Bouncing off the Neoliberal Bubble

I watch Question Time nearly every week. However, this may be the last time I watch it in a long while.

I would have loved to have had the time to have penned an article post-Brexit and pre-Donald Trump triumph, not least because I saw all of this coming. The tide is going out on neoliberalism, the pendulum of history is once again shifting.

Yet if you watched the BBC all of this is at best a curiosity to you and at worst the staggered release of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Record high FTSE stocks, record low bond yields, an 11 year high in employment, retail sales up 7.6% year on year, falling  inflation again this week. These are the facts since June 23rd. Yet every single one of these facts when reported by the BBC is preceded with the term ‘despite Brexit’.

It is no longer any  wonder to me why neoliberals are so shocked when the world votes for Brexit and elects Donald Trump; and mark my words, Italy with Five Star, the Netherlands with Geert Wilders and France with Marine Le Pen are soon to follow.

If all you watched was the BBC, prime culprit being Question Time, of course you would be shocked! You would see four Remainers and one Leaver on the panel every week and wonder what the hell is going on?! You would look at poll data that acts as your comfort blanket, telling you that everyone agrees with you for 12 weeks until your precious data is catastrophically proven wrong AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN on the night.

The neoliberal bubble is becoming so buoyant and impenetrable that now the only interaction these people consent to having with those outside of it, is to throw out a comment calling people who disagree with them bigots, uneducated, or ‘dangerous’. They quite literally would dance at the death of such people, as Question Time panellist Cat Boyd is pictured doing upon the death of Baroness Thatcher.

Well perhaps it’s time for Neoliberals, the owners of the moral ‘glasshouses’, to have a few stones hurled back at them. I find your sneering contempt despicable, I find your dismissiveness downright childish and I find your obliviousness to your own acts of liberal friendly fire mindblowing.

You have all cried wolf for far too long…

You have insisted on calling normal, honourable and decent people you disagree with and who live lives that you never care or take steps to understand ‘despicable bigots’; then when it counts and the boogeyman of your own invention, Donald J Trump, comes along caricaturing everything that keeps you awake at night, you had nowhere else to go with your outrage.

You have desensitised people over access to transgender bathrooms, breastfeeding in public and the denial of  cake services to homosexual couples. Honest liberals you should be championing like Sam Harris, Majidd Nawaz, Ayan Hersi-Ali and Bill Maher ‘bigots’ are attacked for talking about the problem of Islamism. You fought the wrong battles too many times, as Maher perfectly summed up on his show this week.

When are neoliberals going to wake up and realise the world is going in this direction because they are now living so heavily in their own one.

You can continue to unfriend us on Facebook, you can dismiss us as ‘deplorables’ and you can choose not to follow the ‘right wing press’ on Twitter, but guess what? We will still be here and we will still vote, and all you will achieve is a further narrowing of your bubble.

We’ve been living in your world by your rules for well over a decade, but now your doing a great job of undermining it for us.The Left, you are losing. You are losing the elections, you are losing the referendums.

But hey! At least you never lose an argument right? I am guessing probably not? People agree with you all the time right?

Well ask yourself this, have you ever even courted or entertained someone of a dissenting opinion to you? Have you attempted to learn something about us? Do you care to know what people outside of Islington, or Wivenhoe or Highwoods think about the world? No? Therein lies why you lose.

I could say it more, but Jonathan Pie says it better.

Understand this. Every time you shut us down or comfortably ignore our existence we are happy to shut up and wait until voting day. Neoliberalism needs to engage with us, not cry post-truth politics when you lose. You need to be introspective about your failures, not protest about the consequences. You think you know better? Don’t wheel out Robert De Niro and Jay Z, prove us wrong.