Elites to take gold, silver and bronze.

As we all know, social and political issues are mostly class-based. The elite carry off all the prizes while the rest of us work, watch and wonder.

It's been the way of things throughout history. The elite run the show in their own interests, sending proles off to war every now and then to kill off the courageous.

Naturally their interests are often in conflict with ours so various measures are adopted to make sure our interests always come last. Once upon a time it was the sword and the noose allied to land ownership, but these days the old bread and circuses game seems to do the trick.

This wouldn’t matter too much if we had a number of key freedoms such as free speech, the freedom to exchange our goods and services as we choose and a transparent tax regime. Unfortunately, these freedoms are easily presented as threats or risks and as usual this is how the elite keep a grip on things. 

They even try to present the climate as a risk, but that one seems to be sagging a little under the weight of its own silliness.

Socialism and egalitarian notions, in spite of their superficial appeal, tend to make things worse by presenting the elite with a powerful weapon of social and political control – the welfare state. Control the welfare state and you control hearts and souls by creating dependencies too powerful to resist. 

Take away our earnings via complex and unfair tax regimes then dribble some of it back to us through dependency channels with all the cream skimmed off. A great wheeze and very effective.

Even more useful in keeping the elite thumb on the scales are bodies such as the EU and UN. It is no accident that the EU gains more and more power over the UK even though a majority of UK citizens seem to think we’d be better off out. Of course we would, but the elite obviously don’t so that’s that.

So why do folk fall for it? 

Why do ordinary folk vote for the elite? After all, it's been obvious for some time that the big three political parties in UK politics simply represent elite interests - a melding of big business and big government. Yet voters must know they personally aren’t members of the elite and must also know the elite don’t give a fig for their aspirations. In fact they put quite a bit of effort into knocking our aspirations on the head.  

So why vote for them?

I suppose it’s simple enough. Bread and circuses works. In fact - don’t we have one of the major circuses coming up quite soon? That absurd Olympics drug-fest?