Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.
I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren’t crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?
It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that “Read more” button, you may rather quickly want to read less. Still here? Okay then here goes.
When I was a child, there were two recognisably distinct working classes. There was the official “working class”, who wore cloth caps, who left school at fourteen, did manual labour, drank beer, went to football matches (where they stood on concrete terraces), and who didn’t just vote Labour. They were Labour. The Labour Party was a vast social institution, with vibrant branches throughout the land, and you would no more switch to the Conservatives because of a bit of nasty economic weather than you would have switched over to the Germans during the war merely because your sergeant-major was a heartless swine. Remember all those black and white movies starring people like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay?
Likewise the Conservatives. When I was young they were a similarly huge organisation. Biggest marriage bureau in the land, they were called. There was a definitely middle – as distinct from an upper – class, of “deferential” office clerks and senior manual labourers. But the aristocracy and bosses to whom the slightly more affluent and trusted workers deferred still ruled their roosts, and the massed ranks of the Conservative Party looked up to them, and aped their manners and mannerisms. I can never think of the Conservative Party of those days without thinking of another movie, Genevieve, in which office workers, thanks to their newly acquired but extremely second-hand cars, were able to play at being aristocrats.
But those movies also told a different story, of what was to come. Freedom was in the air. Not all the cars were aristocratically ancient. Suddenly the movies became openly anti-conformist, colourfully cynical about everything. Two huge transformations got under way. A culture war which started in the fifties, exploded in the sixties and which has been raging ever since, cut the deference from under the old Conservative grandees and caused them to be mocked instead of imitated, and as for the old manual labour Working Class … well, it just melted away, went to Asia. Locally, it either smartened itself up and got itself a job pushing paper and talking over the phone, or it gave up and went on the dole.
The results were the Thatcher and Blair eras, which historians will probably come to regard as the same thing. What happened was that British voters were becoming much more alike. Not identical. Not all equally poor or equally rich, but definitely more like one another. Their ambitions, tastes and problems were converging. They tended to like the same (now televised) entertainments, to dress similarly, to do similar jobs, to live in similar houses, to have similar ambitions – not to the point where a rich manager of a big corporation is indistinguishable from a toiler in an office half a dozen rungs below him, or to the point where a good Oxbridge degree no longer counts for anything, but more so than had been the case before. Politically, there are now fewer people who define themselves as being Labour or being Conservative. They are more willing to switch, from one party to another, none of whom seem precisely to represent how they feel and what they believe in any more, not least because party politicians are now far more rarely sighted by regular people, other than on the television. And many more of those Oxbridge (and similar places) winners in the meritocratic race to the top will be liable to vote Labour, because of their ancestry or their newly acquired opinions, and because much of the modern media have now become a huge “left wing” stronghold ruled by “left wing” grandees (the quotes being because such titans are unrecognisably different from the old leaders of the old working class). Many toiling wage slaves, who wear suits but who still toil, with no ancestral Labour loyalties or leftish opinions, will willingly vote Conservative, if they offer a better deal.
As I say, you can exaggerate all this. I still buy timber from people who have permanent dirt under their finger nails, having walked to the shop past other grubby toilers putting pipes into holes. Grandees are still very grand. But so were my grandfathers, and I’m not. And who knows what the kids of the guy who cut up my timber for me last month may already be doing? Besides which, such is the nature of first-past-the-post democracy that if only, say, ten or twenty per cent of the electorate switch from being solid Labour or solid Conservative to people who will go either way or some other way, depending, that’s a potential landslide, to somebody. That’s humiliation, for somebody. The phrase tipping point is hard to avoid here, and why bother?
All the parties now try to be all things to all men, far more than was the case fifty years ago. In those days, the thoughtless cliché was that politicians were “all alike”, when in truth they were alike only in being comparable but distinct sorts of disappointment to their own distinct armies of supporters. They all told lies, but different lies depending on which party they were. Now, they really are much more alike, a trend recently described in detail by Peter Oborne in his book The Triumph of the Political Class. Oborne describes a switch from a world in which Labour MPs had much in common with Labour voters generally, but far less with their Conservative opponents, Conservative MPs ditto, to a world in which all the MPs are, pretty much, on the same side as one another. Politicians used to get their money from their supporters. Now, they get it from, well, politics. It used to be that one lot said of government spending: more! The other lot said: less! They actually disagreed, at least in what they said. Now they all say: no more than we can afford, but no less. They agree. The circles of the Venn diagram have moved together, and all party politics – “grown-up” party politics – is now done in the area of overlap.
