“If you have tears…” Into the proliferating categories of victimhood demanding special protection, legally privileged status and statutorily enforced ascendancy over their fellow citizens comes a new claimant to PC compassion: the politician.
It appears the political class is being subjected to unacceptable (a classic establishment term) abuse, vituperation and intimidation. MPs and parliamentary candidates are at the sharp end of this persecution, but all participants in what is still called, without a scintilla of irony, “the democratic process” are at risk.
Diane Abbott is leading the charge in denouncing those who are disrespecting their rulers. The fact that this ridiculous person is in Parliament tells us all we need to know about the state of public life in Britain today. The fact that she and her colleagues perceive themselves as deserving of respect reveals the depth of the delusory state in which the discredited political elite is enveloped.
What is a politician? “Someone who selflessly aspires to public service,” chorus the assorted moat-cleansers, duck-house proprietors and second-home mortgagees who govern us. They have imbibed their own pompous propaganda to the point where they now believe it.
When the inhabitants of the Westminster bubble peer into the looking glass they see tribunes of the people engaged in statesmanlike debate within the historic cockpit of the nation. When the hapless citizens they misgovern survey the same scene they see thieves and hypocrites wallowing in entitlement in the cesspit of the nation.
What is politics? It is the acquisition, retention and exercise of power. It is the imposition of the will of a tiny minority upon the rest of society. For that reason it has always been fiercely contested. Historically, the price of failure in a power contest was death. For centuries, political careers that ended in failure (as Enoch Powell famously claimed all did) were formally terminated on Tower Hill or at Tyburn.
The whining Entitled Ones who claim today they are being subjected to unprecedented violence – mostly verbal – by an intolerant public know no history. They are ignorant of the conduct of the London mob in Queen Anne’s day, of the cracked skulls and deadly violence of 18th and 19th-century elections, even of the lesser contentions caricatured by Dickens in the Eatanswill election. It was long an axiom that those who aspired to rule others must expect to face hazards.
In Britain’s historical chronicle there then occurred an untypical interlude when the preoccupations of governing an Empire, coinciding with the expansion of the franchise to universal suffrage, created a period of calm bolstered by the two-party system. In 1965, when MPs made the intoxicating discovery they could thumb their noses at public opinion by forming a cross-party alliance and abolishing capital punishment against the will of the nation, that consensus ended, though few people were conscious of the fact at first.
Since then, British political history has been a record of consensual tyranny by the combined political class. This infamous cross-party alliance has enabled a handful of people, fewer than a thousand in number, to impose their increasingly leftist-liberal prejudices upon the nation. At first they picked off significant minorities – e.g. rural sporting communities – in isolation. Then the trickle of despotism became a tsunami.
Bans on hunting and on smoking, the creation of “hate” laws to gag free speech, the ending of equality under the law by the attribution of “protected characteristics” to minorities and the introduction of ideologically defined “aggravated offences”, the redefinition of marriage without a manifesto commitment, the reordering of the royal succession on the back of an envelope – all amounting to a radical reconfiguration of British society by a handful of MPs, often on the initiative of a “Conservative-led” government – these were the serial provocations that alienated the public, further aggravated by the parliamentary expenses scandal.
But more outrageous than all these fleabites were the subjection of the United Kingdom to an alien jurisdiction in Brussels and the imposition of a deranged policy of mass immigration with the irresponsible aim “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Nothing more dramatically illustrates the total unfitness of the political class to govern than that frivolous destruction of the national culture and extravagant distortion of Britain’s demography. Why did they do it? Because they could.
The EU referendum result called time on the unaccountable activities of the political class. On the morning of 24 June 2016 Britain’s political oligarchy was granted a momentary insight into its own impotence. Time and an ingrained sense of entitlement have emboldened it to attempt a recovery of its lost authority.
Incongruous notions of retaining an archipelago of meaningless and incompatible vestiges of the EU – Single Market membership, EEA membership, Euratom, etc – combined with a self-deluding narrative that opposition to free movement of people has “softened” are persuading the whipped curs that they can regain mastery of the mutinous electorate.
They are making a potentially fatal miscalculation. The electorate is preoccupied with holidays and other activities of normal people. It is not, for the moment, interested in Brexit negotiations. Eventually, however, it will turn to the politicians and ask why they have not executed the electoral mandate they were given to lead Britain out of the EU. If all the foot-dragging, crypto-Remainer political class can show is a shambles there will be serious trouble.
Any attempt by politicians to ring-fence themselves with protective laws, increased privileges and further repression of free speech must be fiercely interdicted by the public. MPs need to be subjected to more scrutiny, not less. They must be made more accountable. Embarking on a political career should be an obstacle course, not a cakewalk. All politicians should be viewed with suspicion rather than respect or indulgence.
They aspire to rule us, at a time when the state has usurped a grossly extravagant degree of intervention in every area of people’s lives. We have reached the point where parents may not take their sick child abroad for medical treatment without NHS doctors and the courts attempting instead to take his life. This tide must be rolled back and the first move should be to restore politicians to the lowly status to which they hypocritically pay lip service: public servants.