Another chapter in the slow death of politics … The public has lost faith in Left and Right – and it's hard to see how it can be recovered … Apathy rules: the late Philip Gould compared politicians to footballers playing in an empty stadium because the spectators have lost interest and gone home. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: Politics are the lifeblood of nationhood.

Free-Market Analysis: Another startling article in the UK Telegraph, this one from columnist Sue Cameron.

There's no dominant social theme we can determine directly from this brutal assessment of regulatory democracy. Are the larger powers behind the British Empire contemplating a new kind of government? Is this article idiosyncratic or is it part of a larger meme?

We are well aware that the target of the powers-that-be continues to be world government – as best we can tell, anyway. Cameron's article doesn't advance world government or any government and may be sparked by a new book that she mentions in the article, Philip Gould – An Unfinished Life.

The book is about how British political analyst Philip Gould shook up the Labour party by modernizing it. Of course, Cameron didn't need to write about the book necessarily so we are still left with questions about how such an incendiary article could appear so prominently and at such length.

Since her brief at the Telegraph involves covering politics as a columnist, we can interpret this perhaps as an aberration, a yelp of frustration over the way her "beat" is headed. In any event, the article presents us with many salient points, especially in light of upcoming US elections. It reminds us that many US political issues and problems are shared by Britain.

Here's more:

The late Philip Gould, Labour's brilliant political strategist, used to compare politicians to footballers playing in empty stadiums: the spectators have all lost interest and gone home. A new book out this week shows how Gould, the first man to make systematic use of focus groups and the first to use the term New Labour, managed not only to breathe life into Labour but also to save the Conservative Party …

Yet the book also chronicles what is surely the slow death of politics as we have known it and the impotence of our political leaders to halt the decline. Gould recognised that voters, whose party allegiances were once firmly based on class, were becoming less ideological, more aspirational and much more fickle. They were changing, but the politicians were not.

The battle to force change on the major parties was one of attrition. In the book, uber-moderniser Lord Mandelson talks of how he designed a new batch of Labour membership cards and "forgot" to include Clause IV – Labour's historic commitment to nationalise just about everything. The party dinosaurs ordered the cards to be pulped and reprinted with the magic words …

As political parties continue to shrivel, politicians themselves are acutely aware of the system failing. As David Miliband notes: "While there has been a lot of talk about the radical wave of democratisation in the Middle East, there has not been much reflection on the sense of disempowerment that people feel in Western countries – not just from the political process but from key decisions that affect their lives."

All our politicians are struggling to find answers. They are losing power to the markets, to the big global corporations, to the emerging economies and to the media, notably to the social media made possible by new technology … It is hard to see how our politics is going to be revived.

You see? This is pretty gloomy stuff, and deservedly so. The problems faced by Western democracies are indeed generated by an electorate that feels powerless. But the powerlessness is REAL. Democracies in the West have increasingly been exposed as a sham by what we call the Internet Reformation.

A combination of impending depression, expanding militarism and regulatory authoritarianism is no doubt responsible for the sentiments being enunciated here.

What is worth pondering at length – and we do ponder it – is why those behind these trends are propagating them. If those at the top of Western society want to cause a social explosion they couldn't go about it a better way.

In fact, there are explosions taking place throughout Europe and soon they will spread to the US as well, we figure. In Europe, the current violence has been sparked by the misguided policy of austerity.

To avoid the blowup of Southern Europe, one would have to undo a string of "mistakes," including the expansion of European power and the current straightjacket of monetary policy.

If European PIGS could simply devalue, then the pain would be spread throughout society and soon be forgotten about. But this option has been "precluded" by an obsession with European unity.

European unity, of course, will only cause disunity in the end, as it already is doing. Not only that but the EU is an increasingly authoritarian enterprise itself, with plans for continent-wide wiretapping as a matter of course along with increased militarism and general statist expansion.

All around the world, as a matter of fact, populations are reeling from regulation, militarism and economic decay. It is like an invisible plague – and our impression (as we regularly report) is that this state of affairs is far from coincidental.

There are forces that want to create world government and are assiduously trying to accomplish this by destabilizing current regimes. Sound too conspiratorial, dear reader? Is all that is occurring truly accidental?

The idea is to create the maximum amount of chaos apparently in order to begin to migrate more fully to global government. We have no idea exactly how this will come about but if people are made miserable enough, presumably they will welcome any antidote, even a bigger political system.

Within this context, we are not surprised that people are losing faith in "democracy" (whatever that is supposed to be). This faith is being relentlessly stripped from them, seemingly on purpose.

We only wish we were more optimistic about what will be proposed next …