We are governed by idiots, but their days may be numbered
“Nothing works in this country anymore,” has become a fashionable plaint. “Everything is broken.” Yes, but by whom? The answer, self-evidently, is: by the political class. An arrogant, entitled, instinctively authoritarian, but woefully incompetent, self-selecting pseudo-elite has hijacked the commanding heights in all our institutions, with results that we all see.
The establishment religion is Net Zero, an obvious fantasy, in pursuit of which our virtue-signalling politicians are taxing us beyond a sustainable level, damaging our entire economic infrastructure and impoverishing ordinary citizens. Since imminent elections focus political minds, we have just witnessed Rishi Sunak offering a few desperate concessions on Net Zero – the ban on sales of petrol and diesel cars postponed to 2035, ditto a ban on new oil and gas boilers, no tax on meat (only a totalitarian government would even have considered it) – kicking the can down the road when, instead, the can should be sent to the crusher.
This was Sunak’s road to Damascus, via Uxbridge. The only significant point about it was the realisation that the public will no longer tolerate the elite’s superstitious self-indulgence. This hair-shirt extravagance was not even devised by a prime minister, but by a prime minister’s unelected wife. Boris is spluttering in outrage, but voters should note this supposed reset of policy is only a change in timetable and that Sunak describes proposals to abandon Net Zero as “extreme”.
Unveiled behind the Tories’ new, indigestible slogan “Long-term decisions for a brighter future” – Aw, puleeze! – this transparent effort at conning the electorate shows the establishment is worried. Sunak observed that the Tories “seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-working families”. By George, he’s got it! What a perceptive aperçu: you have to get up pretty early in the morning – pretty early! – to steal a march on Rishi Sunak.
“We are going to change the way our politics works,” babbled the penitent Sunak. “We are going to make different decisions.” There, there, there. Indeed we are, Rishi, but you and your charlatan party will not be involved. As nanny used to say, before her role was usurped by the state, Mr Sorry comes too late.
This attack of pre-election fright by the Conservatives, whose behaviour for the past 13 years can only be described as kamikaze, changes nothing. Even today, the Entitled Ones in Sunak’s own party and across the green coalition are denouncing these minimal concessions to public opinion. Would we also be right in thinking that those most aggressively demanding that people of modest means be forced to install £15,000 heat pumps and abandon motoring belong to the upper end of the not-short-of-a-bob-or-two spectrum?
The will of the governed counts for nothing, in the eyes of our entitled rulers. Secure in the knowledge that the blame for this state of affairs is rightly going to obliterate the Conservative Party at next year’s general election, the Labour leader feels free to plan, openly and unashamedly, in concert with Emanuel Macron – a more proximate enemy of this country than Vladimir Putin – Britain’s reincorporation into the European Union, from which the British electorate opted to depart.
The Rejoin agenda is now overt, since Labour believes that, with the Tories in the electoral killing bottle, the voters have no option other than to return it to government. Then it can do anything it likes. Cue that tired mantra of Tory grandees, on the innumerable occasions when they were betraying their supporters, “They have nowhere else to go.” The emergence of UKIP and, later, the Brexit Party suspended that state of affairs; but the legacy parties believe that normality, in the form of one social democratic party, nominally divided into two, has returned, with the unchallengeable monopoly on power that settlement confers.
The EU has embarked on a frog-boiling exercise, proposing to split its empire into four tiers, on the calculation that governments can get away with luring their populations into the least committed form of associate membership, to be followed later by progressive integration, until full membership arrives. However, like so many Baldrick cunning plans originating in Brussels, it could backfire horribly.
Member states that are increasingly Eurosceptic would have difficulty in persuading their populations to take the psychologically daunting leap out of EU membership; but it would be much easier for a seriously disenchanted government among, say, the Visegrád states to persuade its electorate to vote for a change to the next tier, just short of full membership.
The danger for Brussels is that a graduated system of entry can also serve as a graduated system of exit. Labour seems oblivious to the reality that the EU is in deep crisis and now facing an existential threat over immigration. Labour wants to bring into Britain a quota of unwanted EU arrivals. Why not? It is Liberty Hall here in the UK: liberal dogma says that anyone who is poorer than the average British subject – which is the majority of the world’s population – should be admitted to this overcrowded island.
The history of enforced mass immigration into Britain – enforced by the gagging of free speech and the liberal consensus across the legacy parties – amounts to a paradigm of the elites’ abuse of power on all issues. Our entire culture and demography was changed, against the public will, for such responsible purposes as “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity” (cf. Andrew Neather), under Tony Blair. The Tories have been worse: Sunak is still ratcheting up legal immigration, to please crony capitalists averse to paying their employees a decent wage.
Those who have been running the country over the past two decades have not only wrecked our demography and society, they have destroyed health care. The NHS, the great golden calf of liberal cultists, is a smoking ruin. One person in seven in England and Wales is waiting for treatment; nurses and doctors routinely strike, as casually as car workers at Dagenham in pre-Thatcher days, not in pursuit of any clinical improvements, but for larger salaries, despite the parlous state of the post-Covid NHS and heedless of detriment to patients.
