This is a corrected version of a piece from 2011. Only typos and the title needed amending. For the rest, the splendid word "stet" applies.
As May approaches, we thought
it would be fitting to look back at the first year of the Coalition government
and calmly examine their achievements and popular sentiment towards these
and discuss what, if anything, we intend to do to stop the country being
blackmailed any further into bonded penury by an out of control financial
sector and its placemen in Westminster. Today, our editor-in-chief offers his
own personal analysis, verdict and none-too-subtle call for organised and
widespread civil disobedience.
Like so very many people
nowadays, I am feeling the pinch and sharing the pain
in involuntary deference to a belief that this will help the
nation's balance sheet. To demonstrate just how dedicated I am to my
country and how keen I am to suffer for the nefarious pranks of the
financial alchemists who somehow contrived to make half the wealth of the
planet disappear overnight and then mysteriously reappear in their
accounts, but only after we had made a similar deposit, as well as having
to endure the squeeze on already limited household finances, I have
a near belly-up small business that not that long ago was
coming along quite nicely. Sadly, it depended on a healthy and
confident economy for sustenance.
Exactly how my livelihood
evaporating overnight is helping the country's finances has not been explained
to my satisfaction. I do hope that the Chancellor isn't making important
calculations on the basis of any contribution I am likely to make to
G.D.P. If my experiences in any way represent those of others in the
private sector, any projections based on our ability to pay taxes and to
fill the crater left by Coalition’s attack on the public realm will have
to be fairly modest to be even remotely plausible.
Apparently my financial
insecurity forms part of an engine of growth and my
assets represent a liability. I have to change to accommodate their
policies. Overnight, my life became superfluous. Not in the way the farrier’s
did when the motor car finally replaced the horse, but because some gentlemen
in the City decided that certain aspects of the state weren’t conducive to
their own highly-refined interests and that perhaps a government whose cause
the City alone supported with some £11m in donations, yea, over 50% of their
election fund, might see their way to reciprocating this generosity by letting
them snap up what remains of the public sector at a price of their choosing.
Notice how neither the purpose nor, indeed, the need for public
services has been challenged. What is being debated is who they
are for and who should benefit from them. Somehow, adding a profit motive
to an already financially stretched service is going to help matters all
round. Many find this difficult to believe. A few are
finding it difficult to believe their luck.
My story is not unique. It is
increasingly typical and looks like becoming a norm. Millions are in the same
boat or will be very soon. Swingeing cuts in our standard of living with the
inevitable consequences for our general well-being are only just beginning and
we’re already stretched. We are told that this is unfortunate but,
sadly, unavoidable and that, “really, we’re hurting, too.” We are told,
without the slightest acknowledgement of any lurking irony, that
while reimbursing large corporate investors who were foolish enough to
allow a crowd of sociopaths in an over-sized and largely unnecessary financial
sector to take their money to the crap tables was somehow right and proper,
supporting the poor sods in whose soil they flourish, i.e., pretty well
everybody else, would somehow be seen as a sign of profligacy on the part of an
over-intrusive state. Furthermore, after this very generously
permitted one-off act of public intervention, any further attempt by
government to involve itself in the activities of the banks would be considered
"interference" and therefore quite inappropriate. In return
for the pleasure of bailing them out, our government has been asked to be, and
is indeed being, lenient. They are clawing back the state alright, but only
where and when it suits.
As if to spite the electorate for
keeping the natural party of government out of office for so long, the
Westminster coalition is wielding an economic wrecking ball while it
creates for its friends not just a haven from tax, but a haven from decency,
a pleasure dome where a self-selecting and utterly self-serving elite
can bathe in the wealth they have creamed from a tired, battered and war-weary
society, insulated from the blind fury of a seething mass of feckless
ingrates. The most worrying thing of all, though, is that we appear to be
making absolutely no headway in resisting this unprecedented assault on the
common weal. Condemnation of nearly every item of policy, enacted or
planned, has produced strange bedfellows in right-wing, free market evangelists
and progressive tax enthusiasts, but Cameron and Osbourne, with their
respective foils, Clegg and Alexander, acknowledge and dismiss
dissatisfaction from all quarters in one breath.