It’s a point I almost certainly owe to Oborne’s book (which I read some months ago but have now forgotten most of the fine detail of) that Winston Churchill, regarded by most as a very old-fashioned figure, what with his aristocratic ancestry and his antique mannerisms, was actually, from this point of view, a rather modern figure. He made his entire living from politics, and from political commentary and political writing. When young he did soldiering, sort of, but always with a newspaper contract and with an eye to a seat in the Commons. Once there, he had millionaire businessman friends who bank-rolled him. He switched parties when younger. But, that distinct Churchillian public persona still reflected a political world in which the classes were sharply divided, even if Churchill himself was an early member of that political class that Oborne has written about. Harold MacMillan, the Tony Blair of his day, was a similarly modern type. Now, they are all like that, or try to be.
What this means is that modern British party politics is a furious race to get just that bit ahead of the other fellows, and thereby win the whole farm. If that ten or twenty or whatever it is percent of merely rational voters, the fabled swing voters whom all the parties now court so desperately, decide that, for all your obvious faults, you are just that tiny bit less frightful than those other snouts-in-the-trough swine, then you stand to win hugely, in one of those seismic upheavals.
But, do not confuse such a landslide with being deeply respected or, heaven help you, loved. The cause of the landslide is not depth of feeling, and certainly not in your favour. It is merely a widespread judgement that you and your pals are, for the time being, likely to be a bit less incompetent, a bit less predatory, a bit more canny and a bit less panic-stricken by the unexpectedness of the unexpected than those other bastard losers.
A final point, which is that I am not describing a Final Point, some kind of local and party political end to history. A pattern in politics – in anything, come to that – is no sooner widely understood than it is ready to be smashed. I can remember when people talked, in the late 1950s, about the “end of ideology”, of how the Welfare State had been set up by Labour and accepted by the Conservatives, and that, pretty much, was that. Only months after that, all kinds of ideological hell was breaking loose which is only now subsiding half a century later as the Baby Boom that unleashed it finally sinks into its dotage. No sooner has the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron age been identified as its own distinct age, than some wholly new confluence of forces will erupt to knock the smug looks off the faces of the entire Political Class as we now know them, and replace the whole damn lot of them with wholly other sorts of politicians, perhaps with dirt under their finger nails. Perhaps politics will suddenly reassemble itself along generational lines, with the Baby Boom demanding more terminal care than workers feel inclined to bestow upon it. Some new rough beast will slouch towards Bethlehem, as it always does. Maybe Cameron will win a huge majority, but then, … something quite different will happen, and that Cameron decade that he must already be anticipating and hoping only to prolong will elude him.
Perhaps the EU will actually inform Britain, publicly, clearly, that it now rules it, and that merely British elections really do indeed now count for absolutely nothing, and maybe the British people will accept that, which will change things rather, will it not? Or maybe they won’t accept it, ditto. Perhaps Labour will now pull themselves together and replace Gordon Brown with someone less off-putting, and we will enter a time not of Thatcher Mark 3, but of permanent, Italianate, John Majorism stroke Gordon Brownism, in which all politicians without exception are permanently hated and permanently despised. Perhaps there will be a new Peasants Revolt (Peasants Revolts always happen just when, and just because, nobody expects them, not even the Peasants). Perhaps the Chinese and the Americans will have a war, and we will have to go back to our fellow countrymen sewing our clothes and assembling our MP3s and mobile phones, and there will be real workers again, saying Eee Bah Goom to each other and voting Labour no matter what. Perhaps Dagenham will be the epicentre of a thermo-nuclear explosion, with who knows what party political ramifications. Perhaps a new Ice Age will suddenly start, or a new plague will sweep the world. Perhaps Scottish independence will (a) soon happen, with (b) all kinds of dramatic and unpredictable knock-on effects, such as England leaving the EU but not Scotland. Or Wales.
