Today is Brexit Day, which is something to celebrate.
But to put it bluntly, the nation is an absolute mess. Levels of taxation and spending are insupportable. Pretty much every aspect of life is regulated by the state and its adjuncts. We have permitted speech, not free speech. Constitutional checks and balances abolished under Tony Blair have not been rolled back, in fact they have been expanded and deepened under a Tory government. The people responsible for mass abridgement of the most basic civil right 2020-2021 are still in politics and able to show their faces in public. The laughably named ‘Conservative’ Party has not only failed to fight the culture war, leading party members such as the risible Penny Mordaunt do not know what a woman is. Parliamentary democracy has in large part been replaced with a technocratic administrative blob, one that deposes Prime Ministers who question the high-status Guardian-reading consensus on almost anything. What remains of democratic politics has started to develop very dangerous sectarian elements in some parts of the country. And whilst the Tories arm of the ConLab blob have proven to be inept, inane, and malevolent, they are about to be replaced by a Labour government who will dial all of that up even further.
And yet…
On 23 June 2016, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even with every Parliamentary party supporting Remain, echoed by the majority of the mainstream media, the blob can be defeated. Never forget that.
Brexit was not the endpoint for anything, it was just the start of a long process of a great political and social realignment. Brexit was a prerequisite, a strategic battlefield shaping operation if you will. This will be a long struggle and it will get worse before it gets better. But it is a struggle that has to be fought and can be won.
You could have written:
That was not the end. It was not even the beginning of the end.
But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
I fought long and hard for BRExit as part of the Vote Leave campaign. From delivering leaflets, doorstep conversations, high street stalls and the rest I spent most of the spring and early summer campaigning.
In the end parliament did their very best to reject BRExit in it’s entirety and when couldn’t cancel it or repudiate it with their decidedly undemocratic “Second Referendum” (how very like other EU referendums the Blob didn’t like the democratic results of), they maxed out the costs and showed how spineless they where by the blob “advising” Treason May to accept every concession the EU demanded, even when it almost broke the Union.
I had some hope when Treason May was ousted and Boris elected, but the promises turned to ashes and he just basically enacted what Treason May had negotiated without much change in substance.
So while I will celebrate Independence Day, because at the very least we are out of the EU (for the time being), it is only with a heavy heart because so much money has been wasted in an unnecessary “divorce” settlement and so little of the gold-plated rules from the EU bureaucracy and civil juris laws that are alien to our common law have not been repealed.
All I can hope is that the EU collapses before we’re dragged back in by the Quislings of the Labour/Conservative party.
Ponder how many ‘f*ck offs’ there will be directly after the General Election. Last GE about 30 million people voted, of around 47 million registered.
If you guess that 20% of the votes will be for Reform (a gross simplification) then at least 6 million people will be bothered enough to vote against the two main parties. Add in the people who did not vote at all (for various reasons) of around 17 million, then 23 million people will be saying ‘f*ck offs’.
Any Party claims of stunning mandates should be discounted.
John Galt:
My understanding of Theresa May’s faux Brexit was that, in order to avoid any customs barriers between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the UK would have to stay in the single market. Boris Johnson’s brilliant idea was that GB could leave, by dint of erecting a customs barrier with NI instead, by any standards a constitutional abomination, but Boris has never done details. What Sunak’s “Windsor Framework” is meant to do is anyone’s guess.
The only sensible place for a customs border is between states, ie the UK and the Republic of Ireland. If we had stuck to that, the EU would have soon realised that a hard customs border was unnecessary. But we are governed by fools. QED.
The easiest solution is just no customs barrier. If the EU want to ban their citizens from buying UK goods, so what, that’s their business, but why should we ban our folk from buying foreign goods.
Economic and social (societal) collapse is now inevitable.
The question is what happens AFTER that collapse – as Argentina has shown us, economic collapse need NOT be the end of the story.
Unless we are saying that Argentinian society is capable of reform and British society is not capable of reform – which seems unlikely.
So there is a chance – although one of the great problems is that most dissent in the United Kingdom will soon be illegal, the Herbert Marcuse trick of declaring dissent “Repressive Tolerance” or “Hate Speech” because Freedom of Speech supposedly “harms disadvantaged and marginalised groups”.
The Argentine Peronists were rather ineffective at banning dissent – they certainly wanted to ban dissent, but they were very incompetent in terms of how they went about doing it.
I fear the British left-establishment (the idea that the establishment is any way conservative is wildly untrue) will be far more effective in banning dissent.
To those who, correctly, point out that we do not have Freedom of Speech now – true, but it is soon going to get vastly worse.
I was always wary that the Tories would make a mess of leaving the EU and then what they’d do afterwards. Even then I didn’t expect the current Tory government since 2019 to have been so godawful.
Still, the way Brexit (along with Donald Trump) exposed the derangement, effeminacy, extremism, misanthropy and class hatred of the centrist dads and the ‘sensibles’ has been priceless.
The root of the problem with BREXIT is that the original underlying problem was that the accession into the EU was essentially fraudulent from the beginning. Nobody ever stated clearly what the hell was being given up and what was going to be gained. Sovereignty matters, and nobody ever bothered to tell people that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were now going to be making the rules…
EU accession, so far as you can actually describe it with any honesty, was actually a coup against the electorate of the UK by the permanent floating bureaucracy. A slow-moving one, granted, but still a coup. There was never a legitimate or honest plebiscite taken until it was far past the point where it should have been, which was part and parcel of the coup: Present the people with a fait accompli.