One year on from an election that
created history by returning, with a functioning majority, a gruesome
hybrid of a party whose existence was inconceivable even while we were happily
casting our votes, the vast majority of the population are either being
squeezed to the limit or are preparing for it. Even by the measures of their
precious Market, this government's policies are not only failing, they are
storing up mayhem. They will tell us there is no Plan B. There doesn't appear
to be a Plan A. If there is a plan of any kind, it is one predicated on our
detriment and that violates the very soul of our democracy.
They appear to be getting away with
it. By setting out to antagonise as many distinct but
overlapping groups as possible and setting them against each other by
playing on what appear to be conflicting objectives amongst what they
have the cheek to call self-interest groups, they emulate Thatcher in
seeking to divide the opposition. What they fail to acknowledge -
even though, rightly or wrongly, it is a self-evident truth
- is that regardless of any sub-divisions, the population is united in its
loathing for this government in a way that it wasn't with Thatcher. She at
least had the wit to keep the middle classes and, significantly, the police
onside. This lot are alienating everybody they can lay a hand on, with a few
notable exceptions. Many of its own M.Ps are very unhappy, albeit
sometimes for reasons completely at odds with those of the moaning masses; some
would like to see greater and more permanent dissolution of the state.
They see education as privilege which
can bring rich rewards and thereby appeal to a wide constituency when they
ask who should pay for it. They avoid asking whether society will be the richer
or poorer for cutting education back to the bone and making it available only
to the wealthy. They make no attempt to square this assault on future
generations with the skills shortage that makes large scale immigration a
necessity in a country with rocketing unemployment and a stagnant economy
with saturated resources and seemingly not enough to go round for its
own. And they make no attempt to square this with an immigration policy
which, while thankfully now far removed from the reflex racism
of 20 years ago or more, is still riddled with contradictions. They see
the unrestricted movement of capital as inviolable but don't extend
this courtesy to people. The reconciling of a love of globalisation
with the policy-driving opinion that multiculturalism isn't working is not
likely to be debated any time soon. I'll take an imperfect multicultural
society before the homogenised servitude they have in mind.
The very fabric of our society is
under unprecedented and wilful attack, but nothing we have said or done to
date has made one whit of a difference. By way of a "concession" to
widespread condemnation of his "reforms" from pretty well anybody
even tangentially connected to health services in England and Wales, a health
minister bent on privatising the N.H.S., the sacred cow of British life, offers
apologies for "not getting his message across" and promises a
"natural pause" before he cracks on regardless. (Scottish viewers
take heed; left unchecked, this will feed across the border soon
enough.) Having apparently been the victims of demonic possession,
the Lib Dems have shown just what can be done when you take egalitarianism
to its logical extreme and treat everybody with equal disdain, including
themselves.
Without seeing any conflict with their
anti-state ideology, the Coalition has set itself up as some kind of
chimerical intermediary, preliminary to building a new state, one more
amenable to their ends and less likely to be troubled by discontent amongst the
masses. They have declared themselves immune to scrutiny and their policies and
motives beyond reproach. They offer entirely phoney dialogue and stage-managed
press stunts where Cameron tries and fails to convince a single mother why it
is that she should have to suffer because of the insane profligacy of the
banks. If we want to even begin to put the brakes on this lot, we'll need to up
our game.
The last two or three years have seen
our sensibilities insulted to the wilder shores by financial
gangsters with an improbably customised grasp of what “fair reward” actually
means and an unfeasibly bloated sense of self worth, aided and abetted by a
small clique of political bankrupts, who claim to have our collective
blessing but in fact received precisely 0% of the vote as
they weren't actually on the ballot paper. This manifesto was
not put to the people.
