Editor's Blog

Malice in wonderland 2: demonising others and the sociopathic government

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In Part One of this series on CrimeTalk, we observed that facing the reality of cultural decline alongside economic and political disenfranchisement is truly irritating, especially amidst a growingly polarization of wealth. So many turned their anger onto immigrants, foreigners and the EU; a core driver for Brexit whatever the denials. Since May and Johnson created a "hostile environment" for all immigrants, the level of racism and xenophobia in this country has been obscene. But then the Westminster Tory government treats all but its friends as servants, slaves, serfs, plebs and peasants, or just plain irrelevant. Back to the empire: did I say in Part One that you can't turn back time? Well, governments can try; but it won't work.

The murder of George Floyd in the USA blocked the effectiveness of reverting to internal colonialism or brutal autocracy, at least on race and policing. The future begins now, whilst the state plays for time on its guilt. Criminology has to face up fully to the fact that it has taken money from white cat rulers to study the lower classes, the black cats, violent men and gangs - as well as the so-called justice system otherwise known as the maladministration of injustice - with precious little positive effect on racism. It does look at scapegoating in general, often blaming the media for creating folk devils (Cohen 1973, Cohen and Young 1973; but see also Cohen 2001 and Young 2011: 79-80), but the bottom line is that it has never left the terrain of statism or the parameters of state, and so never fully disengaged itself from institutionalized racism, popular prejudice and imperial power. How many criminology centres and departments study crime and injustice in underdeveloped countries? How many offer comparative criminology or even look at other countries' performance? Or colonialism, human rights violations and the murderous treatment of indigenous populations? Or even prejudice, hate crime and racism? Criminology has been a white-cat science. Black cat criminology is emerging and thriving as we speak, reclaiming criminology from the perspective of the people all over the world (see for example, Cuneen and Tauri 2017, Watts 2016, Cain 1996, Bowling 2012, Mahabir 1985, Pryce 1979, Barak 2017, Morley 2019, Sumner 2017 and many more).

Cultural protection via scapegoating others

Protecting our culture, identity and assets comprised the rationale for Conservative scapegoating the wrong target, for stoking the blaming of a relatively innocent partner and neighbour in the EU, and for generally offloading our failures and disgrace onto Others, notably BAME citizens, or at least not protecting them from lethal fires such as Grenfell Towers or the selective CV-19. Racism and xenophobia link Brexit and the virus, and this essy will explore that link.

Labour never fully faced up to the issues round immigration, and still seems not to have grasped the practical issues with the 'free movement of labour'. Practical engagement with reality would have steered us in a constructive direction. But a supine, sometimes rabid and mostly conservative media from 2016-19, combined with a scary and arrogant far left unrealism, fuelled an anti-Corbyn hysteria even amongst Labour voters, some of whom, it seems, want to holiday on Portugal's Algrave beaches without letting Portuguese workers into the UK to pick fruit and vegetables, jobs the English worker won't take, and access health and welfare benefits. English culture became toxic and stupid, or, to be kinder, ideologically confused in a post-imperial miasma. And no-one liked intellectuals or academics any more in this philistine and complacent country; criticism and ensuing guilt is too unnerving during chaos, so there was little listening to rational or scientific resistance to the growth of the far right and its racist Brexitization of the Tory party.

'Immigration', as a generalised censure, was at the heart of the Leave vote in Referendum 2016 and, contrary to many Remainers and Labour members, I would say that censures are always two-sided: there actually is a problem in practice with the idea of the 'free movement of labour' - like the 'free market' it suffers from the fact that nothing is free in this world. But did we debate that? No.

The social censure of unregulated immigration in a post-imperial, or indeed any, economy is not arbitrary criticism; fear of further immigration into the post-imperial UK has its ideological roots in practical working-class reality as well as in Tory anti-welfarism and capitalist protectionism. The key question with 'free' anything is always: who's paying? Working people know this. Not recognising the centrality of immigration to 'the class' or being able to get beyond Blairite political correctness to face it head on, Labour alienated itself from many of its usual voters. Yet a public sector dependent on immigrant and BAME doctors, care workers, teachers, police and nurses was under attack on several fronts. Many an Asian Brit has been told to 'go back home', as if returning to Bolton or Birmingham was an answer to anything. Many of the jobs supposedly taken by second or third generation Brits are still vacant, e.g. in nursing, and Brits continue to love their Indian and Chinese food. Like Dr Goebbels' Entarte Kunst exhibition of 1938, far-right thinking in 2016-19 England caricatured immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers, the soft Left, the avant-garde, the disabled, the mentally ill and of course Marxists as non-human aliens whom fear dictates should be attacked, used for medical or psychological experiments, incarcerated, defeated or at a minimum excluded or institutionalized (see Sumner 1994: 63-6 and ch.5). Johnson won the 2019 election comfortably with a majority of 80. The demons were cast out; in the minds of Brexiters at least.

