in parliament at the polls and pay the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) £1 billion to secure a majority government.

Even before the election result, the EU was applying pressure on Downing Street in its Brexit negotiations by dangling the carrot of Irish unification before the Belfast and Dublin governments, citing the majority result in Northern Ireland for 'Remain' in the in/out EU referendum, and subsequent local fears of a 'hard' EU border within Ireland. The DUP would rather hang themselves (or the nationalist population of Northern Ireland) en masse than accept a united Ireland, so the scene is set for much fecklessness and skullduggery over the next year or two.

As the English are wont to say: 'Bloody hell, mate!' If the permanent bureaucracy in Westminster isn't careful - which I can just about guarantee you it won't be - it risks regime change in the form of both a republican/socialist overhaul of the British monarchy and the collapse of its union of anglo-celtic nations in the form of Irish unification and Scottish independence.

Failed state

What happened at Grenfell Tower is both symptomatic and symbolic of the fact that something is profoundly rotten in the state of Great Britain. While that could be said about the West in general - where the wheels are coming off the 'Washington Consensus', producing dislocations all over the place - I think the contradictions in the UK between how the state, and thus society, sees itself, and how it actually is, is particularly pronounced.

British youth has long since been corrupted: the country is joined only by the US for the highest rates of underage sex, teenage pregnancy, drug use, and alcohol use in the developed world. Its media is appalling, rating as the most right-wing (and not in any positive sense of that term) in Europe; and you've no doubt noticed the celeb-porn plastered all over the web pages of many of its biggest media platforms. London is the most corrupt city on Earth, a distinction earned by the unscrupulous behaviors of its elite minority and their banking/business ties with organized crime, military contractors and terrorists the world over.

And then there are the pedophilia scandals. As Home Secretary two years ago, Theresa May said that pedophilia is now "woven, covertly, into the fabric of our society", and she should know. In recent years, one after another pedophile network has come to light, revealing what can only be described as decades of child sex criminality on an industrial scale - and it was often taking place in the very studios of its trusted media, in the very institutions of its child care services, in the very grounds of its sporting establishments, and in the very halls of its government.

When a society devours its young like this, where else can it go but down in flames? With its bizarre decision to court disaster by calling the Brexit referendum, and its overtures to China in recent years, the British establishment's long-term strategy apparently foresaw the UK providing 'offshore' banking services for Yuan-denominated (and dominated) global trade, while keeping its own population cowed under a 'strategy of tension' (via outright terrorism and other forms of subterfuge). But reality and those annoying things called 'facts' have caught up with them.

Enter J.C.

As if he wasn't before the election, and before Grenfell, official polls now tell us that Jeremy Corbyn is the public's favourite to lead the country.

It cannot be stressed enough just how dangerous Corbyn is to the establishment. He has been an MP since 1983, and has a consistent track record of voting on principle in the House of Commons. He warned back then that gutting the country's real economy in favour of a fake one dedicated to 'manufacturing' financial instruments was a strategy that would end in tears; he warned that a fake 'left' under Tony Blair was bamboozling the country with its 'humanitarian wars' and 'third ways' in the late 1990s; and today he's still the same principled bloke that he was back then.

That is why the British security services immediately marked him as "a threat to national security" when he won the Labour leadership contest in September 2015. Why on Earth would Cameron have been saying such about Corbyn just months after winning what should have been a 5-year majority Conservative government? Because a reasonably fair society run by people with integrity is kryptonite to the UK's ruling elite, and because they sense that the general public wants exactly that.

In their 19th century elitist worldview, a Corbyn-led government would destroy their country; in reality, they have destroyed the country all by themselves, and Corbyn represents the only chance it has of saving itself - or, to be somewhat more pragmatic in diagnosis - the best chance it has of navigating the ship of state in these times of tumult, and of making course corrections without the country descending into chaotic and bloody revolution.

Scottish comedian and leftist commentator Frankie Boyle sounds a note of caution though: the UK establishment - even when it is on the racks; in fact, especially when it is on the racks - is made up of people whose sociopathic tendencies predispose them for handling crises well - not by solving them, mind you, but by turning them to their advantage and against the interests of the people. Rendered conscienceless via the British public school system, by the time they're in power, the self-styled British elite instinctively know what to do: whatever it takes to maintain the status quo. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the 1990 TV mini-series A Very British Coup to see the what the 'deep state' looks like on this side of the pond, and what awaits Corbyn should he become prime minister.

In just over a month's time, the UK passes the 20th anniversary mark of Princess Diana's death-by-'unlawful killing'. I don't know what if any connection that has with current events; I just thought I'd mention it. While I confess - as an Irishman - some measure of schadenfreude at seeing the true nature of 'great' Britain finally come out in the wash, I'm also happy for my British neighbours. It's a red day in England; 'ere the Sun rises!

Finally, here's Jeremy 'Jezza' Corbyn (did anyone else notice that his initials are J.C.?) taking to the stage this past weekend at the Glastonbury festival to tell 150,000 people (who had probably long ago despaired of politics) to keep the faith and love one another. Can you imagine Theresa May doing this? The poor woman would rather flee recklessly through yonder fields of wheat...