After an appropriate pause in phoney
contemplation of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, the military industrial
complex is also flexing its muscles again and actively seeking deployment. Our
political masters, novices all, have duly obliged and provided an
entirely fresh conflagration in North Africa for reasons nobody now seems to
remember. Best of all is that much of it is British made and, damn it, all that
expensive ordnance presently levelling a well developed and wealthy country
will need replaced. Cruise missiles at £300K a pop. The U.S. dumped a hundred
of them on Libya on day one of the No Idea Zone being imposed. Thank you very
much. We look forward to your call, which will be recorded for security and
training purposes.
Sometimes, it is tempting to defect
and seek political asylum in Norway. I’ll invoke human rights legislation on
the grounds that my sanity is being threatened and that an oppressive
regime is deliberately denying me my right to make a living and
enjoy family life and possessions in peace and security. In the last 30 years
or so, we have seen quite draconian anti-assembly, dissent-stifling legislation
slip on to statute with little or no resistance while people felt generally
secure and not minded to protest. We are about to find out just how valuable these
rights were and why people fought so hard for them many years ago and could do
worse than to concentrate our minds for a moment, lest the little say we have
left in how our world is ordered is lost for ever. This time round, the folks
in charge won’t be letting go without a fight. They are building one
great gated estate for themselves, with salubrious grounds and round
the clock security, while we look on helplessly, paralysed with
astonishment and disgust.
Our democracy has just been
comprehensively mugged. Not content with taking our wallets, the felons took
our clothes and our self-respect. This sapping of the will of the people is not
simply a consequence of their agenda, it is a primary objective, a
prerequisite to the complete subjugation of democracy to
absolute plutocracy. There is no need for resort to conspiracy theory
here. This is how it is and if evidence were needed,
subtract "the possible responses of the markets"
from recent governments' agendas
and count what's left. This has, of course, always been the way
of things but, to the chagrin of the moneyed classes, increasingly over
the last century or two, society has been afflicted with built-in
mechanisms designed to keep tabs on these impulses; democracy, a
free press, the right to assembly and peaceful protest, that sort of
thing. Thatcher dealt with the unions within minutes of taking
office. This shower have already hand-cuffed the vote and they know a
friendly media mogul when they see one. They have many fine plans and, so
far, it's all going very nicely and they are weathering everything that is
thrown at them without blinking.
Organised strike action is more or
less banned. Co-ordinated action is a criminal offence. What kind of protest is
it when you have to ask permission? Spontaneous demonstration has been
completely neutered as a political force, largely by dint of an unconvincing
concern for public safety and a shamelessly self-referential, capricious,
politically illiterate media with absolutely no grasp of proportion or perspective.
A naïve assumption that our governments know best and have our best interests
at heart hasn’t helped.
As well as the economic cost of the
financial chaos born of the antics of gimlet-eyed spivs while they quite
arbitrarily inflated the value of land, bricks and mortar and then played Black
Jack with the balance, thereby indebting three generations, we are paying a
hefty democratic price with our right to peaceful protest having been
diminished to the point of impotence while we weren’t paying attention. The
“carnival atmosphere” of the recent demonstration in London was hardly
surprising. For all the impact it had, it might as well have been a
carnival, except that the floats were pretty naff and the sideshows
frankly embarrassing.
If there was to be any hope of the
demonstration having any impact on Government thinking, let alone policy, some
kind of unifying moment was called for. It didn't need to be the
Gettysburg Address, but if rousing oratory has any place left in
our politics, this was a missed moment. Tony Benn. Arthur Scargill, even. Jimmy
Reid would have been my choice, but he’s dead. Who - or more appropriately, what
- do we get? Ed Miliband, the Great White Hope of the left, with all the punch
of a soufflé, comparing the cuts with apartheid in South Africa and proclaiming
the cause of resisting them to be on a par with the American civil rights
movement. Hang on a minute, lad. Not in my name, as they once said. With
enemies like this, the Coalition has little to fear.
