A Chapter that gets a bit ranty and conspiratorial

If the West, Britain and America in particular had decided to take sides with an enemy who believed his vile actions were sanctioned and desired by God, against an enemy who did not believe in God, during the Cold War, it was largely because the West did not believe in God either. During that post war period until the early 1990s the Cold War was not a war involving God, it was more a huge and dangerous standoff about the best way to serve Mammon. We had recruited the Islamists without paying proper attention and we had thought we could contain them. The Islamists had been recruited and trained and armed in relation to Afghanistan, which seemingly God forsaken place was strategic. There was a gap of merely five years between the end of the Soviet Union and Bill Clinton shit stirring in the Balkans. The NATO plan in the Balkans, which was the blueprint for the subsequent wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and for what was meant to have happened in Egypt where we were intending to back the Muslim Brotherhood, was pretending that Islamic extremist thugs were ‘moderate rebels’ fighting the extremists in charge. The reason usually given for the intervention in Iraq, by those who tried to explain what all the madness was about was oil. But oil didn’t explain the Balkans and it didn’t explain Syria, America was more or less self-sufficient in oil, after it had taken up fracking. Oil was just another way of serving Mammon and by the 1990s the Climate Change thing was getting going and so mixed messages were going out about mass consumerism, economics being everything and the pressing need to save the planet and all things green. Virginia couldn’t make sense of it.

Saving the planet seemed at first to have religious overtones to it. It was ostensibly about looking after God’s world and preserving it for the next generation. But people were nature too and part of God’s creation. And the green thing was massively Malthusian. The Devil of course would buy one’s soul, so he was a capitalist, of sorts, but at least he wanted it. The greens just wanted people to die, in order to save the polar bears. And yet Greenpeace had also got involved with the Islamist terrorist groups and the hundreds of constantly renamed N.G.Os and foundations that funnelled them money, even from Prince Charles, supposedly for ‘rebuilding’ Syria, without the Syrian government, in contravention of international law. The green crap and the support for Islamist terrorism were somehow two sides of the same coin. Tellingly there was very little support for Christian refugees from the Middle East, in the West. Britain took none at all and seemed to go out of its way to ensure the country could not be used as a refuge for Christians from Syria or Iraq.

The whole mess of the last thirty years in terms of Foreign Policy was a way of attempting to serve two masters. And one of them was not God. The country seemed to be driven to serve the Devil and Mammon. Mammon was the endless money-go-round that was warfare, the Devil, itself. And democracy and politics made no difference to foreign policy, Left and Right pursued the same agenda.

Virginia did believe there was an agenda, a conspiracy. This was policy, pursued aggressively, not cock up. It would have been possible for Britain to relax after the end of the second war and the end of the Empire, to really retreat, not giving up and hiding its face, but taking a break. It might have really gone in for a kind of peaceful, ‘managed decline’ that did not have to encompass making a hash of our economy at home or giving up on our relationships with our former colonies. It needn’t have gone nuclear, it needn’t have joined the EU, Britain could have pottered along, trading with our neighbours and English-speaking former colonies and friends. In those circumstances the left would probably have been less full of self-loathing, as a nation we might have forgiven ourselves our trespasses as we had forgiven those who had trespassed against us. We might have gone forth into the world in peace and have been of good courage and held fast to that which was good. But we didn’t, we couldn’t accept we, that is the establishment, were not meant to be out there, shit stirring. And so, we carried on, first there was the trouble in Suez that really set the tone for how deeply the shit was to be stirred and how badly we were to fare as a result of the shit stirrers’ getting things wrong. Virginia was a big fan of Simon Raven and recognised a man telling the truth via a work of fiction when she spotted one. Removing Islamic dictators in the Middle East, because we wanted the Islamic extremists in the Middle East population to be able to vote for the kind of Islamic extremist dictator they would prefer, and not just have to put up with the one we didn’t like, was the next phase. Or so the government told the British people. It was a load of rubbish, but what could one woman do, the Devil was already in charge, someone had pushed the first domino over decades ago and no amount of black-magic would stop the next one falling over. Besides, Virginia didn’t know what the truth actually was, she just knew the west was not interested in democracy for the Middle East. The only useful sort of magic was the internet, the news sites and blogs of diligent researchers who pieced together the evidence and showed the whole picture instead of the little mosaic fragments it was possible to hold in one’s memory, in order to try and construct an argument. And there was the intention of course, the magic had to be made out of the intention, to spread the word, tell the truth, bang on endlessly, all day if necessary.