In my view, people who deny any social roots to this level of anti-immigration feeling, dog-whistle racism and localist xenophobia are out of touch, even the Oxbridge-educated Marxists (see on the other hand the late great sociologist Geoff Pearson's far-sighted essay of 1976 on "paki-bashing"). The English working classes are very concerned with loss of jobs for locals, reductions in their benefits, abuse of benefits by otthers, welfare cuts, excessive taxation despite tax-evasive offshore accounts for hedge fund managers and multinationals (like the FAANG giants, Facebook, Apple etc) escaping much tax at all, and a loss of English identity or a blurring of a clearly defined English culture. Yet they love their Premiership football team with barely a local in the team and many players being black. The team now 'takes the knee' before every game, albeit with no crowd to watch it in these COVID times. Over a third of professional soccer players are black, and nearly half of England's male football World Cup team in 2018, with no complaint from the fans who flock to fill every stadium for most games. So, is Brexit about racist prejudice and xenophobia or about jobs, local pride and identity, or both, or, as alleged by the conservatives, control over our own destiny?

Big capital is global, promiscuous, abstract, distant, inhuman and obsessed with profits. At any time before now, the UK in austerity could be faced with a huge influx of labour whilst our workers experienced declining living conditions and benefits. So the 'Northern red wall', now famous for voting Tory in 2019 instead of their usual Labour, mostly older, and female, voted for the globalizing free marketeers to safeguard their local industry, identity, culture and jobs! Utterly irrational and doomed to fail! Dysfunctional reasoning, like expecting a fish to climb a tree.

Brexit is quite complex in this way. Like any act of self-harming it requires a lack of information, a surplus of propaganda, a lot of low self-esteem, even self-loathing - which we of course do better than anyone, some desperation, much confusion and much disdain for foreign Others in favour of 'our' ugly losers Farage and Johnson. The Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish also cherished their local survival but, with their strong national identities and cultures, and a need for more reliable and loyal economic support than England provides, voted to remain in the EU.

From Vienna to Samara with Boris and Natasha: but will it fly? Icarus, Icarus, give us a wave, Icarus, give us a wave!

Why does this matter to criminology? Brexit touches a key question, which is, to paraphrase John Oliver from Last Week Tonight: how the fuck did that happen? How do we explain mass self-harming - by Leave voters in 2016 and repeated in the 2019 election?

Why was the Tory party "Brexitized" to quote Lord Patten? Brexit must surely be one of the most corrupt and corrupting political processes in English political history. As Oliver said recently in lockdown: 'It's not a good time to be human'. Brexit is the silliest of silly walks (as in Monty Python) led by an upper-class clown, blagger, chancer, proven persistent liar, and failed journalist who, after he chaired Have I got News for You, his colleague on the show, satirist Ian Hislop, said Johnson should "have a fair trial, with a desirable result of him being in prison forever". Politicians are today matters of criminological concern, or should be. Lord Patten, Oxford University Vice-Chancellor, former Tory Party chairman, ex-Governor of Hong Kong, in a Bloomberg interview called the Oxford graduate a "disaster", a persistent liar, "mendacious", "incompetent" and a "huckster") Has criminology ever profiled a problem PM or even PMs in general? Why not? Are politicians superior intellects combined with psychopathy, like project managers, as Cummings said (see below)? Don't we want to know if they come from delinquent subcultures and broken homes? What if PMs and their advisers are genetically challenged or suffer from a serious personality disorder? Do they take psychometric tests before admission to the post? Noting the orange narcissistic disaster in the USA, would that be a smart idea, indeed the bigliest and bestest idea in the history of the known universe??