Medieval Middle-eastern regimes would
have little to fear if a crowd of 250 thousand people, with a raft of
legitimate grievances largely shared by 90% of the population, would display
the same feeble compliance with authority recently displayed in London and,
given as much generally sympathetic media coverage as it wanted,
presented its argument so abysmally. With weary inevitability, to the extent
that it is always widely predicted, and with suspiciously detailed
accuracy, too, “trouble flared” and a group of inebriated students
smashing a few plates in a deli was trumpeted as “unrest” worthy of calling in
the cavalry to suppress.
In yet another assault on our already
tenuous wits, the minute scale of the trouble dominated headlines.
The less trouble there is at a demonstration, the more this absence of incident eclipses
the main event. If there is no trouble, we are taken live to where it
wasn't happening and told at length of what didn't happen with a brief
outline as to why people were unhappy. People who have just lost their
jobs are asked how they feel and ministers explain why it is they have to
feel that way to 21 year-old journalists who know diddly squat and that is
it. Every protest is flagged up months in advance to the point where its purpose
and any potency it might have carried are diluted and dissipate
into the ether to the extent that the demonstration doesn't even
qualify as a gesture, just an empty pose.
As if we hadn’t been insulted enough,
this is then cited as an argument for just why the economy needs
its throat slit; the alternative is anarchy. Fortnum & Mason may seem like
nothing, but it’ll be Harrods and the Garrick Club next, old chap, you
mark my word, and then where would we be?
After M.P’s treating the expenses
system like a company credit card, bankers just taking the piss and a
government now intent on punishing 90% of the population for the pleasure of
bailing the bastards out, was that the nearest the British could get to
outrage? In my application for asylum, I’ll cite the beaten and broken back of
the collective will of my oppressed fellow citizens.
No matter how reasonably presented,
any argument with this hectoring anti-State ideology and the economically and
socially illiterate policies it has seen enacted is dismissed out of hand with
dire warnings of what would happen if the City of London isn’t placated and
kept sweet. This is an affront to any notions of democracy. We do not get to
vote for the City of London.
If their grasp of just what
“representative government” means is so far removed from ours, it is not just
perfectly reasonable but absolutely necessary to question the very legality of
this government, not just its democratic legitimacy. While the whole
country was stunned to the point of concussion in nauseated disbelief at the
brazen volte face of the Lib Dems, hitherto widely perceived to represent the
last remnants of plausible socialism in British politics, one hugely
significant constitutional change effectively bypassed Parliament in the blink
of an eye last May.
Since time immemorial, the
parliamentary vote has been based on a simple majority of one. In one of the
most brazen examples of abusing office for party political purposes imaginable,
the infant Coalition decided that for votes of confidence alone, the margin had
to be 55% to 45%. If the Lib Dems walk out, they will only be able to muster
53%. Why 55%? Just enough wriggle room in case a few of Tories decide to
jump ship. Nobody was consulted over this. Long before parliament had
opened, we were presented with a fait accompli. There is only one way for
a sitting government to ensure victory in a confidence vote and that is to have
the endorsement of the people in the form of a legitimate and
sufficient working majority. It's called a democratic mandate. You
either have one or you don't. Offer the change as a manifesto policy, if you
dare, but before the plebiscite, not afterwards as
an antidote to democracy having failed to deliver the
desired result.
The Conservatives' insistence on the
absolute necessity of a working majority can be dismissed out of
hand by one very simple truth; the electorate didn't give them one. The
vote gave them a limited mandate. These things happen. Nobody can question the
result of the election, nor the Conservatives' right to from a
government, but we are entitled to take issue with the way this has been
manipulated by the Tories and guaranteed by the Lib Dems to produce a
government nobody wanted. Democracy has to be all or nothing. An appalling
precedent has just been set.
Somehow, they have been allowed
completely off the hook by their line that this was a government of national
unity fighting off the forces of hell itself and that stability for its own
sake transcended all other considerations. Five minutes into office and
they unilaterally barricaded themselves against democracy by
executive decree. The sheer speed and efficiency with which the deal was struck
and the troublesome parliamentary arithmetic taken care of makes the
suggestion that this was an entirely spontaneous meeting of minds that
took everybody by surprise hard to swallow.
