Kiss Goodbye to Planes Trains and Automobiles
One by one the escape routes are being closed. It's now official government policy to crush the ordinary motorist into giving up. For millions whose jobs and businesses depend on driving, it's literally the end of the road. At the same time 'transport unions' have brought the train network to a halt. Work from home, anyone? Even if, despite all this, you somehow made it to an airport, unless you're in business-class there's every chance you'd find your luggage had vanished, your flight was cancelled, or an unexplained delay will leave you sleeping on the floor among the litter.
Whether it's the unions, the airlines or the politopaths, the message is the same: pay up or stay put, sucker.
Some of us -rather a lot, I suspect- never quite saw the virtue in standing still when life goes wrong. When things blew up in your face or simply ran out of steam you had two choices: wipe the mud off your cheeks and press on, or get out of Dodge and reboot. Ours was an era of rolling stones; a generation of beavers eager to hit the road. It wasn't all about holidays, either.
DRIVEN TO WORK
If home-town wasn't working you tried your luck a new town, a new country; Europe was only a ferryboat away. You could buy a decent used car in Woolwich for £100 and by the time it died in Rome or Barcelona you knew how to drive, hustle for work, avoid two-legged sharks and order breakfast in three languages. That's what free people could do, and a lot did.
Airports and hotels were run for the convenience of travellers, not government data-collectors. You took the cross-channel trip in a beat-up van you borrowed yesterday and slept in it. You could head for the coast; roll up at a cafe in the south of France, guzzle bread and wine, call yourself Johnny Ringo, take a job digging holes for a Turkish property-developer -cash in hand.
Nobody knew or cared who you really were; there was always room for useful people. Nobody could phone you or find you if that's what you wished and 'anonymous' was not a dirty word. And if you returned after a month or three years, Britain was just where you'd left it and maybe this time you'd check out Bristol, London, Cornwall, perhaps even Wales...
RIGHT TO ROAM
It's not subtle. The controlled demolition of
freedom to travel has begun, right in our faces. It's a Communist classic from the
Cold War. Simply make travelling (1) crippingly expensive and then (2)
hopelessly unreliable, and hey presto, going from A to B becomes a privilege
instead of a right. With no car you're at the mercy of corporations to
whom little people will never matter. In the New Third World, when you
finally get a ticket to visit your dying mother and by a miracle the coach actually
turns up, you will clutch the driver's arm mumbling god bless you like some grubby peasant in 1950's Siberia.
Do not forget how the two covid years rebranded travel as a gift reserved for well-behaved servants of the State. Repeated lockdowns and no-go areas turned most vehicles into expensive street furniture. For the first time in history free-born citizens were literally forbidden to make journeys for our own reasons. Overnight, deciding where you wished to spend your life was shifted from the realm of free choice to 'regulated behaviour' that needed government permission. The pigs of Whitehall were squealing with glee at their amazing new powers. This, they felt, was the way things should be, and they have every intention of making it so again.
The corporate/state regime sees every virtue in penning us up in cells. Inmates of modern closed environments will overdose on screens -those pernicious advertising tools that sell us the democracy myth 24/7. The internet is the second phase of state control over the public's perception of reality. Television alone used to play that role -the 'trusted' entertainer/informer, but there's not much difference between the box and the web when you're trapped in one or the other.
CRUSH THEM YOUNG
As always, the weight of the social engineering falls hardest on the weak. Travel restrictions will hobble the life-chances of youngsters. Most school-aged kids are already pursuing on-screen lives in which actual location is deemed irrelevant. For a least a decade now, those aged twelve or over rate their digital relationships to be at least as important as real ones. If travel is costly, difficult and uncomfortable enough, increasingly lazy youngsters will opt to escape online instead -and the regime wins. Submission to the misery of state-limited travel will see them robbed of the joys of a world that belongs to them by right.
Those of us lucky enough to live outside of cities and towns appreciate the importance of space. When I made the switch -aged 40- from town to countryside, my mind expanded in proportion to the spaces and stimulation around me. When I took jobs that involved travelling all around the country, life opened up as never before. The exact opposite will take place in the minds of captured city-mice who cannot or will not travel. Their world can only shrink, the way the screens shrink everything, until all they can see are screens.
All our freedoms are under assault, and each one must be fought for to the last ditch. No politician has the right to turn freedom of movement into an elite-only privilege. Flimsy 'environmental' excuses cannot justify this calculated attempt to reduce us to the level of caged animals. We do not belong to the corporations or the government and they need to hear that, loud and clear.
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