Spiral

In the beginning, something happens – a banking crisis perhaps – which makes a lot of people poorer. So, well you could fix the problem – by regulating the financial system properly for instance – and accept that some of it was because of your own stupidity and greed – the housing market isn't a machine out of which money pours for ever, it turns out. But understanding that require some basic numeracy, and no-one really wants to take the blame for their own misfortune anyway: it's always easier to blame someone else.

So you don't: instead you lie to yourself and to everyone else. It's not your fault, you lie, it's someone else's fault: foreigners and globalisation are to blame. You decide you want fewer foreigners so you can clean your own loos and wipe the bottoms of the elderly as you've always wanted to, and to reduce the supply of cheap foreign goods so you can pay more for good English goods, the way your parents & grandparents once did in the glorious days of the empire. It's those European liberals that are causing the problem, some of them in league with the Chinese.

So you close your borders and start discouraging the foreigners (only discouraging, of course: no-one should be beating them up, at least not while anyone is watching). And suddenly you find that wiping the bottoms of very old people is not the paradise you were led to believe, and that paying more for English goods that, somehow, aren't as good as you thought they would be is not such an attractive idea after all. Oh dear: now you are even poorer.

But you know why, now: it's those foreigners, isn't it? It can't be your fault. Some of those foreigners still live here, don't they? We should get rid of them (and now it is OK to beat them up, even while people are watching; in fact it makes quite good TV, don't you think?). And so you force out more people. And so you get poorer again, and the diet of potatoes and overcooked cabbage with grey meat is really getting a bit boring now.

Well, the foreigners have all gone (only a relatively small number were killed in the purges, they say, and they're just foreigners, after all, not proper English people), and the borders are closed: even if anyone wanted to come back, they can't. But it's not your fault, no: it's never your fault. And there are still people living here who, really, are not quite English – if they are even, really, people at all. You know the ones: the Jews, the Gypsies, black people, yellow people people who are, you know, different, with their rainbows and their good music. It's their fault: they should go home or, since they say England is their home (what a silly idea: England is for the good white English folk, not these half-humans) then at least away – to camps, perhaps. The good honest poor folk can have their homes: or the party of course, yes that's better: Boris, Jacob, Priti and Dominic need some more houses, of course they do.

And still you get poorer. And the floods and droughts are every year now, and the crops are starting to fail, even the cabbage, and the meat is greyer than ever, after being quite tasty for a bit after the last purge, which is odd. This can't possibly be because of that imaginary liberal elite scientific climate-change thing the globalist Europeans and their agents were so keen on fixing, of course: no, it's something they're doing – something in the water, or the air perhaps. It's the scientists and the liberals with their endless patronising expertise and their liberal science and elite facts – they're in league with the foreigners and the Gypsies and the Jews – they're poisoning the water and the crops and altering the weather – away with them to the camps. Perhaps the meat will be better again, for a while.

It is, after all, never your fault.