But in the meantime, party politically speaking, things are, I think, as I have described them.
Excellent essay, Brian (yes I did read the entire thing.)
Would you object if the LA wanted to publish it?
I may link to it in the meantime from the blog (you can’t prevent me doing that anyway, and also I have been chastised (to my chagrin) by our commentariat for not “linking enough”!) but your piece merits wider circulation. If you and/or the other Samizdatistas agree, i would be pleased to forward it for publication.
I took the liberty of adding, about two thirds of the way down, some twenty minutes or so after first posting this piece, the following:
“It used to be that one lot said of government spending: more! The other lot said: less! They actually disagreed, at least in what they said. Now they all say: no more than we can afford, but no less. They agree. The circles of the Venn diagram have moved together, and all party politics – “grown-up” party politics – is now done in the area of overlap.”
It’s a point I have long wanted to include in something, and could not bear to miss it out from this, which is definitely where it belongs.
David Davis
Yes, please republish this in any way you please.
Being a child of the current epoch (Thatcher-Blair-Cameron?), but also somewhat aware of how politics worked beforehand, I concur heartily with the above.
Never has “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.” been truer. It is the source of much of the apathy that infects the electorate. Why vote when the parties are all the same? Something seismic needs to happen and soon.
I think the most interesting part of your excellent post is in your description of how the two major parties have come together, to dance together upon the head of a middle-ground pin. Because there is now so little to differentiate the two parties, it has become much more about personalities and haircuts than it has about policies and ideology. People ‘liked’ Tony Blair, so they voted for him, and now they ‘don’t like’ Gordon Brown, so they’re going to vote against him and for the other bloke (who looks a lot like Tony Blair). Increased volatility is, I think, a major symptom of style over substance. Imagine that previously there were people who liked sponge and custard and those who liked rhubarb pie and cream. Now we have 150 different flavours of ice-cream, which are all essentially the same except for slightly different colours and tastes. When you walk up to the ice-cream bar, you can never make up your mind which one to choose, so you go with whatever everyone else is having. The style leaders thus become the most important group in society, hence the massive influence of the Westminster village media in telling us which way to vote. That so many of them personally liked Bonson Jorris and disliked Kenneth Herringbone, perhaps tells its own story as to why Bonson managed to overturn a bought-and-paid-for socialist electorate, in London.
I think the other important factor is the size of the government-employee voting bloc. All democratic parties now need to pander to this bloc of tax consumers, as well as to the private sector bloc of tax creators. Thus we reach a force-field stasis of the politically acceptable amount of tax that the state can extract from the tax creators. Mr Brown started out last autumn with a winning electoral position and is now in an unwinnable electoral position because he got this stasis wrong, with his 10p tax band problems. Now that people have stopped liking him over this tax treatment detail, it’s going to prove impossible to get people to start liking him again, so if the Labour party don’t want to suffer a landslide defeat they are going to have to appoint David Milliband as leader, yet another Tony Blair clone. And then the Tories will have a competition on their hands, where they can fight over who has the best ‘Tony Blair’.
Though once again, does it matter in the slightest? We have the emergence of four world empires, with the US, the EU, the Chinese, and the Russians. The Russians will probably amalgamate with the EU, and then we will have three world empires. Perhaps one world empire will emerge from this, but I think this will be brief because it will be so chaotic that it will almost immediately collapse, due to the inability of socialism to calculate.
Thus, democracy doesn’t just give us guaranteed socialism, as Professor Hoppe might put it, it also gives us a direct road to a Nineteen Eighty-Four style serfdom.
It is not the nature of democracy and its ever decreasing circles that we therefore need to be discussing. We need to be discussing how we can get rid of it and replace it with something much better; i.e. the voluntary society. But then, as a Rothbardian, you would perhaps be expecting me to say that! 🙂
Mr Davis is right.
It’s a long slog for a blog-post but well worth it.
You swine Brian, you’ve delayed my lunch!
