Mitt Romney and George Osborne: Proof of an alien communist conspiracy sent to foment a worldwide revolution?[i]

Although I have no proof to support the assertions I am about to make,[ii] this article will argue that the leaders of the world’s conservative parties (and their fellow travellers in the global uprising that has become known as “The One Per Cent”[iii]) have been subject, over many decades, to infiltration by a cadre of alien communists. I want to claim, without much justification, that a group of long-term sleeper agents, now established in positions of influence, have been activated by their alien overlords in a concerted attempt to change the course of human history.

The goal of this (extremely unlikely) conspiracy is nothing less than a worldwide communist revolution and the creation of a single world state.

In 1978 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm published the essay “The Forward March of Labour Halted” in Marxism Today. It identified structural divisions in the British labour movement that, Hobsbawn believed, undermined the prospects for further advancement of the social democratic project. In the depths of the 70’s global economic crisis, with capitalism retrenching and governments struggling with tighter budgets, the collectivist foundations of the post-war social democratic settlement were being undermined and the benefits of state solutions to societal problems were becoming harder to identify and communicate.[iv] In these circumstances the growing technical/supervisory class and the better-paid, largely unionised, “labour aristocracy” could be peeled away from the rest of the labour movement – who were poorer, under or unemployed and far less likely to be union members. This split would break the power of British unions and shatter the prospects for the British democratic socialist project.

Thatcher’s Conservative Party would spend the next decade proving the prescience of Hobsbawm’s analysis.

The Tory hegemony of the 80s and 90s was contingent upon the support of the “C2s”[v] – just those people Hobsbawm identified – who had become disillusioned with collective/statist policies. Thatcher offered an alternative individualist ideology and sweeteners – council house sales, ending the closed shop, widespread share ownership, income tax cuts and more – that were designed to bolster this group’s attachment to her project.

There are many similarities between our current circumstances and those that prevailed in the late 1970s but there are also significant differences. The economic crisis we face is even worse, the pressure on the welfare state is even more profound and we have seen an even more relentless ideological attack on collective responses to social problems. But the differences are not just those of scale.

The biggest difference lies in the response of conservatives.

Far from enlisting elements of the working class and putting in place policies to entice them into a broad-based alliance, this government is pursuing a narrow agenda of bolstering the position of the wealthiest minority, “The One Per Cent”, at the expense of the rest. Ed Milliband’s “squeezed middle” is precisely that group of workers who once formed the vanguard of the Thatcher revolution, but Cameron and Osborne have no interest in their concerns. Today’s right – not just in the British Conservative Party but in America’s Republicans and amongst speculators, businessmen and think tanks around the world – is pursuing a strategy of polarization. They are treading a path that will widen and deepen the economic and cultural gulf between a tiny, super-wealthy, elite and the rest of us and they appear to have no concern for the suffering, frustration and anger this polarisation will cause. The middle is not just being squeezed, it is having the very life throttled from it.

And this leads me to the suspicion that there is something strange going on and that the modern right may not be what it first seems.

Welfare states were not created because the ruling class of Twentieth Century capitalist nations spontaneously developed a conscience. On the contrary, every advance had to be wrung from them and concessions were made to organised labour in the shadow of revolutions that raised genuine fears that the existing social orders might be swept away by an angry popular uprisings. For all the horrors and failures of fascist and soviet systems, their existence certainly served to focus the attention of Western governments on their own working class. At least part of the motivation of those who reluctantly surrendered ground was that the alternative was far worse. The terrors that came with dictatorships in Russia and Germany (and many other nations) were, and remain, warnings that the capitalist state dare not allow its working class to become desperate. Welfare states were both safety nets and mechanisms to release social pressure.

There is no secret knowledge here. These lessons were burned across the globe. No one, especially no one with the privileged educations of those running the modern Conservative Party, can fail to be aware of that history. What, then, can it mean if they then chose to ignore these bloodily learned lessons?[vi]

Who stands to gain most if the welfare state is destroyed?

