Pre-revolutionary Britain?

Could the pre-conditions for revolutionary uprising be getting so worrying that the Beeb bosses feel the need to start propagandising against it?

Brown this morning is given lead-story reportage of his babbling about 'success' in Af-Pak. He's even quoted as talking about 'patriotism' (famously "the last refuge of the scoundrel").

With near 70% of Brits opposed to the USuk aggression there; with presumably some similar large majority still smarting about the pigs-at-the-trough (apologies to actual pigs) MP-expenses racket; with people -- my immediate neighbour for one -- becoming desperate at the lack of paid work, the draining away of their savings and the piling up of debts; and on and on -- you have to imagine that the steam pressure from the commons is building up steadily.

Seems to me that there has been a marked increase lately in ridiculous parades of military simpletons in desert-camo gear through the streets of various towns (no wonder all the little boys, and the over-grown boys who do 'sport' fishing and shooting, are all wearing it these days -- in wet, green Britain, for gods-sake! Together with that arch-symbol of US-worship, the base-ball cap).

There seems also to be an upsurge of media-images of these damnfool parades, with invariable shots of crowds of Union Jack wavers lining the streets -- entirely spontaneously, of course. Bit like that 'spontaneous' demonstration of joy by 'thousands' of Iraqis as US troops pulled down SH's statue in Baghdad.

And then there was that odd counter-demo by a handful of alleged 'Muslims', also in melodramatic fancy dress, at one of the early parades in -- where? -- Luton? Somewhere in Essex? South-East England anyway, where English-empire jingoism is traditionally at its most intense. Quite a stick in the hornets' nest that was. 'Scum' was one of the words being thrown about by the worst of the hacks -- just quoting comments by members of the public, of course; that same public of whom more than two-thirds are opposed to the aggression....

We can take it for granted that if there is indeed a build up of proto-revolutionary pressure in the Brit populace, we shan't be told by the corporate media until it's no longer ignorable. So how would we know about it, apart from anecdotal evidence from our own neighbourhoods, and of course by the increasing appearance of this kind of high-profile 'patriotism' bilge?

The BNP is making a mini bit of comic-opera headway too, and getting completely disproportionate attention from the corporate hacks for it.

But of course I'm just being fanciful. We all have it built in to our deepest levels of whole-life conditioning that such Third-Reich style melodramatic propaganda manipulations just couldn't happen in staid, mild, easy-going Britain, could they?

And as for false-flag operations........ oh really, come on!

Meantime, in the real world behind the indescribably-ridiculous jingo-screen, Britain's collapsing wealth continues it's headlong rush towards collision with relentlessly-rising food, commodity and energy prices; the old-order economists, pocket-pols and captains of industry are clueless about how to deal with the new epoch of permanent global scarcity; and the hopeless, already-lost, unadmitted resource-war in Central Asia begins its squalid endgame, still haemorrhaging blood and treasure all the while as it crashes.

If you were an English-empire gic, or one of their leading pocket-pols or editor-hacks, what would you do to try to damp down the grassroots discontent, if not 'put out more flags'? A certain weary inevitability about it all, isn't there.

Rhisiart Gwilym, Medialens