'Cost of living crisis'? No, we're getting poorer

To talk plainly is considered uncouth. Everything emanating from our modern mouths must be lathered in a suitable amount of euphemism, lest someone becomes, Heaven forbid, triggered.

Each modern hysteria – climate, race, and who knows what World War III will produce - lends us its own rich drivel. Perhaps more astounding is the rapidity with which new coinages are adopted by everyone. It is testament to the malleability of most among us.

COVID was a particular boom time for inventive minds. ‘Social distancing’ - most irritatingly used as a verb ("Sorry, I can't come, I'm social distancing"), ‘shielding’, ‘covidiot’, ‘new normal’, ‘flatten the curve’ – or, if you must, ‘squash the sombrero’.

It was indeed a wacky era, made all the wackier for how readily it has been consigned to the memory hole. People are too embarrassed to confront the episode, shown up as they were as lovers of order taking.

But do not be fooled. Just because the Wu Flu has more-or-less passed this does not mean that our insatiable appetite for euphemism has lessened. Witness our 'cost-of-living crisis'. This is largely framed as a temporary blip of inflationary pressure, which is soon to pass before we return on our rightful path of prosperity.

As with all important topics in the 21st century, sound bites matter more than cold-headed facts. After all, how we are to return to economic expansion is not fully elaborated upon, mired as we are with a suffocatingly large state, whose bureaucracy stifles growth and tax demands choke aspiration; the decade-long undercutting of the domestic labour market by importing low-skilled workers, which has resulted in stagnant real incomes and near-zero productivity gains; the ruinous inflationary policies pursued by our political class – both through vast monetary expansion and as a result of implementing ridiculous green policies; and the shipping overseas of vast tracts of the West's productive industry in the myopic pursuit of shareholder interest

It's a racket designed to enrich the very top of the globalist pile – it's not just a 'cost-of-living crisis'. It is the process of becoming poorer, and markedly so. The pound's purchasing power has fallen drastically and your wages have not kept up. For all the talk of 'shrinkflation' (whereby you pay the same price and receive less of a product), what you are actually witnessing is the degradation of your standard of living and your relative impoverishment. It is a systemic crisis of the West.

Politicians, naturally, would never phrase things so boldly. They are key agents in the dissemination of euphemism, designed as it is to cover up their wide-ranging failures. Nor, too, would those atop the business class, whose gross enrichment relies heavily upon manipulation of our overly convoluted regulatory and tax systems.

The losers of this awful scheme are the middle class, who are forced to shell out ever greater proportions of waning real incomes to fund the state’s largesse. The chasm between the haves and have-nots grows daily, the formerly comfortable sliding slowly into the latter category. Those who hoped for a modest life in one of our society’s many necessary but unglamorous roles – and who believed that elites ultimately held their best interests at heart – are gradually socially and economically marginalised.

Unfortunately, the supranational elite’s mismanagement isn’t just making you economically poorer. Materially you may have more junk than ever, but even a 60" TV screen won't fill that hollow feeling in your soul. You are losing much of true value but what cannot be easily priced by dull-headed economists.

That which binds the nation – much of it invisible – withers. Social strands fray. The demographic make-up of the country has altered within decades to an extent usually seen over millennia or after a military conquest. Social trust lessens with each boatload of illegal immigrants and with each report of demographic transformation, undermined further as our society indulges in fits of self-loathing, erroneously imagining ourselves uniquely malign and every other society noble.

Naturally this is catered for with another slew of euphemisms, ‘diversity’ key among them. This misleading term – for a near monoethnic town in the Midlands populated by Pakistanis would be considered ‘diverse’ – is usually shoehorned into the deceitful catechism of ‘diversity is our strength’. If you change ‘our’ to ‘their’ then it makes more sense, for to govern a divided, disparate population is easier than one unified by its history and values.

We let society’s institutions be taken over by the ideologically possessed and failing to take the threat seriously. 'This left-wing nonsense will burn itself out,' claimed many, as schools and universities became centres for postmodern indoctrination. ‘They’ll become conservative when they get jobs, houses and children.’

Yet, that didn’t happen, and the haters of the West stand virtually unopposed, their more insane elements atop our chains of command and now agitating for a Third World War. Why? Nobody is too sure but they’re daily preparing you for one. Not content with destroying their own countries, the maniacs in charge stoke fires across the world.

It’s anybody’s guess what will happen next. Maybe Armageddon, but more hopefully the overreach and subsequent collapse of the pernicious globalist ideology that is running the world headlong into chaos.

What’s for certain though is that there’ll be some daft euphemisms thought up along the way. When you begin to notice them, that’s when you know something pernicious is afoot.