The so-called “Conservatives” were never on-board with BREXIT. They thought that they were going to win the election on that one, not lose it. So, the idea that they went into it all with the intent of sabotaging it? Absolutely accurate. And, observe the present situation in the UK: They did this deliberately, and sacrificed the existence of the party to do so. Why? Because, my friends, they’re not really “Conservatives”: They’re actually part of the Labour/Tory/Whoever else permanent floating blob, who just cosplay their party positions to con the people. All the responsible Tories will land, cat-like, on their feet in some safe sinecure in the bureaucracy or as “political consultants”.
The same thing goes on, here in the US. There really and truly are no “political parties” any more; it’s all “interest groups” and 90% of the people “in government” are in it for themselves and the rest of the grifters.
Which is why I’ve concluded that you don’t just need term limits, you need limits on any sort of supervisory government service. 3-5 years, max… Anything more, and the bastards will corrupt it all. I’d also include “lobbying” as government service, BTW. We’ve all got rather too many “professional politicians” and “professional government bureaucrats”, and if you think that’s a crazy statement, please examine the service of J. Edgar Hoover and Anthony Fauci, then tell me that these assholes in permanent positions do a good job.
3 years over the course of a lifetime is plenty of “public service”. I’d even ban lawyers from making or voting on law; you want to be a lawyer and make money from gaming the legal system…? Fine; you don’t get to be either a judge or a legislator. Advise on the law? Maybe help with the language? Sure; excellent idea. Make it? Adjudicate it? Oh, hell no…
We should go back to the idea of judges as being less legal experts, and more there as “responsible adults” to ensure fairness and make rulings based not fantastic legal theories (sovereign immunity, anyone…?) but on common sense. 3 years, and you’re done.
I wouldn’t allow a dog-catcher to make a professional career of it. You can’t corrupt too much in that little time, so… Yeah.
We were taken into a political union with all those wonderful checks and balances. All the Blair constitutional improvements happened from a point of having those wonderful checks and balances.
Pete North has pointed out that the crown should be a guardian of our constitution and protect crown powers from being given away yet has failed to do so. Parliament can give away our powers or mess with the constitution at will. Our power begins and ends with general elections unless we are granted a referendum, that many describe as anathema to our system or advisory. As Pete points out, parliamentary sovereignty is part of the problem.
Stuart Noyes – I agree that Blackstone’s Divine Right of Parliament is as irrational as the Divine Right of Kings (and the American Founding Fathers were correct to reject Blackstone – and they did reject him, although modern textbooks cover that up), however, as you also make clear, the problem is not Parliament itself – but its giving away power to the bureaucracy, both the Civil Service and to independent agencies (such as “Ofcom” the censorship people, or the monetary debauchers of the Bank of England).
Lord Chief Justice Hewart warned Parliament against this in his 1929 book “The New Despotism” – but his warnings have been ignored.
Every matter is reacted to the same way by Parliament (or by those who control it) – “let us set up an independent body to deal with it” – the spell of Plato, government by “enlightened experts”.
The “independent body” is really accountable to no one (by design) – and it “deals with the problem” by lots of arbitrary edicts.
It is an utterly terrible system of government – and, sadly, it is not confined to the United Kingdom.
For example, the Constitution of Texas carefully limits the powers of the Governor and the State Legislature – but not of the various boards and agencies that now rule.
Officials elected by no one – indeed with hardly anyone knowing who they are, and ruling by arbitrary edicts – that is modern governance.
19th century Senator Roscoe Conkling was correct – if elected people can not hire and fire the officials then responsible government has been subverted, it has become a myth.
“But elected politicians being able to hire and fire the staff leads to corruption” – perhaps it does, but it was better when officials answered to elected leaders, rather than being answerable to Pfizer and co (the modern system is no less corrupt – it is more corrupt).
Even Chicago was better off under the corrupt old Mayor Daley than it is under the modern bureaucracy – in fact Chicago was a lot better off under the corrupt old Mayor Daley (Richard Daley the First) than it is under a Civil Service system.
“How does one deal with an elected government becoming a tyranny – rigging elections, and so on?”
In case anyone is thinking this – the answer is to make government local enough so that the people can overthrow a corrupt regime, as (for example) was done in Athens Tennessee – the “Battle of Athens”.
If the government is vast there is little the people can do – even in the face of blatantly rigged elections, as the tragedy of January 6th 2021 shows – with people dragged off to be tortured and abused, indeed some of the prisoners are still in the hands of the regime (the utterly evil regime) to this day, three and a half years later.
Make no mistake – the Federal Government of the United States, and the government of some (some) of the States is evil. And I use the word “evil” after due thought.
The Corporate State (include much of the judiciary – and almost all of the media) is not your friend, they hate justice, they hate truth – and about many matters.
Richard Marks – I didn’t mean domestic bodies although they aren’t great either. I was more thinking of the UN and Council of Europe. Foreign bodies in the sense they aren’t within the power of the crown, as per Kilmuir’s opinion.
The uk could frame its own asylum laws and ditch the unamendable UN treaties, and should do so. Same goes for the ECHR.
Let us not get confused by terms. Freedom of expression/speech has never meant you can say what you like, without any consequences. It means that the government can’t first censor, or, edit, your speech. However, if you slander someone, they can sue you for slander. I think that we should have Freedom of Opinion- so long as it is qualified as your opinion, then nobody should be able to shut you down.