Johnson is advised and steered by Dominic Cummings, an Oxford history graduate, fluent in Russian and a "career psychopath" (former PM David Cameron's words), the "Machiavel in Downing Street" who once tried to launch an airline from Samara, in Southern Russia, to Vienna, Austria, about 3000km, and it failed to take off. It wouldn't fly. Why we may never know, perhaps because it was utterly pointless and had no takers? Samara-Vienna isn't exactly a routine holiday route, although e-Dreams will do a cheap fare from Vienna to Samara, a city on the Volga, for those needy souls who need to see Stalin's bunker there. That route is surely not going to fly long, although Johnson and Cummings repeatedly seem to want to prove that they can do or say anything, and Johnson is on record as being indifferent to content focussing much more on results whatever their merit or viability.....To adapt a football chant: Icarus, Icarus, give us a wave....Icarus, give us a wave..

Icarus, intoxicated by thinking he could fly, flew too close to the sun, got burnt and died on landing presumably. Johnson and Cummings seem similar. They can't fly either but insist on trying and repeatedly come close to burning. The English billionaires' media and the BBC tend to lionize them as positive exceptions to normal human functioning rather than demonizing them as a pair of sociopaths: English exceptionalism, something we are getting used to hearing under Johnson whose teachers say has always seen himself as exceptional.

"Boris Johnson's failure to release report on Russian election interference is an 'affront to democracy' say opponents"

All Russian relevance to British politics is now denied and suppressed by our duo from the dark side, (Boris) Badenov and Natasha (Cummings), inspired by Bullwinkle J. Trump himself; 'piffle pfaffle pfeffle, too close to the mark, go away, not now, fair enough, move on, I only played tennis with Putin's colleague's wife once, pfeffle pfaffle, and it was for money, let's move on.....no relevance to criminology whatsoever.

Cummings is often portrayed as some kind of Machiavellian genius. Actually anyone like myself, with 40 years' teaching and researching in criminology, sociology and jurisprudence and experience as Head of a Law School and of a School of Sociology, Philosophy, Criminology, Government and Politics, can easily see where he is coming from intellectually, especially after reading the essay by Collini (2020). It seems he believes in an evolutionary anthropology, so beloved by right-wing philosophers that suppose human nature is fixed (thus favouring élites as 'natural leaders' whose 'exceptional' talents take them to the top), that explains change by claiming we 'evolve' like animals in an "order generated without design" that can outstrip any planning policy or intellectual culture. Cummings believes more in unchanging hidden laws rather than the weight of mighty ideas or new perspectives. Neuroscience over humanist models of man; "decentralized coordination via market prices" rather than collectivist forward thinking based on a science of history.

Putting aside the extremely dubious value of a distinction between universal laws and the power of the mind or culture, because it cannot cope with Marx's use of both 'iron laws' and human purposiveness as explanatory or Thucydides on the laws of motive', or indeed science itself. Cummings sounds like Von Hayek, an élitist who sees most people as chimps following the crowd and himself as the visionary who can use science to steer them towards a universally agreed value, without any democratic consultation as to what that value actually is or how he should steer. Confused? No, he is.

This confused thinking really matters to millions, when the government he steers, with Gove and Johnson, uses a eugenics approach to the coronavirus that supposes 'herd immunity' can be established without a vaccination in sight, by allowing a 'natural' cull of weaker sub-sectors, namely, the elderly, the poor, the urban and the BAME, even though it leads to brutally disproportionate death rates amongst those communities - high rates that the government simply cannot dismiss or explain away because they seem to emerge from their own policies, past and present, and not nature. Vaccinations are needed for true herd immunity, if you want to avoid killing half the population first, and science, planning and order are required to produce vaccines. Cummings is indeed confused but he reveres chaos so it is partly chosen; he has little regard for law, the rule of law, and order, all of which he sees as the props of smaller minds.

Folk should by now have seen what Brexit really is: the Etonian/Oxford classicist, Eurosceptic Johnson is a career, fuck-off-all-ye-peasants, professional Tory, lying journalist, post-truth self-aggrandizer who had a fantasy and saw his future emperor role in politicising and weaponising a distracting fable for a mass-market with the reward of serious power and fame....but in need of someone to make it fly in virtual reality, someone who lives in virtual reality, and will tell him what to do. So he found his Dom, an IT-data obsessive who will not tolerate any dissent and who requires his subordinates not to think...a geeky empiricist, a chancer who believes uncritically in 'big data', thinks only he can 'read' it, linked with Cambridge Analytica, a post-truth eugenicist confident in producing big results from that big data, a contemporary historian of the end of history, who can make anything fly (except between Vienna and Samara). Someone who wants to sidestep other politicians and accountability. Was that the only reason demonic Dom was in Russia for 3 years, learning how to fly or was it how to 'control' democracy?