Virginia decided she was not an online troll. She was a decent, middle aged English woman, speaking truth to power

Only power did not want to hear the truth. Power, Virginia knew, had already decided to go out of its way to prevent Virginia letting her fellow men know, or at least her fellow Spectator and Telegraph readers, what was really going on. She had long suspected there was a specific operation in existence, but even so it was still rather shocking to discover it really was a thing. The Counter Trolls really were scared of the truth getting out.

Way back in 2014 Cameron had told a UN Conference he wanted something done about extremism and had made it clear he was not just referring to violent extremism, but to any narrative on world events which ran counter to his own. In 2017 Amber Rudd announced to tech companies that people who wished to do the west harm should not be allowed to do so via the internet. All discussion on this occasion was about stopping terrorism, but of course, the legislation, once in place, would be used to stop everything else the government thought it was dangerous for the little people to know about. And so it went on and on, each new minister in the post making more and more draconian declarations about controlling the internet and ‘fake news.’ Then the story of the Integrity Initiative broke.

“The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

The Integrity Initiative aims to unite people who understand the threat, in order to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare.”

It was a pity in a way, Virginia felt that this Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative were not on the side of freedom, just against Russia. It sounded so commendable, so Machiavellian and really one did wish for unalloyed goodies and baddies in the world, God and Mammon, God and the Devil, Magic and Black Magic, Right and Left, Maggie and the Miners and so on. But really the only theoretical good there was, was truth and setting up these organisations to create counter narratives and to counter troll the trolls did not bring the truth into the light, it simply provided a secondary layer of dirt to hide it with after the other side had thrown theirs on top. It just increased the mudslinging in other words, and nobody was any the wiser as a result. And there had been some funny business in Spain too, when the democratically elected government had been prevented from appointing the Colonel it wanted to be the Head of Homeland Security, because other Western Governments objected, and a successful Twitter storm had been organised. This was precisely the sort of thing Western Governments were always accusing the Russians of doing. Two wrongs never had made a right, thought Virginia even if she knew better than most people, how often two wrongs felt as if they made a right, for a short time, when you had brought the second wrong about in darkness.

Interestingly there were people who had written defensive articles about the death of Dr David Kelly involved with the Integrity Initiative and Institute for Statecraft. There was also an American expert on Novichok, the toxin which had supposedly been used to zombify the Skripals. There were all kinds of tantalising snippets and insights into the dastardly going on in the security and intelligence services. Virginia once again felt what a marvellous age she was living in. There was information galore and nowhere for people to really hide, for long. The only trouble was that none of it, from either side, would ever be brought to trial in such a way as one could weigh the evidence and make a judgement. All one had, after all was a hunch, a balance of probabilities, on which basis to decide for whom one should cast one’s vote. And really this was all one had ever had. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, good old prejudice would have to do, for the most part, as it always had.

The Autumn of 2018 was very odd, in other ways, too. Everyone hated the Chequers nonsense, but when May went to present it in Salzburg, despite the fact it was more or less a dictation exercise from the EU to Britain, the E.U rejected it and there was an interesting reaction from all the people who hated, ‘Chequers’, couldn’t stand Mrs May and wanted nothing to do with all this humbug. They felt a kind of protective instinct towards May. And a protective instinct towards her bloody silly agreement which wasn’t one and given a bit more of a push they might even have ended up actually agreeing to it, even if the other side didn’t. Our side felt humiliated and bit like a man that didn’t want his wife to start blubbering, in public. Yet as she stood beside the other EU leaders, she looked more like the poor creature with Asperger's syndrome, on the outside of the ‘in group’, the unchosen girl at school, the one nobody wanted to play with, than anything else. Even Virginia found it hard not to feel sorry for the old bat, rejected on all sides as she was, but she had brought it on herself, that fact was inescapable, she had tried to be all things to all people and had ended up as one always did in those circumstances. May’s Christianity may have been a consolation, but it didn’t seem to have reminded her one could only have one master. Then perhaps such thinking was no good for politicians involved in negotiations, it was in the nature of a negotiation to make bargains and bargains were the devil’s special area of expertise.

Virginia tried to get the old rumour going again about May and the Asperger's syndrome, but it didn’t fly. People were too low spirited to care about the cause of her state of mind, only wishing she were not in charge of proceedings and at a loss as to how to bring such a necessary change about, with no election in sight.

In November came a very extraordinary event indeed. The Attorney General was subjected to a ‘Trial by Parliament’ over the legal advice he had given the Government in relation to Northern Ireland. Nothing like it had happened before, but the Government had no majority and half of those on its own supposed side were agin it.