This was a stitch up. The Tories might
not have wanted this, but they had planned for it. The Lib Dems, quite
foolishly, had prayed for it, believing that they could hold whoever won to
ransom but ending up hostages to their own lack of a genuine political purpose.
The only thing that makes the role of junior partner in a coalition viable is
ultimate recourse to the power to bring down the government. This card
can't be overplayed, but they signed it away for no consideration.
The Law Lords and constitutional
lawyers saw nothing wrong with this. Not so much as a raised eyebrow. A column
or two in the Guardian and that was about it. Job done. You can almost picture
the glee on the Torys’ faces when they saw just how readily they managed to
whip up a panic and sneak this through under our noses while telling everybody
that the sky was falling and that only they could save us and that there wasn't
time for idle debate. Not only did they have a working majority, even
their minority was now safe. Why and how the Lib Dems agreed to this one
point defies all inquiry. While an eye for expedience seems to be
their only real purpose in life, it is difficult to imagine how this could have
been presented to them as remotely palatable, let alone desirable.
You’d have thought that for taking the
role of political gimps, the already sealed guarantee of catastrophic collapse
as a party and watching helplessly as an angry public started
erecting guillotines in every public place, they’d at least have been
allowed the rules of the House as collateral. What else could they possibly
have to lose?
This might go down as one of the most astonishing
acts of political suicide ever performed. It has turned the good guys
of British politics into a toxic brand and their few remaining
supporters into sympathisers and collaborators. We are about to find out
in Scotland if they may have achieved something that
was inconceivable a year ago and are now actually less popular
than the Tories. Only those who couldn't point to Scotland on a map could fail
to grasp just what this would say. As their Coalition partners have learned,
the Scots are quick to react and slow to forget. Meanwhile, true Liberals are
not represented by any party on these islands.
Even if it was a consensual act, its
depravity sustains. A government has no right turning half a millennium or more
of precedent, upon which our albeit unwritten constitution is largely founded,
completely on its head, after an election, simply to secure its own
survival. If this happened anywhere else, we would be muttering about attacks
on democracy and summoning ambassadors to Downing Street to express our
concern.
This change to parliamentary law was
not decided in the House. It was decided before any government had even been
formed. In the euphoria of this extraordinary love-in between such an
apparently ill-matched and ill-met couple, it became law by parliamentary
formality. There was no green paper let alone a white one. Not even a
consultation period or committee stage. Any formalities were dealt with after
the fact. The constitutional implication is alarming as it diminishes our
democratic franchise; however one looks at it, our collective ability to unseat
a Government has been significantly curtailed. The threshold for removing a
sitting government has been raised by 30 seats with no debate.
The franchise was eroded further by
the, again, completely unilateral decision that this would be a five year
parliament come what may. The Coalition functions as a party, but seems
unburdened by the concomitant restrictions that traditionally go with this
luxury when one assumes office, which roughly distil down to recognising the
boundaries between party and government, government & power, power and
state. They have crossed all three by some distance. They are now claiming the
right to fix the term of parliament on the basis of a rule they just dreamt up
for themselves out with any legal context. Not only should a vote of no
confidence require a simple majority of one, the timing of it cannot be
pre-determined and should not be effectively banished as a democratic
tool for the term of a parliament; to do so undermines the foundation
of parliamentary process and is anathema to democracy.
So, instead of a democratically
elected and representative government, we have a legally dubious
coalition comprising two very narrow self-interest groups,
one consisting mainly of authoritarian, venal, plutocratic ideologues, the
other of political sluts and fall guys, who unilaterally changed the rules
after an election to secure a result nobody voted for. The bankers have
provided a boundless savannah on which our opprobrium can run free and we
shouldn’t let the buggers out of our sights, but not nearly enough attention is
being paid to the political conjuring tricks performed in order for them to get
a compliant government.