All opposite data and interpreters of data, and interpreters of interpreters, will be either ignored or vilified or ruined by Dom's 'knowledge management' tactics (what happened to 'evolution'?) of lying, deflecting, bullying and the frequent repetition of bullshit. Demonic Dom was never going to leave it to the natural process of politics to get the results that he had actually assumed or wanted ages ago. This 'smart truth', or 'domain assumptions' hiding behind big data, would be reproduced by a media that is still feeling the obligation to output anything 'accredited spokesepersons' say, because they have 'authority' and 'weight', even though their messages may be obvious lies, brazen dissembling, guesswork or pure bullshit. Truth is a mere lifestyle accessory when you engage in professional mind control via old media, social media, opinion polls and lies on buses.

Everything becomes politically steered in this anything-but-evolutionary 'evolutionary psychology' and, as self-imagined masters of the universe, the Johnson-Cummings-Gove macho clique believe anything can fly and any virus can be defeated in a mythic 'war' or taken 'on the chin'. 'Get Brexit done' was Johnson's infantile mantra, repeated ad nauseam - like Cummings, results before principles. Of course we all want results, but only providing their production is ethical, legal, follows best knowledge and practice, and not based on some exceptionalist fantasy of the self and one's capability. Icarus, Icarus, give us a wave.....Icarus give us a wave!

Cummings himself quotes William James’s pronouncement: “When superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce … we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.” It may be that that’s how we should think of Cummings – as “an effective genius”, or, rather, a genius of effectiveness. He is admirably committed to learning from science and to basing policies on evidence in a more than cursory way, but in the end, delivery is the point. “Get x done”, where (we might pseudo-mathematically say) the value of x equals a multiple of results from focus groups plus the square root of whatever appears to favour breakout thinking. (Collini 2020)

There is no time here to discuss the historical links between classics, myths and empire, suffice it to say, if you are unsure what they are, just look at the Parthenon, the Coliseum, any town hall or national institution for the columns and arenas of the classical architecture of power and then ask why Britain dominated India's 400 million for two centuries with only a few thousand troops - the 'civilising mission'? Ask why people attack statues to imperial mass murderers, rapists and plunderers, people who have destroyed whole cultures and even indigenous populations. This is not vandalism but a poor substitute for obtaining apologies, reparations, war tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions.

The élite should not complain about the people pulling down statues, but be grateful it was not worse and respect such idealism. Hopefully, the statues will be just the beginning of a long unwinding of a barbaric historic trail. Johnson says we should preserve our history; what he clearly really means is that we should not explore its hidden side to discover imperial atrocities. He does not at all mean we should teach colonial history in UK schools, so that UK school kids hear about what we did to the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, or the Indians, or the massacres and torture in Kenya and Burma, or the sacking of a democratically elected Labour PM in Australia.

Brexit is a classicist's con, pure bullshit, an old imperial myth, and a malicious one at that; one that was not needed or demanded by UK voters but envisaged in a high Tory mindset. The Tories dreamt it up, like the route between Samara and Vienna, at a time when political diversion and a foreign scapegoat were needed; someone to blame for ever-increasing poverty, fears of excess immigration, the NHS funding deficit, the English identity crisis, the constant erosion of the public sector in Britain by 'austerity' policies, the privatised trains not running on time, and the selling off of national assets to foreign ownership. These were their policies and Brexit was certainly not a conscious plan to conceal their terrible results. They don't plan and they don't see the results as terrible. Ideology is like a dream in this way - Brexit ideology is like a bad dream, a nightmare - an unintended and almost innocent but stupid condensation of multiple sources that conceal the malice and choice, blaming others for the damage we do, turning the world upside down.

An ideologically defined scapegoat and target for a heightened English nationalism in decline, 'Johnny Foreigner' is to blame: that imaginary fool played by Manuel (aka the late Andrew Sachs) in Fawlty Towers, that perceptive and prophetic study of the Brexit racist mindset as displayed by Basil Fawlty (aka John Cleese); parody of the deep-rooted ignorance and malice of English racism. For the uninitiated, see the classic 'I know nothing' sketch. For Manuel, 'he know nothing' (say it in a Spanish accent).