I would just like to add something though. I see New Labour’s implosion as being inevitable. The parallels with the John Major government are inescapable. Is it even vaguely possible that people will see those two as excamples of how the wheel always comes off and that government (of whatever shade) is the essential problem?
I think it has a lot to do with our electoral system- i live in a safe labour seat (Leeds Central), my parents live in a safe Tory seat (Blaby). Neither party has any intrest in engaging with voters in those seats, they will never change hands no matter how much campaigning is conducted in them (well you get a few more BNP or UKIP voters). This means that a relativly few voters in relativly few Constituencies actually matter – so the politicians talk to these people instead. This can also lead to massive swings on just a few percentage point changes
I blame anthropogenic political warming caused by massive amounts of super-heated air rising from the centers of government. This in turn causes rapid runaway shifts in the political climate which, if left unchecked will result in a catastrophic rise in the global levels of bullshit. The only solution, posited by all parties, except the heretical Libertarians, is massive tax increases, with the monies to go for publicly funded re-election campaigns for the incumbents.
What I got from Brian’s post is that the reason the two parties are becoming indistinguishable, is the disappearance of socio-economic classes as they were known in Britain for the past couple of centuries or so. If that is correct, for me it begs the question: is there any kind of a new class system that may be emerging? Or is it going to be the political class that Brian has mentioned (which I guess must include a few very rich and well connected, who are not nominally politicians), and everyone else for a long while? It is also interesting to consider how much of Brian’s analysis applies to the US.
Worth reading just for that sentence.
In the US we have the much the same happening between Republicans and Democrats, at least the type of each that the “swing voters” eventually vote for. I think two things are contributing to homogenity of our two party systems – the advancement of information flow and the success of the State overall over the last several decades in insinuating itself into people’s lives, and the compromises made by the parties to do so, according to their resepective manifestos.
With the explosion of information outlets, old ideas are displaced more quickly, the “memes” aren’t fixed as they used to be. People could hold on to dear old beliefs and pass them from generation to generation. When all one had was a slanted newspaper as their source of information, ideas remained entrenched. Now beliefs are under attack nearly every day. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as it makes the individual more well rounded, but resolute. It is a bad thing if people merely throw up their hands and ask mother government to think for them.
Unfortunately, that’s where we seem to be with so many people, and that dovetails with the second reason why there is a lessening of differences between the parties. They’ve both come to the conclusion that they will compromise on 90%+ of activities, they’ve bargained between each other as to how to run people’s lives without much competition, and so have grown like each other, especially to gain the swing voters. Those people who are firmly Democrat or Republican vote as they always will, 50% abstain, leaving the 15-20% swing voters who vote on whims and what the media serves up. THEY are the ones who rush headlong over the short bridge that separates the two parties, and carry they day.
Billll, that sounds like a load of fux collectvtist debt trashing (if you know what I mean).
Good luck waiting for something ‘seismic’ to happen. The British people haven’t done seismic since Cromwell and probably never will again.
I honestly think that most people see such a small difference between the two main parties that no-one really gives a flying one who gets in and all elections are used for is to givel whoever’s out of favour a smack on the wrist and told to stand in the corner for a term or two.
All this is fine – as long as the British public gets its bread and circuses, although with the cost of food going up, it may be different this time.
But not too much – we wouldn’t want anything to change too much, would we?
Alisa has hit a very telling point on the similarity of the changes in functions of “parties” in the two major forms of representative government (government with the consent of the governed); the U S and Great Britain (dares’t one still say U K?).
Brian’s observations seem to indicate that (as in the U S) parties now function only as vehicles for the egos and idealisms of individuals to achieve some form of public significance.
It appears there are no longer any distinctive forms of “party cohesion” for methodologies of governance in either nation.
This resulting similarity, following on very different economic and cultural developments is rather curious, given the differences in the “ingredients” of the major party formations – that is, the circumstances out of which each arose in each country.
Perhaps, as many of those of libertarian bent suspect, this condition results from a commonality of apathy (or seduction) of the electorates which have been expanded more rapidly than their capacity to deal with being governed.
As Brian notes, this may give way to less representative governance from the EU for Britian. Heaven knows (or or trying to figure out) what it augers for the U S.