What makes the present government so
very different from any predecessor is that, uniquely, they have no expectation
of a second term. They don’t even pretend to desire one. Not one cabinet member
seems remotely concerned that even being in opposition after the next election
is a fading hope and that even the most senior members of the executive risk
losing their seats. This seems odd for a group of Oxbridge illuminati with
such noble political ambitions. We are perhaps too quick to accuse our
politicians of electioneering while carrying out their elected duties. At least
this demonstrates political ambition, something which necessitates maintaining
the support of the electorate, thereby tempering their behaviour. We should be more
worried when they don't appear to have even the inclination to be re-elected.
They see no personal consequences from electoral anihilation. They have hired
the state for one term only. Their lack of genuine political ambition suggests
a contempt for any political tradition and, by extension, for any political
institution. Such attitudes should bar them from office. Deliberately
undermining and challenging the authority of the state used to be known
as sedition. Doing so from within was called treason.
Anybody would think they simply wanted
to be in office long enough to steady the ship of state on a course that
suited, and that along the way they might forge sufficient mutually beneficial
friendships that losing a tiresome chore of a job that pays barely a pittance
and brings nothing but grief will be a welcome and keenly awaited release.
These people are just marking time until 2015. By then, they'll have achieved
what they set out to do. I like my politicians to have loftier ambitions
and to be prepared to put their personal reputations on the line, lest
they make a botch of things. In the days when politics was a calling
rather than a career move, this was called accountability and, whisper it,
a matter of honour. This lot are running up a substantial slate
which is being underwritten with our livelihoods regardless of
their performance. What we have witnessed amounts to a de facto coup d’etat.
As if this weren’t bad enough, there
is now a risk that we might have an electoral system designed specifically to propel small
third-placed parties into government. The Lib Dems represent a first in party
political history, perhaps anywhere, in that their stated aim in any election,
be it Westminster, Holyrood or Cardiff, is to come third. They plan with
this eventuality in mind and no more. They are a party born of schism and
designed for no purpose other than to return to parliament people who couldn't
find a political home anywhere else. They staked a claim to
a spurious middle ground that was somehow neither capitalism nor
socialism. This may have existed for a while in the mid 80s and early 90s, but
it was merely a waste-ground evacuated by a rabid right and a loony left.
As market economics became the only
show in town, this space was inundated and the Lib Dems, rather than
offering the best of all possible worlds by somehow reconciling two
fundamentally opposing views of how the state should operate, were set
adrift on a political sea with no discernable borders and what
little dry land remained was occupied to overcrowding. All they have done since
then is complain because the electoral system wasn't giving them a
fair crack of the whip. While concentrating on this one issue, they have
forgotten what they would actually do with it if they had it. The answer
appears to be, "whatever we are told."
Courtesy of yet more abuse of the word
fairness, first passed the post would be replaced with third passed the post in
the name of even more fairness. What the electoral reformers refuse to
entertain is that small parties fail to make office not because of
shortcomings in the electoral process, but precisely because it has
served its purpose. Most people either don’t like or aren’t interested in
them; their not reaching office is not a result of conspiracy, but of
democratic will made manifest through the ballot box. They aren't represented
because they aren't sufficiently representative of a significant enough number
of people. When they reach this threshold, something they need to argue for by
the same rules as anybody else, the existing system will recognise them. Given
that a seat has to go to somebody, to artificially rig
this process specifically to make it easier for failed candidates
is both absurd and an abomination. It is yet one more perversion of
a democracy already under threat from unelected and unchallenged forces
in big finance and a cabal of political parvenus.
A few questions, mostly in the same
colour scheme, have been asked over and over since the first realisation that
the banks were up to no good, through the expenses scandal – which in reality,
amounted to about £1.5 million a year, i.e., about what an investment banker
believes is a good reflection of the market rate for his supernatural skills –
to the present when, despite being completely propped up by the state, the
bankers are still helping themselves with impunity. What won’t we tolerate?
When do we stop and shout with one voice, “Enough”? Are we just going to let
them horse on and treat society as a cash cow for a few? How many lies will we
buy?