Granted, the Hippocratic oath became meaningless after abortion was legalised, but today’s extreme indifference to patient welfare is chilling. Yet, amid this chaos and universal shortages, the NHS bureaucracy is planning to create three new departments, which will have nothing to do with curing patients but are designed to impose a woke police state in medicine. The three proposed new departments – Equality Diversity and Inclusion, People and Culture, and People and Communities – will employ 244 people, including at least 177 staff earning at least £50,000 and 18 senior officials on six-figure salaries, to a total of almost £14m.
This comes at a time when the government is supposedly cutting excess NHS staff and resisting woke nonsense in the service. What is health secretary Steve Barclay doing? He is reported as being “frustrated”. Britain does not need a frustrated health secretary: it needs one who will instantly investigate whether he has the direct power to intervene and prevent this outrage and, if it transpires he does not, to secure an immediate statutory instrument to prohibit it, having made clear that, as soon as he is confident of his powers, all contracts will be cancelled and the posts abolished. A health service that prioritises pronouns over cancer is an obscenity.
All the pillars of our society are rotten. The police are now a feral band of entitled thought police, deeply politicised thugs, as we saw in West Yorkshire, when they dragged an autistic teenage girl from a cupboard under the stairs in her own home, to arrest her for a “public order” hate crime. Our police are now also on-the-hoof legislators: they have decriminalised burglary, having solved only 3 per cent of cases, and are in the process of similarly legalising shoplifting. That will leave them more time to pursue their priorities: “hate crime”, pronoun misuse and Christian preachers.
The paradox is that we live in an authoritarian state, but we do not seem to have a government. In every sphere immemorially regarded as the responsibility of government, our supposed rulers are impotent. They are helpless to keep the King’s peace domestically by repressing crime, or to defend the nation militarily, the prime purpose of governance, since they have dismantled our armed forces. At a time of 1930s-level geopolitical menace, they are still reducing the Army, while our aircraft carriers have hardly any aircraft and, since they are not equipped with catapults (why?), cannot deploy more modern jets.
It is baffling why Vladimir Putin is giving himself a bloody nose in Ukraine when he could simply walk into Britain, unopposed except by jobsworths demanding Ulez charges on his tanks and lunatics jabbering about being misgendered. Remainers keep claiming that, because of Brexit, Britain is a laughing stock. We are indeed a laughing stock, but it has nothing to do with Brexit, our sole positive achievement of the past thirty years.
We are governed by fools. Every authoritative institution in the country is in the hands of clowns who think there are more than a hundred sexes, that open borders are a perfectly practical proposition that will increase prosperity and that the family is “oppressive”. If we do not remove every last one of them, sooner rather than later, this lunatic asylum will crumble into bankrupt anarchy.
The first to go will be the Tories: that is the one reform that is a certainty. Delaying net zero impositions by five years will not save them: their names are woven into Madame Defarge’s knitting. That means a Labour government that will actively aggravate all the damage done by the Tories and attempt to dupe us into re-entry into the EU, but, so fast is that doomed project disintegrating – the sight of the serially incompetent Ursula von der Leyen, destroyer of the German armed forces, on the island of Lampedusa said it all – there may soon be little left to rejoin.
The irreducible problem is this: because the self-limiting pool of the political class is teeming with scoundrels, idiots and cowards, the traditional parliamentary system on which we have long relied may no longer be viable. There are only three possible outcomes to this situation. The first is the emergence of a third party, necessarily led by Nigel Farage since only he has the track record and charisma to generate sufficient support. If public rage against the legacy parties became a strong enough tide to lift that craft over the sandbar of first-past-the-post, then a solution would be possible.
The second possibility, in a worsening crisis, would be a radical reordering of the parliamentary system, enforced by the will of a desperate public, making MPs and civil servants directly accountable to the electorate, with all major decisions subject to national referenda and recall of MPs made easier. Hungary, much abused by Brussels for following its own course – and succeeding – has made public consultation a routine part of the political landscape. We need to follow suit.
Since, however, the whole coalition of parliamentarians, mainstream media, lobby groups, civil service and the apparatus of the deep state will resist any such reforms to the last ditch, no historian, viewing the present crisis through the prism of past experience, could rule out the third possibility: revolution. There are some indications that Britain is in a pre-revolutionary state. Once every available government has not simply lost the confidence of the governed, but become hated by them, revolution cannot be completely discounted.
Whatever form it might take, it is still some time away, though time has a habit of accelerating in the run-up to great convulsions. The vacuum that is principally causing this instability is Parliament, now widely distrusted by the public. When pompous Sir Bufton puffs out his chest and prates about “the privileges of this House”, as happened with such tedious regularity during the Commons’ attempt to reverse the popular will, as expressed in a referendum, he should pause to reflect.
With every major institution, from the Monarchy and the Church, to the core element of stable society, the family, abused and disrespected, in a “woke” climate to which MPs have massively contributed, why would a sceptical populace uniquely spare Parliament from its contempt? Especially when most of the problems from which the public is suffering can be traced back to the denizens of the slime-green benches.
We have reached a tipping point. If government does not begin to reflect the will of the people it governs – in much more substantial ways than deferring installation of heat pumps – in an age of intemperate passions, we cannot rule out the possibility that Parliament may no longer be seen as indispensable. We may need radically new forms of governance and that necessity could generate creative possibilities. Nothing is for ever and it would behove honourable members to remind themselves of that reality, before they continue to abuse and gag the British people beyond the limits of tolerance.
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