Because the Tories inhabit gilded bat caves, they would not have noticed that the NHS, the social care industry and our fruit and veg industry, and more, depended on the many hard-working immigrants who come into this country with hope, skills and good will; sometimes at our request! Welcome to County Durham, home of Icarus Airways, with flights direct to Barnard Castle, the Cummings family bat-cave where the old bats nurture their belief in the superior intellects provided by genetic inheritance:

Dominic Cummings' father in law's opinions will leave your jaw on the floor. The sort of chap who looks down his nose at everyone. pic.twitter.com/BoR7W9Tc6L Otto English (@Otto_English) May 28, 2020

Criminology needs to grasp the role played by immigration, racism and the state rejection or compulsory sterilization of immigrants in the very construction of societies (see McLaren, 1990, on Canada, and this on the US, also Sumner 1994/2012, ch.2). It makes no sense to study the links between immigration and crime without looking into the histories of colonialism and immigration policy. Both Brexit and our insular response to the coronavirus are coloured by this xenophobia and racism.

Johnson is ex-President of the Oxford Union, a Balliol graduate born in New York, had junior Ministerial posts, was mayor of London, and has a father who was a Tory MP. He may be an unprincipled chancer, but he is also a lifelong Tory, with a belief in his own exceptionalism. He plays to win and has won a few Pyrrhic victories. His Brexit is a gamble and instinct, like Cummings sensing with his intuitive grasp of human evolution that Samara will become the next Blackpool for the Viennese. Turning down EU assistance with ventilators and PPE, despite this costing UK lives, then lying about it at press briefings: Icarus, Icarus, give us a wave; Icarus, give us a wave. Only 1.9 million deaths to go before eclipsing the siege of Stalingrad...which was on the other side of the Volga....

Resistance and collusion

So, have we Brits been conned by people who care nothing for being bound by laws or truth? I haven't been, so maybe millions of others haven't either - certainly not the 48% Remainers who soon became the 53% in 2019 and are now the 60% according to polls. Brexit may look like a far-right cock-up foisted onto a gullible British public by half-cut Tory liars. But, was it? And was that all it was? Was the public gullible? I'm always inclined to believe that workers have more commonsense than company directors, and there is a study of their respective economic forecasting somewhere, proving that (reference to follow). Even despite psychotic levels of media vilification of Jeremy Corbyn, a veritable epidemic of demonization, and a Eurosceptic leading a Europhile party sitting on the fence about Brexit, Corbyn led the Labour Party to 32% of the vote (10.2 million) on a radical economic programme, renouncing austerity, resurrecting the public sector and renewing the social contract - and bringing us into line with other Northern European social democracies. This was not a sign of public gullibility.

What would have happened if Corbyn had not seemed so ambiguous on Brexit, if he'd resisted the fantasy of broadband nationalisation just yet, or ludicrously low (for Southerners anyway) inheritance tax levels, if he'd deigned to work with and even consult successul Labour mayors instead of ignoring them, if he'd dealt with the anti-semitism issue in his party, if he'd avoided this election becoming a Brexit election, and above all met the working class halfway on immigration. Labour failed to grasp the grass-roots 'commonsense', the attempted self-protection that inspired support for Brexit, the perverse thing that made otherwise astute workers vote for Nigel Farage and UKIP. It never understood that the 2016 Referendum vote was the 'fuck-off' vote to all politicians who took the working classes for granted. Maybe not consciously, but the zeitgeist, the collective unconsciousness was rejecting 4 decades of national mismanagement, autocratic snobbery, not taking workers' views seriously, and nanny-statism. 'We'd rather risk self-harm than do what you wankers want' is a truly British wisdom, a true indicator of our merit and our class society; closely followed by 'we hate do-gooders because we want to be self-reliant and they rarely do good' (yes, I've lived in Cleethorpes and the Grimsby area). Self-harming has also been frequent during the coronavirus lockdown; we are ready to feel doomed.