Oh! as for “seduction,” nothing puts it better than Ross Perot did (Gad! was it that long ago?):
“They’re bribin’ ya with y’r own money”
You’re right Brian that the class structure has changed radically, certainly in my lifetime. The most working class people I know run their own businesses. Ok, they’re self-employed builders who employ the wife and kids and band together with their mates to build a house here or a do makeover there, or contract out to a larger company on bigger jobs.
The middle class work in the city. Ok, they work for credit card companies and debt consolidation companies and lend everyone the money to buy the products and services the rest of us want.
Then there’s the administration class that writes reports for each other and for the governing class.
Add in the underclass, (or welfare class), and the super rich and you’ve just about covered it.
The thing that these people have in common is that, objectively, in the words of an old politician, they’ve never had it so good so they are heavily invested in the status quo.
In my view, there are only two things which can cause the people to switch votes on a massive scale. The first, and the major driving force in the coming rejection of nulab, is that this lot have had their turn. They’ve become tired and stale. A bit of a joke. Let’s give the other lot a go.
The other incentive is fear. I don’t think this is playing a major part at the moment, despite the rumblings of recession or the price of oil.
So there you have it. We don’t really give a shit who runs the country, either here or in Brussells, as long as we keep getting our bread and circuses.
This time we’ll vote for change, as long as the change is cosmetic and doesn’t interfere with the important things in our lives.
Maybe Gordon’s goose was cooked when England failed to qualify for Euro 2008.
(This comment may contain cynicism)
is there any kind of a new class system that may be emerging?
Inner party, outer party and proles, perhaps?
Spot on. The speed of information dissemination is inversely proportional to our (therefore rapidly reducing) global “regional” differences.
Yes, I read it all too…good informative prose & yes there has been confluence in so much more than just politics…so much so that with little to choose between we have sunk into the most dangerous morass of all…Apathy.
The most horrifying quote from the main body of the essay is this:
Brian –
An excellent piece – and yes, I did read it all.
One picayune point – I don’t think the really big cultural change started in the Fifties. It was, at the least, in the middle of the War. Waugh identified already in the first edition of Brideshead as “Hooperism”.
SteveShark –
The British people haven’t done seismic since Cromwell and probably never will again.
Really? I’d call 1689 pretty “seismic”, wouldn’t you? And that was some 30 years after Cromwell was dead.
Perhaps it depends on what one means by “the British people.”
Exactly. I blame science and technology. Not to worry, though: the current state of S&T education (or rather the lack of it), combined with the Green Moonbattery, will mitigate this problem in short order.
Maybe “seismic” is too strong for this, but doesn’t the Atlee government count as well? It seems like Britain changed quite a bit during and especially just after the war. It does seem unlikely to change again, however.
As for the Thatcher majority, I’m under the impression that she wasn’t actually all that popular, but was seen as the least bad among three options, the other two being almost unthinkably odious. I’m not British, so someone please set me straight if I’ve got that wrong. The point is that she won by default more than on the wave of a popular mandate, no? And the UK saved itself from real Socialism almost by accident. Which is largely true of the US as well, actually.
What does “Eee Bah Goom” mean?
“…the UK saved itself from real Socialism…. which is largely true of the US as well, actually.”
Perhaps you’d like to re-think that particular little thought Joshua?! 😉
Mugabe tells Zimbabweans to say his name when voting, and the country is going backwards. We say his name backwards (Ee-Buy-Goom), and we go forwards!!! I think it’s some kind of magic word. Whatever, it seems to work!
It is what southern Englishmen imagine northern factory workers of blessed memory used to say a lot. The image of the northener is a man with a flat cap, who drinks beer, works in a factory, speaks with a rather unnattractive Lancashire or Yorkshire accent, believes in trade unions, Labour, and is thick as a lump of cement.
I like to think that in time, this image of the “northener” will fade.
E-Ba-Gum was a expression popularised by The Goodies, and used by Bill Oddie a lot. It is probably a variant of ‘By God!’, as an oath.