Many in the banking sector will rebuff
any polite request for restraint in their habits by saying that only some banks
were bailed out and that the rest were private companies who could do what they
liked. Most mainstream commentators seem to have swallowed this and it is
parroted as unimpeachable fact, ergo, end of argument. This is, as they say,
utter bullshit. If 1.3 trillion pounds hadn’t been pumped into the British
banking system, the whole show was over and they know it. It wasn’t just
individual banks who were saved. The entire sector was resuscitated. It needs
reminded of this and soon. They are sitting there, writing themselves cheques
for millions of pounds, stretching our patience to the limit, with the
unmitigated nerve to dismiss any admonishment by citing a lack of regulation
and we are taking this? The £375 billion of “quantitive easing” – printing
money, in other words – all ended up inflating property prices in London.
Nobody outside – and only a handful within - the M25 got a sniff of it.
While it may be morally reprehensible
and repugnant in every way, it isn’t altogether surprising that brutish, odious
dictatorships the world o’er look to the West, particularly
Britain and the U.S., for the training, expertise and even the very
tools of state repression. They look to us and see a people who fought for
democracy and then gave up on it. To them this is a clinching argument against
it: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and people get bored with it.
They see a people who have the freedom
to express let alone act on dissent but who refuse to avail themselves
of this and accept, in good grace and with only lip service to
disapproval, outrages being committed in their names in foreign lands and a financial
elite helping themselves from the public purse in a way psychotic
sub-Saharan despots could only dream of. By the standards of even a
generation ago, a lot of what used to be considered, at best, ungentlemanly and
probably corrupt behaviour has been stripped of all taboo and
decriminalised and we don’t seem to mind. The British and Americans
clearly know how to strangle dissent at birth in developed countries with
educated populaces and how to enslave and fleece them, day in, day out, for
ever. Need evidence? This warrants and can stand frequent repetition; the
bankers are still taking multi-million pound bonuses and paying no attention
whatsoever to our gob-smacked indignation. Their behaviour is so
outrageous, it doesn't take much imagination to see why some might view
it as provocation and an open invite to confrontation. People come to
blows over much less yet the bankers, vastly outnumbered, seem
unperturbed. We should be perturbed by their confidence. It suggests that
they know they aren't going to be touched.
Who better to train and arm the
Bahraini and Saudi governments, to mention but two, to keep in check largely
uneducated and economically exiled people anxious to hang on to what little
they have? There is something darkly comic in the
highly-qualified platitudes that spout forth from William Hague and his
ilk on the "need for democratic change in the Middle-east." It’s not
so much that they are insincere and have vested interests in mind – though,
they are and do - but that they don’t appear to have a clue what line to
take. Any debate trips over dirty great Saudi-shaped contradictions before
it even starts, so they steer clear of saying anything illuminating at all.
They are conducting a war - guns, tanks and planes all bombing one geographically
and politically distinct area looks awfully like a war to me – but they
don’t seem to have any opinion on how it should be prosecuted nor, indeed, why.
The most worrying thing of all,
though, is that nobody seems too bothered about this. War has become ambience
to us. Nobody can remember when we weren’t last involved in military conflict
somewhere or other. Even if not fighting, more often than not, the cream of
British design and craftsmanship is right there at the business end of the front
line.
If they equivocated any more they'd
forget their names, but they are wise to watch their words. They are not too
keen on dissent either. It could quite easily be argued that the British
Government is amongst the least tolerant in the developed world. An unruly mob
of 20 students armed with nothing more substantial than mobile phones and an
overweening sense of entitlement is considered sufficient provocation for this
government to call out 500 riot police.
It’s little wonder our
government watch what they say when demonstrators are being shot in
Bahrain. How, exactly, might they respond if Julian, Crispin, Adrian and pals,
instead of smoking joints in a university chancellor's office and daringly
dropping toilet rolls out of windows, were storming around central London
in broad daylight in pick-ups, firing AK 47s with manic abandon
while screaming "Alluhah Akbar!!”, moreover, without even
the courtesy of giving the authorities 4 weeks written notice of their
intention to hold a spontaneous protest or notifying them of their every
last movement, minute by minute, in text, voice and video, courtesy of the
voluntary electronic-tagging facilities so kindly provided by Facebook and
Twitter?