The EU Withdrawal Agreement was actually rejected by 3 of the 4 UK Parliaments. Most people by the end of 2019 wanted at least a second Referendum or no Brexit at all, as evidenced by the voting patterns in the 2019 election; the opinion polls showed 53-47% against Brexit for that year; and 75% of new voters (youth) rejected Brexit. So it has little future beyond the life of this government; a bit like the Samara-Vienna return trip, come to think of it. Recent polls now have around 60% rejecting Brexit. It is hardly a shing example of the success of authoritarian populism and media management techniques based on 'smart data'. It looks like we don't want Brexit now we know more of what is involved, so it is more an example of the stupidity of not consulting properly on important issues, of sustained lying and truth concealment. Indeed, were it not for the anachronistic and dysfunctional first-past-the-post voting system a Labour-led coalition would now be in power with about 50% of the vote. Electoral reform now looks an obvious need to avoid the infantile results of adversarial party or playground politics. Focussed and fully funded regional governance in a multi-party devolved state with proportional representation may not sell to Left or Right in government, but it is time for change to something like that. Neither Brexit nor this pandemic should cause so much havoc ever again.

Many only voted for the Tories in the 2019 election because they could not face voting for Corbyn, who got censured nationally as a "Marxist' folk devil by the media; 'Marxist' being curiously and abstractly defined, because several of his policies have now been actioned or promised by the present Conservative government. Does the media use of "Marxist' have any meaning any more? Isn't it just plain hatred of something unspecified, like the unknown or suspicious? A bit like stop and search? The media, overall, represented the views and fears of the wealthy London and the South-East which were at times extraordinarily rabid. The North and the Other is still distilled in Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Hollyoaks and Mrs Brown's Boys, our soaps; their perspectives never set Southern agendas. Can you imagine Newsnight presented by Paul Mason? It can't happen yet in this class-ridden miasma.

So with Boris Badenov in the cockpit in 2020, we fastened our seat-belts and began our descent plummeting into Chaos and Tragedy, both twinned with Samara. It left thousands dead, at least 50,000 and counting, mostly dying earlier than they should have, including 20,000 or so in care homes. BAME people suffered disproportionately, along with the elderly. The only consolation is that lockdown meant a dramatic drop in air pollution due to reduced driving, so we can expect there not to be 29,000 deaths this year due to particulates in the air. The virus went viral and has been an atrocity, and the government was, obviously to all, too slow to lockdown, very hampered by having removed regional health authorities earlier, too complacent about neglected and out-of-date PPE stocks, too ignorant of the need for popular trust, and disabled by having privatised so much of the NHS since 2010. Johnson now can only blame others for what happened, before the lawsuits come, and his whole Cabinet denies responsibility before they are sacked. The only issue now is whether the Hillsborough 1989 enquries will complete before the Grenfell Towers and the CV19 public enquiries begin. We will probably all be dead before this government recognizes its lethal errors or permits them to be officially proven. The cover-up is still in full flow.

Cummings does not believe in sustained planning ahead nor does he share the value of being held legally responsible for his actions. Criminologists may dislike my critique but how many of them study environmental or health crimes, or indeed the accompanying information crimes? How many use Phil Scraton's speaking truth to power in Hillsborough: the Truth (the 4th edition) or Pearce and Tombs' incisive study of the Bhopal chemical disaster Flowers at the Altar of Power and Profit (2012) in their teaching?

Political pathology, sociopaths in government and a nasty virus for a nasty party

Most of those who will be most affected by Brexit, our children, our students, are very much against it, and the government has no plan, or idea how, to look after or deal with at least 48% of the population (the Remain voters, now around 60%) post-Brexit. Similarly, in their handling of the CV-19 pandemic, the government appears not to give a flying 4x about there now being more excess deaths than in the Blitz. They have dug a deep hole for themselves and just keep digging. There is never an apology or regret for their errors; no doubt to avoid legal liability in future lawsuits. They have 're-opened' the society too soon, too broadly and too ineptly; which will sustain this first 'wave' let alone bring on the 'second wave' in specific workplaces. Their inability to send clear messages on masks, social distancing and outdoor activities is itself a symptom of pathology. Indeed, the whole Cabinet appears to be stuffed with sociopaths (see Healthline for the DSM-5 definition, that of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic manual, compiled by hundreds of experts). Sociopathy is defined therein as:

"To receive a diagnosis of ASPD, someone must be older than 18. Their behaviors must show a pattern of at least three of the following seven traits:

Doesn’t respect social norms or laws. They consistently break laws or overstep social boundaries.
Lies, deceives others, uses false identities or nicknames, and uses others for personal gain.
Doesn’t make any long-term plans. They also often behave without thinking of consequences.
Shows aggressive or aggravated behavior. They consistently get into fights or physically harm others.
Doesn’t consider their own safety or the safety of others.
Doesn't follow up on personal or professional responsibilities. This can include repeatedly being late to work or not paying bills on time.
Doesn’t feel guilt or remorse for having harmed or mistreated others."