Blair and his cronies were all raving lefties in their youth. Successive Labour defeats and the fall of communism persuaded them to misrepresent themselves in order to get elected. That prudent genius Gordon stuck with Tory spending plans for the first two years in office making it very difficult for the opposition to pin on Labour the age-old accusation of profligate spending. Meanwhile the honeymoon of winning power combined with Blair’s charisma and the painful memories of long term “unelectability” kept the die hard lefties onside.
Of course the fullness of time has revealed what a thoroughly dishonest program it was all along. It has also revealed – surprise surprise – that a prolonged policy of rising taxes and government expenditure does eventually cripple a previously healthy economy.
Hopefully British politics may yet recover from the damage caused by a government with strong beliefs but with absolutely no integrity. This can only happen if people recognise that everything’s going pear-shaped because Gordon’s prudence has racked up crippling government and personal debt, wrecked a pensions industry that was the envy of the world and stunted the country’s economic development.
But all the signs are that Cameron takes his cue from Blair more than Thatcher. Instead of those of us who hang to the right being openly represented by a party favoring low taxes (i.e. 15 per cent of GDP), the best we’re offered is realistically more like a couple of percentage points lower than Labour (making the option low 40’s v high 40’s).
In a nutshell, Thatcher may have won the war with the Soviets (along with Reagan) and she may have won many battles in Britain with her election victories and the privatisation of council houses and entire industries. But in Britain, ideologically, she lost the war.
I think the parties have become indistinguishable because the Gramscian Project is now effectively complete. With their cultural hegemomy now in place, with all the institutions and power blocs of the state singing from the same hymn sheet, the politicians, who are both emanations of and subject to that hegemony, have no choice but to enact its values, while attempting to display superficial differences in order to gain a personal (or rather, party) advantage. Genuine diversity of opinion in all but the most trivial matters has been rendered not just unacceptable but literally unspeakable within the public sphere. The result is that politicians spend their time not thinking up distinctive policies, but trying to think up ways to conjure an illusion of having distinctive policies. The culture of spin is a consequence of this; it’s all marketing because the products are indentical.
A major problem with this is that the hegemonic value system imposed is entirely dysfunctional and causes great unhappiness in the populace. Any government enacting it (as any government is obligated to do) will become immensely unpopular as the people suffer and become unhappy. After some years of giving that government “a chance to make things better” the populace turn on them in fury and “put the other lot in” in the desperate hope of an improvement. But an improvement is impossible, so the cycle repeats, ad infinitum. Hence the landslide, pause, landslide effect.
The more change is talked about, the less there actually is. A Cameron government will be indistinguishable from the current shower of shite. It will deploy, or attempt to deploy anyway, some distinctive brand rhetoric, but that is all.
But this sort of echoes what Brian said. My point isn’t really what I’ve just written; it’s that people keep making the mistake that this is some kind of accidental thing, an evolutionary change, the development of the political class and convergence of the parties. It isn’t. It has been deliberately engineered on the post-marxist philosophical model. The governance has been deliberately, purposefully, separated from the government, and the government reduced to mere enactors of the policies decided by the extra-governmental governance nebula, which now resides all around but external to the thing we still call the government. The government no longer governs. Is it any wonder that voting is a complete waste of time?
Excellent post, interesting comments.
Ian B writes:
Possibly he refers to the go-betweens to our proxy gumment, the parthenogenetic Whitehall Bureaucracy, which receives its orders from Brussels & ‘advises’ its respective faux-ministers what they have to do.
We are deep in Eurofoecal matter & the longer we ignore our plight the more difficult will be our self-extrication, should we have the nous or will.
Such, incredibly, is the blind acceptance by the sloth-in-the-street of foreign rule..…for that is what it is…that good friends around the World are preparing to write us off as a nation…or anything of import.
…with a whimper!
permanentexpat-
It’s wider than the EU. The EU is more symptom than cause. The governance of Britain now resides in, yes tranzi orgs, but also in quangos, NGOs, pressure groups, faux charities, academia, the bureaucracy in general, nominally private companies such as Capita, institutions and bodies of all kinds. You’ll find only a small part of it in each place, often each isolated corpuscle seems insignifcant if considered individually. The effect is synergistic, the network byzantine.
