Political Collapse in the U.K.?

By Glenn N. Holliman

Since businessman and economist Terry Field wrote this article, the Prime Minister, Teresa May of the United Kingdom, has given her resignation notice.  The Conservative Party, the oldest continuous political party in history, is in disarray divided over how best, if at all, to leave the European Union.  Many suspect that May's successor will have no more success guiding a 'soft Brexit' than Ms. May has attempted.  Below is Terry's latest analysis of the whys and wherefores of the situation. - GNH

Political collapse has arrived in England. Where can it lead?

The British Prime Minister has strained her arm muscles this morning. She has shoved the sofas in front of her cabinet office door, to prevent any further remaining cabinet members from entering the room and suggesting yet again that she should go. Thirty-six resignations down the line, no agreement to settle with Europe in sight, and the politics of the street dominating and overshadowing a Parliament worse AND probably more anarchic and more incompetent than any since the one Cromwell broke up. 

What is happening in England is not inconsequential. Indeed, it is a part of a set of changes that rips the country from over two centuries of its past – a successful past until the dread decision to join France in 1914 and the gross impoverishment that followed on the Hitler war.

Left, Barb Holliman points out an 'item' that Terry, in his dark glasses, has overlooked in their discussion on the collapse of the British Empire. 

The first, obvious change is the collapse of the mechanisms of wise government. For centuries, Britain, beneficially isolated by the navy, both safe and able to range across the seas to gain opportunity was sheltered by the comparatively wise and benign government and guidance of an enlightened aristocracy, whose structure, stable as a result of primo geniture, was able to act as a ‘guardian’ to the progressive developments of commerce, of trade, and later of industry and the linkages to the vast colonial empires – the first being in North America, and later in India and the eastern and African countries.

As the franchise was extended progressively through the reform acts of 1832, 1867, 1884 and then into the first decades of the twentieth century, the guiding hand of the commercial interests and the aristocracy, in the form of the Whigs and the Tories, facilitated a near continuous beneficial growth in all aspects of life in the empire and at home in the British isles.

Even as the franchise broadened, as the effect of industrialization generated the Labour Party, and as power moved from landed interests to trade, commerce and the cities, the power and authority of the aristocracy and the great commercial interests, functioning on inherited power and the eternal sense of duty – noblesse oblige – maintained a ready ear to hear the complaints and aspirations of the people. 

The country changed to the benefit of the population. All understood the sense of place, but they also knew what to expect from each other – and from the classes they could see but were not members of.

In short. The system worked, and the politics reflected that and reinforced it.

Then came 1945, universal education for all to 16, later 18, and the maturing of the effect of the universal suffrage as all began to seek representation from those who would prosecute their own class- or sectarian – interests.

As this full-hearted sectarian engagement of all possible interest groups gathered pace, in the wider world, Britain was becoming relatively – and in many parts of the countries that composed the whole – absolutely poorer. The great cities fell to pieces and the inhabitants suffered deprivation, isolation and poverty, despite the post war recovery, whose effect was to greatly advantage the non-industrial south over the dying industries of the north, great social fractures opened up, and the class divides widened. The parties of the left became more vocal, would-be radical, and aggressive with demands, 

The conservatives postured that they were now ‘of the centre’ – Harold MacMillan famously saying that ‘we are all socialists now’ and their memberships began – horror of horrors – to accept those who were state educated, and elevated to civilization by acceptance – albeit in small numbers – into Oxford and Cambridge.

The line held from 1970 until recently, with all pickled in aspic as the left controlled the media and the civil service, the European Union commanded the broad integrationist agenda, and the right was marginalized to being viewed as close-to unhinged.

Then came 2008. The collapse. The evacuation of surplus funds, of easy state borrowing, the impoverishment of state debt exploding to guarantee the foreign bond holders of the City mega-banks that Brown and Balls had willfully created, to milk of mis-stated profits to buy votes by the million. 

The party was over. And it never started up again. Meanwhile, China and India began their remorseless rise to gigantic power. China is well on the  way, India is slower but will undoubtedly get there. In the west, most commentators in England consider the United States as being in decline and perhaps approaching internal instability.