Well, several Cabinet members seem to show all 7 symptoms! Most of us oldies have never seen a more incompetent government; not to mention that it is a Brexit-obsessed and diverted, highly ideological junta that is clearly not capable of the ludicrous levels of micro-management it has resorted to, having impoverished, disabled and restricted the local governments closer to the action. Taking on so much with so little. Stupidity is the word coming to mind but Waller's exploration (2002) of the psychology of Nazi leaders found that they were all high-functioning intellectual types, although he seems unaware of the new evidence (Ohler 2016) suggesting they were all high on cocaine, pervitin and other such for most of the war.

In short, whether it is a special kind of stupidity, a rigid adherence to an antiquated ideology, a stupendously corrupt plan to make fortunes for themselves, or just a massive Pervitin overdose, the present Westminster government has shocked even its supporters with its level of sociopathy. It is sick, and heading towards the fascism of Germany in the 1930's. A Brexit obsession, extreme OCD, and a complete inability or refusal to plan anything, even Brexit, combine to form an archaic reversion to an imperial past rooted in élitist arrogance, condescension and 'let's wing it' attitude towards 'the herd'; a sloppy search to resurrect the glory of the English motherland by crashing the 'plane in a foreign land. Other countries in the UK of course were shamefully disrespected, treated rudely and by-passed in the process, and may declare UDI soon. Consultation, democracy, levels and principles of governance, even law now fall by the wayside as the English Tory junta does what it wants and when it wants dispensing largesse (our money) to its friends as it goes; following the Cummings philosophy of rule by self-defined genius, flying through the chaos and fog it itself creates, philospher-kings without much philosophy or a king or a flight path. As Monbiot put it today, "When secret coronavirus contracts are awarded without competition, it's deadly serious".

Collini's essay explains the Cummings method in more detail but essentially it is all about results, not theory. It is instrumentalist in terms of political philosophy: do what you have to do in order to reach your goals. Yes, that old Stalinist 'ends justifies the means' attitude, so passé in an age where we see the value of good process and reach out to review, compare, retain and constantly re-define our values. Marcus Rashford got his honorary doctorate today for caring about feeding hungry poor kids, and he still scores goals for United: where's Cummings' honorary anything and what are his goals? So, a cull of the elderly with 'underlying medical conditions' (and over 65 we've all got those)? Cummings: who cares as long as we build a total resistance to the virus for all time, the bigliest and bestest community safety net in the history of several galaxies? Unless it's his parents or children and then he cares: law does not apply to him, the master project manager who breaks lockdown to drive 200 miles away and then tests his eyesight with child in the back seat. Similarly, what about the destruction of huge chunks of the economy to push through a no-deal Brexit that nobody voted for or has been able to vote against [note: the majority of MPs never wanted Brexit at all]? Cummings' nihilism states this is merely market efficiency rooting out weak businesses and improving our economy and regaining control; not really giving all the control to distant, high-cost and unreliable foreign trade partners, such as the USA and Australia.

The deep problem here is that all instrumentalist politics contains implicit theory that it fails to tell us about; what exactly are the 'ends'? Does Cummings have an ideal society, a goal to aim at? Does Johnson? Or do Badenov and Natasha just do what the American moose, Bullwinkle. wants? We could suppose that the purpose of society, and of life itself, is to maximise the benefit for the many from the ways we associate, but we can see immediately in any such formulation that there are many issues that need proper discussion in any democracy. Do we really want benefit for the many, or just the Oxbridge graduates? What is benefit today anyway? What is healthy? Don't we all die anyway so is this just just a timing change for the over-65's? Don't we have a moral obligation to forewarn them and do we really have the power not to ask their permission? What is power and how should it be restricted or are we to return to a pre-Magna Carta situation? What is a society? Doesn't data need interpretation, and isn't even the agreed element be subject to different purposes? Isn't science constituted by debate and parameters rather than consensus by fiat, and so is there no such thing as "the science", except perhaps in Russia or North Korea and Brexiter/Government-Virus thinking?