It isn’t the rich – statistics show that, for all the benefits of the NHS and universal education, period the rich retained and even extended their grip on the wealth and resources available to our nation. Only one post-war British government ever successfully managed the economy in a way that allowed them to use the tax system to transfer wealth from the richest to the poor[vii] and even that wasn’t enough to prevent the very richest accelerating away from the rest of us. The real victims of the social democratic advance were the communists and far left who, as much of the working class enjoyed greater physical comfort, lost that influence they had exercised during the interwar years and so slid into irrelevance.

So who benefits if society reverts to a more polarised state?

Obviously[viii] it is the communists. When conflict between the classes becomes sharper it reignites the currently dormant possibility that the working class will again look for solutions in extremism. But why would George Osborne, or other apparent right wingers, pursues policies that will benefit communists? There is surely only one reasonable answer: Osborne and his cronies would hardly be the first Old Etonians/Oxford alumni to have hidden their real ideological attachments in order to infiltrate the upper echelons of British state for the sake of an outside power.

This infiltration goes beyond just the current Conservative cabinet because, if anything, the American Republicans are even more strident in their class war rhetoric. The likes of Mitt Romney, the man most likely to be Republican presidential candidate, can blithely state he’s not concerned about the very poor, and he’s the only candidate the American right can muster who they think might appeal to the shrinking middle ground. It may seem unlikely that so many Republicans would be closet communists, but what better target for a group serious about changing Western politics? And what better cover could there be for a serious infiltration unit?

So, having established that many of today’s leading conservatives must be secret communists,[ix] why must they also be aliens?

Well I could suggest simply looking at them, but that would be a cruel personal jibe and I hope to rise above such things.[x]

However, having established there is some communist conspiracy at work, we know that these can’t be humans because no one on Earth really believes in communism any more – certainly not anyone with the resources and cunning necessary to plan such a vast conspiracy – and we can postulate that all aliens capable of coming to Earth must be communists.

Like Iain M Banks’s[xi] Culture, any advanced society capable of harnessing the resources necessary to cross interstellar space must be capable of the efficient, rational organisation of their economy. And since we’ve recently witnessed, to our considerable cost, the inherent instability of a market-dependent economic system and its chaotic tendency to deliver recurring, devastating crises, we must assume that an efficient, rational economy is one based on collective and cooperative principles.

So space-going aliens must be communist.

And, if the idea of the Culture’s contact division (the secretive agency that meddles in the development of backward cultures to ensure that they mature into civilised members of a galactic community) can occur to the (probably) feeble simian brain of a human like Banks then it must be possible that an advanced alien race could come up with the same idea.

So the notion of alien intervention is not inconceivable.

But what is their plan? Well Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has suggested that a fake alien invasion and a subsequent world-wide effort to defend our planet might be the quickest way out of the current economic disaster. Krugman may be part of the conspiracy, but even if he is not he may have identified a core ingredient of the alien’s agenda.

First the aliens infiltrate the ruling class of the most powerful nations in the world.

Then they create the conditions for worldwide communist revolution by crashing the economy and delaying the recovery though plainly stupid social and economic policies.

Then the aliens arrive in great ships over the major cities and, in their final act as our leaders, the infiltrators conduct a phony war. They invest vast sums of real money, reinvigorating our economy, unleashing a new era of scientific innovation, encouraging a new respect for the benefits of cooperative action and re-establishing a sense of social solidarity but not actually, you know, killing anyone.[xii]

In the aftermath of the war, out of shared suffering and collective triumph, the people of the world resolve to build a better society, a world fit for heroes, and to never repeat the mistakes of the past.

The aliens, convinced that we are now fit to join the great galactic soviet, reveal themselves to the world and begin our formal period of induction. We all live happily ever after, the aliens fix the global warming thing, end poverty and prejudice, show us how to build spaceships and it’s just like Star Trek but without the unfortunate tendency for every encounter with an alien race to devolve into a punch-up.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s all preposterous. There’s not a shred of real evidence. He’s made it all up.[xiii]

But what’s the alternative?

That right wing politicians, businessmen and academics have, spontaneously, taken leave of their senses and embarked on a programme that is insanely stupid and terribly dangerous?

That can’t be right. They can’t be that wrongheaded.

It must be a devilishly cunning piece of misdirection. It must be an alien conspiracy.

And look at them! They can’t be human.[xiv]