But that’s why a scorched earth approach is probably required- if a government of liberty were ever to magically win an election, it would have to burn down much of the network at a fell swoop, destroying what it has the power to destroy (from the DTI to the BBC to OFCOM), snatching funding away from those parts it funds (from higher education to research to ASH to the MCGB to the WWF), severing the tentacles that connect the government to the rest of the network and so on, and, yes, leaving the EU and UN with all haste. It would be impossible to do piecemeal, unpicking the network a strand at a time.
But that’s probably an impossible dream, which is why we’re doomed.
Ian B, your main comment on this thread was superb.
Brian, nice piece. It does rather gell with “public choice” economics in a way; we have created a sort of full time political/consultant class that is in almost perfect balance against the private, wealth creating bit. But I also think there is something else: as our society has become a bit more individualistic (a good thing), people take a more consumerist approach to politics and are more willing to “shop around” for the politicians they like the look and sound of. So just with fads in fashion and consumer electronics, you get a similar process going on in the realm of political alliegance.
Ian B:
Much has happened in the UK since I packed my bags & ratted in 1974…a good career move, as they say.
It is with not the slightest regret that I admit that my self-imposed alienation deprived me of the on-the-spot insight into the details of the cancer nibbling at the wreck of Britain. Many of the organizations you mention were not extant in my days there although ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’, the seeds of our destruction had already been sown & judiciously watered in the fertile soil of green (just starting to take off) & pleasant (not) England.
I share your gloom and, having been at school at a time when much of the map was still coloured pink, I have also had my share of disappointments.
However, as Brian said, even in his terminal condition: “Always look on the bright side!” For example, although Communism is alive & well under a plethora of guises, there are two things on which I would have bet my life that I would never experience: The implosion of the USSR…and German ‘Wiedervereinigung’.
Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for us yet…although that, should it occur, I shall never live to see.
Ian B, a most excellent post. Much to think about there. I’m not sure the pathology is as advanced in the US, but we certainly seem to be going down the same path (minus the EU, of course, but there is serious talk about a North American Union, so how far behind can we be?).
Alisa:
Not that I actually know anything, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express once…
Two classes: people who are governed (or who submit to government authority or at least pretend to obey the civil law when someone is watching) and people who are not.
It clicked for me when I saw a post on another blog about a rave in a smaller country town. Hundreds of people were disturbed by the noise, and the police did…wait for it….nothing worth mentioning. Their “manager” said that it was due to health and safety reasons, that police work in the woods at night was unsafe or some such.
There was another story: a driver, of the group euphemistically called “Asian” in the UK press, got his license suspended. He got it back by claiming that he was polygamous and needed to drive back and forth between his wives.
Whether you think that raves and polygamy should be legal or not, a government that refuses to enforce its own laws or is incapable of doing so, effectively ceases to be a government.[1] Again, plenty of folks probably think this is a good thing. That’s neither here nor there. If UKGov can’t govern, someone will. And there are plenty of people who can be worse than the current regime if they can play to people’s fear of lawlessness.
I don’t know if the problem children are going to start a political party or not. They may not need to.
[1] Chicago, Illinois, USA, is fast headed for a very long, violent summer for much the same reason. The police can’t police in a legalistic society like the US, without the cooperation of the courts and prosecutors. Guess what they don’t have? It also doesn’t help that, in Chicago’s case, the criminal elements have more influence over the civil government (which controls the police) than anyone else.[2]
[2] Someone’s going to bring up the Pajamas Media article on a closely-related topic, I just know it. I’ve read it. It’s crap.
Landslides something new? Lloyd George? Attlee?
Some quick comments from a Yank:
No landslides here. UK politics is far more dynamic than U.S. politics. The 1994 switchover was the first major change in the House in 60 years. The vast majority of House seats are effectively uncontested, which is also true in state legislatures. This is due to elaborately tailored constituency maps. Also, the last four Presidential elections were very close.
However, one similarity: a lot of the more vehement views of both sides have been discredited, resulting in convergence on many issues. Labour has gone from pushing nationalization to executing privatization, for instance. (There are comparable trends in the U.S.)
Nice reading for someone living outside U.K.
Debt Consolidation