To reply to all these profound questions with 'well, we had a referendum and after a biassed media campaign and our multiple lies, without much deep debate, 52% voted to Leave' would simply not cut it in a second-year university seminar in the social sciences. It is nonsense and poor thinking. At a minimum, using the voting methods of Strictly Come Dancing, namely a media-steered referendum, a one-off plebiscite of a massaged public opinion, to decide a matter of historic importance and monumental complexity is childish and suspicious, oh and impossible.....That Referendum vote could not fly for long sociologically speaking.

At a minimum, if we were interested in truth, there should have been a second referendum on the final exit deal, when people had more information on what was involved. At another minimum, if we were trying to avoid chaos and self-destruction, we would need a very carefully constructed agreement with the EU on many difficult and contested business, political, cultural and legal questions - which would take 7 years at least to resolve. Playground dispute resolution methods, bullying the EU and refusing to accept the massive costs of leaving is not exactly professional. Indeed, it appears to be the tactics of the conman, Boris Badenov. Imagining one can just up and leave such a complex social organization in the twenty-first century without a very detailed set of agreements about content and procedure is infantile and an image dragged from a cartoon.

Such an imagination itself is a wonder of the world, only feasible in the mind of the rich, spoilt and born-to-rule who despise lesser mortals, an idiocy of the élite graduate - I lectured and supervised in Cambridge from 1977 for 18 years, I know that mindset and that evil Badenov grin - malice in wonderland. Not clever malice just 'dumb but de luxe, deliciously, deliciously deranged', to quote that poetic master John Cooper Clarke (from "Psycle Sluts", Disguise in Love album 1978).

One final point: hardly anyone in a normal UK university would or did vote for Brexit, not professors, not lecturers and not students, and no-one in the social sciences - so shouldn't the fact that the most knowledgeable and expert section of the wider population opposes Brexit be taken into consideration as a clue? No, is the Cummings answer: ' we pick our own experts' and, he actually said, he wanted "weirdos" as assistants. This became true again with the virus - the government cherry-picked its experts, its science and in the end often ignored all science in favour of political considerations. Just like Bullwinkle J. Trump; and how many dead is he responsible for by only being concerned about his re-election?

Most criminology, a statist multidisciplinary, multi-billion dollar industry feeding off the backs of criminalizations (see Christie 2000), has little in its repertoire, as yet, to deal with this. Critical criminology can and, if developed, must now become the dominant paradigm, must becomea people's criminology that understands why and how crime is so political, why the world is upside down with rich criminals and their kids in power and their victims in the gutter or the desert. We must document and explain why states criminalise and abuse victims whilst giving medals and titles to the land-grabbers, corrupts, chisellers, robbers and blaggers that con, bully, kill and steal their way to wealth and power, fame and fortune.

To enable Brexit and excess death by virus, indifference, ignorance, passivity and despair had combined with, and been conned by, imperial arrogance, élite lies and eugenic ideology. Northern disillusionment and fatigue danced with Southern fantasy in an ugly pas-de-deux, a strychnene Strictly, to form a venomous no-deal Brexit that will worsen the coming economic disaster considerably and for years to come. No one had any plan for the disappointed loser millions, or half the population as they were better known 4 years ago; now more like two-thirds, many of whom will lose their jobs and businesses. They just disappear from Strictly, don't they? But where to? Suicide and declining welfare benefits? Or to civil unrest and anti-state violence? Grim reapers of the world please don't unite! For sure, the sociopathic govenment won't notice, but I have just noticed that John Crace has seen the sociopathy, like so many others increasingly do!

Part 3, Malice in Wonderland 3, on self-harming, follows here

References

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Sumner, C.S. (1994/2012) The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary. Buckingham: Open UP, and North Somercotes: CrimeTalk Books.

Sumner, C.S. (2017) "Criminology through the looking-glass". In: A. Amatrudo & Rauxloh, R.E. [eds.] Law in Popular Belief: Myth and Reality. Manchester UP, pp.15-29.

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Collini, S. (2020) "Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings", The Guardian, 6 February 2020.

Written by Colin Sumner, Editor of CrimeTalk, former professor of criminology, law and sociology. Not a member of any political party, merely a depressed observer.

Do also read "No lie off limits for Boris Johnson" by John Crace, 24 March 2021, The Guardian. As he said:

"How much longer can this go on? Previous prime ministers have at least been on nodding terms with the truth, but Boris Johnson is completely without shame. Without conscience. A sociopath for whom no lie is off limits, either in his public or his private life. What counts is reality as he would like it to be."