A nice touch, this one. Just imagine
what Mao or Stalin could have done with this stuff. Boy oh boy. Just as
tens of millions had to re-train and rethink their lives in the cold dawn of
post–industrial Britain, since the demise of the Cold War, our spooks have had
to find new ways to occupy themselves. What an utterly marvellous ruse; a
political contraceptive that allows the citizenry the brief thrill of active
dissent, but without conceiving a single coherent idea. Everybody is
gleefully signing up to this. While simultaneously providing free product
placement other businesses would give their eye teeth for, the media spare no
effort to highlight the supposed seditious utility lurking within social
networking.
The “Facebook and Twitter Revolutions”
in Egypt and Tunisia that precipitated a domino effect and overnight turned the
entire region into one big happy family of liberal social
democracies demonstrated just how useful these marvels were as instruments
of democratic progress, but this hasn’t plugged the myth. Many young people,
the ones who can make a difference, now believe that if they want to
challenge the government all they have to do is log in. This saves a hell
of a lot of leg work on the part of the authorities. They don’t have to waste
time looking for people when G.P.S. is doing it for them.
Viva la revolution. Philosophers,
writers and political reformers, from Adam Smith to Rabbie Burns to Keir
Hardie, would have been sorely unimpressed that progress had come to this.
Orwell will be wondering why he bothered. I somehow doubt he imagined for
one minute that the scope for near total surveillance by the State would not
only come about without any resistance, but would actually be so
eagerly lapped up that people were prepared to ship seemingly limitless amounts
of money and devote ever increasing chunks of their time complying with its
every intrusive protocol.
We should be more careful with our
scorn the next time we see the French out on the streets over a seemingly minor
grievance stemming from the latest Government policy. We should perhaps take
note and consider what is happening and why. We should ask where we would be
if, at many critical junctures in our history, people hadn’t been prepared to
call time on a government they detest using sheer weight of numbers as a
disincentive to any ideas of suppression by force.
When the French go out on the street,
the headline story is not the issue. What they are doing is reminding
government who’s in charge and who owns what. The French are fortunate enough
to have a written constitution which lays down ground rules for governance. They
tell their governments that if a policy is clearly not designed with the
interests of the people as an over-arching imperative, then they have to think
again. In France, sovereignty rests with the people. Here it rests with the
crown and its representatives. The French are citizens: we are subjects of the
crown. This may seem a trifle to some, but it underpins a mind-set that
defaults to apathy in the face of onslaught from the state.
This should not be so in a modern
country. The Coalition government saw absolutely no intellectual or political
problem in fundamentally weakening the hand of the people in the electing of
governments when they changed the rules on votes of confidence. Perhaps we
should see just how amenable they are to further radical constitutional
change, by way of balancing their slight of hand last May, and set about reclaiming sovereignty for
the people and redeploying some of the less necessary amongst the permanent
civil service to draft mechanisms for ensuring this is upheld in law.
We are only beginning to feel the
economic wrath coming our way. This government isn’t even good at the game of
market economics. One of the first rules of monetarism is not to spook the
markets, but every purchase now carries a financial health warning. This lot
have scared everybody witless and quite unnecessarily. Goods and services have
stopped moving because people aren’t buying; the accumulator effect in reverse;
or as it used to be known and understood as, deflation, the precursor to
depression.
We are being held to ransom by a few
thousand billionaires worldwide who call the shots. This is no longer a
democracy in any meaningful sense of the word, inasmuch as we have absolutely
no facility to call to account the chief controlling influences on
our affairs. We need to reclaim our sovereignty and, with this, reclaim control
of our state by means of legitimate government whose subservience to the
popular will is enshrined in law, responsible and accountable to the people
only. We may have to fight for it, though, and this means more than
setting up a Facebook page.
M. E. Morrison April 2011 (revised,
October 2014 with little effort)
