How can leaders champion Zelensky when they are no friends of freedom themselves?

Freedom is flavour of the month. Ukrainians are dying in their thousands in defence of freedom and the heroic spectacle has spurred Western politicians to make it their latest parrot cry – though endowed with as much sympathy for the concept as parakeets. They have coupled it with “democracy”, another idea of which they have an increasingly skewed perception. For the moment, though, “freedom and democracy” is almost rivalling “equality and inclusion” as the dernier cri in virtue-signalling political circles.

The irony of all this noisy grandstanding is that for the past sixty years our politicians have increasingly devoted themselves to the elimination of freedoms that our ancestors, though deprived of the benefits of universal suffrage, took for granted. Future historians will characterize the post-War years in Britain as a period of aggressive erosion of both personal and collective freedom.

The Labour government that came to power in 1945 perpetuated the wartime climate of state supervision and intervention, so that such conditions began to seem a natural environment to Britons growing up in that era. The economic illiteracy of nationalisation, recalibrating our economy on the same premises as the Soviet Union and its satellite states, was not only a fast track to economic stagnation but, more insidiously, the promotion of a Marxist myth that, despite its discrediting, died hard under the Thatcher reforms. The National Health Service, as originally conceived, might have become the sole jewel in the crown of the Attlee administration, but the plans were redrawn by Aneurin Bevan, to create the leviathan we have today.

The Conservatives returned to office in 1951 pledged largely to maintain the new socialist status quo. Wartime rationing ended later in Britain (the present Queen was already on the throne when the ration books were finally torn up) than in defeated Germany which was already implementing its economic miracle. So far, the expanding tentacles of state intervention in Britain mostly took the form of sclerotic bureaucratic control. In the 1960s, however, a sea change occurred as the embrace of socialism by the political class metamorphosed into a complementary ideology: bourgeois liberalism.

Liberalism turned out to be far more intolerant and intrusive than old-fashioned socialism. It also had more political heft, since it infected all parties in Parliament; indeed, the phenomenon of cross-party consensus was the principal instrument by which liberalism secured monopolist power. In theory, democracy was supposed to be a means of discerning the will of the majority in the country and formulating policy reflecting that will. In reality, the gate keepers of liberalism could always thwart that will – and routinely did so. In recent years, they have taken to disparaging even the aspiration to reflect the national will as “populism”.

This became glaringly evident in 1965 when Parliament voted to abolish capital punishment, against the known wishes of the majority of the public, through cross-party consensus. The fundamental justification for the existence of a government has always been the provision of security for the Queen’s subjects, domestically and against foreign enemies. The deterrent value of capital punishment was never effectively discredited, but in any case that was not the principal argument for its maintenance. The citizen had previously relied on the state to assert his human dignity by avenging him, if murdered; the abolition of hanging made murder just another serious crime, no longer a unique offence against human dignity.

Encouraged by the success of liberalism imposed via cross-party consensus, the political class went on to enforce large-scale immigration. This was an issue, above all, that related to the most fundamental aspects of demography, national identity, culture, social concerns and public services; it followed that it was a key policy area in which it should have been a primary concern of government, in a democracy, to listen to the public will and fulfil it. Instead, while opinion polls showed a large majority of the electorate (83 per cent in one survey) opposed to all but the most minimal inflow of migrants, the government proceeded to pass intimidatory laws inhibiting free speech, to silence dissent.

In tandem, a new phenomenon appeared in public life: suppression of “unacceptable” views through peer pressure – what the Frankfurt School Marxists termed “the reputational cascade”. That weapon would later become infinitely more powerful with the advent of social media.

Increasingly since then, legislation has become intrusive and coercive. Often it attacks some peripheral area of private life, imposes its will, then passes on to address further issues. A totemic example was the anti-smoking legislation. Few people disputed the health risks of smoking. In a free society, the response should have been to publicise as widely as possible the dangers of smoking and to encourage consumers to demand smoke-free facilities in public places. Customers should have negotiated with pub landlords, for example, provision of a non-smoking bar. If managements failed to comply, their competitors would have seized the opportunity to offer smoke-free facilities, attracting extra customers.

That would have been the free-market solution to the problem: reform through competition. Instead, the political class saw another opportunity to impose coercive legislation, to which it has become addicted. The pretext is barely relevant – smoking, hunting, whatever – what matters to legislators is the frisson of power they experience by imposing their prejudices on other people. “Because we can” is the ultimate rationale.