Virginia watched the proceedings with horror. The Attorney General in some ways got away with things because he spoke out straightforwardly about what his advice to the Prime Minister had been, which was that Northern Ireland would be stuck in the Customs Union arrangement indefinitely, if talks on the future trade deals collapsed. He was not asked about his other advice on the Withdrawal Agreement. Virginia found she was singing ‘Is that all there is?’ As she watched him give his advice out loud.

But the other thing that rose to the surface visibly for the first time during that debate, or trial, was a manifestation of the suspicion Virginia had in her bones. All the while up until then, despite depressing and dark days, when Brexit had seemed further and further off and more and more hopeless, Virginia had held the Constitution up to the light and believed it watertight. It might have been worn thin in parts, as pale and gossamer grey as an old silk stocking, but it had had, until that day, an air about it of permanence, such that a Dowager Duchess could still make use of it to hobble about the garden in. One felt that the bastards would play by its rules, this was still England and all that.

But of course those who had gained their power long after the beautiful 17th century Constitution was subordinated and effectively entirely supplanted by a Napoleonic one (The Lisbon Treaty, in which things were done in camera) didn’t give a stuff about the British way of doing things. They preferred decisions to be grown in the dark like fungus and only presented to parliamentarians such as themselves for cooking up with olive oil and wine and garlic, before being vomited out over national populations, they were not going to stop a little thing like the ancient and revered and clear Constitution get in the way of their determination to ignore the British people. And so on that day, the bastards made their announcement in public to everyone who cared to hear it, though of course it was not spelled out in so many words.

A complaint was made about the Bill of Rights by one of the Utter Bastards in Chief, the Half Frog, and the way it prevented Parliamentarians from not having all the power they wanted in order to effectively govern from the back benches and opposition. The Speaker was seen to grin from ear to ear at this remark and the Chief Whip joined in with the general sense of jollity. How much better would it be if the silly old Bill of Rights and Hansard could be entirely dispatched with and parliamentarians could be allowed to make up their rules of conduct as they went along, dispensing with the need to be representative in any way or of sticking to Acts of Parliaments which they had only passed a few months previously. They had changed their minds, they were free agents, superior beings, able to represent their Constituents as they thought best, without actually having to take any notice of direct democracy, remember good old Burke, only forget he lost his seat by a big majority, shortly after writing his infamous guff on the subject of representation.

And so it played out. May put her awful Withdrawal Agreement to the House and it was rejected by a huge majority. The ERG seemed to think everyone was playing cricket, and that the rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement would mean the country would leave the EU under W.T.O terms at the end of March as Parliament had passed an act to ensure this happened. But the Utter Bastards in Chief and their gobby friends had no intention of allowing this to happen and laid plot after plot to thwart Constitutional convention with the aid of the Speaker. In early January Parliament defeated the government in an amendment to a bill which limited the government’s ability to spend money in the event of a W.T.O Brexit. The Withdrawal Agreement was defeated by a historic margin. Then it was thrashed again, then the arrogant bastards in Parliament decided it was time to rule out the prospect of a W.T.O Brexit, since May had given them the opportunity so to do it was not surprising that they did, given their utter self-importance and stupefying fat headedness. Then the extending article 50 shenanigans began.

During this time Virginia did what she could with portraits of the worst offenders and pins. Perhaps her skill was waning with age. They carried on and on, inflicting damage on the reputation of the country and Parliamentary democracy and they simply did not care. Virginia spent hours watching the debates, listening to arguments. The E.R.G got nowhere; they were outnumbered by the bastards. Their good words and intelligent speeches, their pleas on behalf of the real democratic system were trampled underfoot, to mingle with the dust between the green benches. And the bastards did not suffer so much as a toothache or a bit of neuralgia, as far as Virginia could make out, for all she skewered their similitudes. They were so inflated with their own sense of moral righteousness and infallibility, the opinion of the majority meant nothing at all to them. Virginia made a huge sign quoting William Walwyn or was it John Lilburne and put it up outside the house to the embarrassment of the children who took to parking in front of it. “Such hath been the wicked policies of those who have from time to time attempted to bring this nation into bondage; that they have in all times by the disuse or misuse of Parliament deprived the people of their hopes.” She painted it in gothic, italic script over a pale, sky blue background and bound it to the wrought iron railings, like a protesting suffragette, in order to convey something symbolically of the long fight for democracy, which was now being overthrown.

Many people stopped to admire it and more to wonder what sort of a mad old loony would make such a thing. But despite the funny looks, Virginia sensed from her online work that the good people of England were as astounded by events and as stunned and appalled and deeply offended by the display of entitlement the Parliamentarians were putting on as she was.