This school-playground bully mentality can be seen in its most primitive form in the Wee Scotch Senate at Holyrood where, from day one, the favourite word in the parliamentary lexicon has been “ban”. In its early days, the Parcel o’ Rogues was half-way through processing legislation to ban fur farms in Scotland, when it was discovered there were no such institutions on Scottish soil. Undeterred, the Covenanters passed the Bill but, disappointingly, did not go on to ban bullfighting.

Scotland is the canary in the coal-mine when it comes to snuffing out freedoms; similar totalitarian legislation usually surfaces at Westminster later. Recently, however, Scottish repression has reached extremes that even Westminster would hesitate to replicate, as Wee Krankie and her colleagues get in touch with their inner Vladimir Putin. Scotland is, so far, the only part of the United Kingdom where someone can be imprisoned for expressing politically incorrect views in the privacy of his own home.

In Scotland, a child as young as four can change sex at school, without parents being allowed to intervene; you could not ask for a more extreme example of the intruder state destroying family life. The whole transgender crusade is the culmination of an advancing ideology that is trampling down sanity, science and everyday freedoms exponentially: a decade ago hardly anyone had heard of this insanity, today it is seriously oppressing liberties, ranging from family cohesion, to employment, to women’s sport.

Its value to the nihilists who promote it is its very absurdity, because successfully imposing a dogma that defies science is the ultimate assertion of the primacy of ideology over every other consideration. That is the kernel of totalitarianism. Even the market has been subverted, with woke corporations imposing dogma on their employees and HR departments assuming the leading role in corporate strategy, to the detriment of wealth creation.

There has been a blizzard of restrictions on free speech in recent years, wholly incompatible with the principles of a free society. The bottom line is: democracy has failed us. It is seventy years since the brilliant (he was Vienna correspondent of The Spectator at 16) and insightful Austrian political scientist Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn published his most important book, “Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times”.

Its central premise was that democracy infallibly leads to tyranny, though there may be a considerable interval of time before this outcome is reached. The system, as presently constituted, has a corrosive effect on public life and trust. “The fact remains,” he wrote, “that in all democratic nations the person of the ‘politician’ is treated with contempt, and ‘politics’ are looked upon by a healthy public opinion as a cocktail of deceit…”

The problem is that democracy, as presently embodied in parliament and the party system, is necessarily at odds with freedom. Democracy can function effectively in small regions – it was conceived in the city states of classical Greece – or to decide single issues. When electors cast their vote for a politician or party, they are unlikely to support the entire programme, so they may then see someone they elected to Parliament routinely voting for measures to which they are opposed. In contrast, the much deprecated (by the self-interested political class) device of the referendum can work well, as it did in the case of Brexit: it established clearly that a majority of voters wanted to leave the European Union.

That expression of the public will, however, was nearly thwarted by the conflicting element of the institution of “parliamentary democracy” – Parliament itself, a forum of oligarchic power serving the interests of the political class. It is from that assembly that have come all the successive gags on free speech in recent decades. Nor are its legislators even in control; our laws are largely proposed by lobby groups such as Stonewall, whose prescriptions carry more weight than the views of the electorate. The conclusion is self-evident: as in the seventeenth century, Parliament has become the enemy of freedom and the facilitator of dictatorship. There needs to be radical reform of the relationship between MPs and voters, and reappraisal of the party system.

When Parliament is wrecking the hard-won right of equality under the law by imposing “protected characteristics” and “aggravated offences” carrying heavier sentences; when people such as doctors are losing their jobs for articulating the scientific axiom that human beings cannot change sex; when every university, formerly a bastion of free speech and debate, is policed by narcissistic snowflakes interdicting the expression of any opinion conflicting with their own; when the police, now recording vanishingly small crime clear-up rates, tell citizens, “I need to check your thinking” – then we live in a police state.

To see the single most concentrated body of perpetrators of the multiple aggressions against our liberties – the House of Commons – rising to accord a standing ovation to a real fighter for freedom, the President of Ukraine, is beyond sick-making. “We stand four-square behind President Zelensky.” No, you don’t – you stand four-square in the tradition of Vladimir Putin. How did you vote on smoking bans? How did you vote on the hunting ban? How did you vote on the Equalities Act, same-sex marriage, immigration, Brexit, “hate” speech, “climate” impositions, extreme pandemic restrictions, the “trans” terror, and the nationalisation of our bodies through “presumed consent” for organ donation?

Yes, we thought so. In that case you would do better to stop pretending to share Ukrainians’ love of freedom and get along to your true spiritual home in Kensington Palace Gardens – the Russian Embassy.