The psychological effect of this in England is very profound. More so than in continental Europe. Why so? Well, since 1940, England has well understood that its physical survival has depended upon sheltering under the American power’s wing. That to be alone a second time would tempt fate that another Himmler may one day in the future – from some place as yet unknown and not even considered dangerous – stamp his psychopaths on the people of the islands from which there would be no escape. SO America was essential. And like a father standing guard over a child, it is both resented and loved.

Yet now it (America) declines. And into what? And how long will it take before senility and ineffectiveness takes over there. We in England know how fast collapse from immense power to nothing-at-all can take. It is lightning fast; and it happened – quite directly, and quite recently – to us.

Thus the first reaction in Britain – it being pragmatic- is to see if its new uncle in the east is likely to be beneficial as its father in the west has been. So we court China. We flatter it; we eschew the Dalai Llama now, we pitch for their ‘investments’, we invite their unsmiling Head Man to address our parliament (where he reminded us what parvenus we are) and hope to enter some of their highly controlled ‘markets’.

And yet there is a nasty reality we cannot shake off. That we are weak, unskilled, poor and alien to the new eastern Uncle. Who we now fully understand cares entirely for himself and not at all for us. Our friendly father (America) in the west, still affectionate to us (why I simply do not understand now save for history and sentimentality) may be ‘in decline’ but by any reasonable expectations is still unlikely to ‘decline’ to anything less than an immense power, if not any longer the sole global power.

All this has de-stabilised England. It has entirely lost a sense of place and a sense of safety for the future. The ‘austerity’ following on 2008 caused generalized discontent, and the parties moved to the margins – the Labour Party to a retro-socialist obsession, with a mini-Lenin type at the head, and the Conservative Party sought to find the centre-ground in partnership with the Liberals. The depth of the impoverishment of the state following on 2008 was such as to doom any such centre -politics from doing other than enraging a population drunk on decades of state largesse provided on the back of ruinous state and private borrowing.

The centre in Britain has collapsed. With England split between the socialists on the left, and a new form of English Nationalist party that is emerging before our eyes in the form of the moth emerging from the chrysalis of the old one-nation, aristocracy-led, socially only lightly-engaged Conservative Party. May was the last attempt to sustain a Eurocentric, essentially centrist, ‘managerialist’ Conservative Party. It is no coincidence that May is a Grammar School product, taught to ape the mannerisms of the old aristocracy, but on a pathetically modest scale.

SO what is happening now to that political dispensation – a dispensation that is the latest iteration of a party over 200 years old? The new party (Conservative) emerging from the old one is becoming a very different creature indeed. This new party rejects everything that has gone before, even as it claims to being intent on reviving it. This new party is at its heart a true reflection of the contemporary England – an essentially working-class, total work state, where the vast majority of the population is functionally educated, disconnected from the world in a way their antecedents were not for centuries past. These people live and breathe their little island. They have entirely forgotten their imperial past (save for a periodic dollops of deliberately out-of-context emotional gloop served up as socialist ‘social cement’ by the profoundly unhelpful BBC).

In less than half a single lifetime, the entire world view of their grandparents has been destroyed, thrown into the trash can, and replaced by a sort of anarchy of disconnected newness, intended to both serve the needs of local commerce, and to deconstruct the class and other social inter-relationships that both grew out of the past, and offered sophisticated connections to it. The citizen is entirely cast adrift, made new, made isolated, turned into a socially compliant consumer unit, but with a quality of life and a sense of security and happiness worse than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. 

In this condition, all must work all the time. As in the former Soviet Union, children are farmed out to care agencies as parent work from youth to decrepit old age – and they are taught that this is the only way to live, that anything else is unimaginable and undesirable. To sustain this absurdity, the people are subjected to a level of conditioning and psychological management from the earliest years that Dr Goebbels would simply marvel at for its extent and it unyielding continuity. Winston Smith in 1984 observed the poisonous lunacy. I doubt such awareness is available to the inhabitants of England now.

The extent of disconnection is perhaps greater in England than in any country on earth. And into that comes people like Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party, and Boris Johnson and the like in the Tory-Conservative party.

Out of this free-floating condition comes Farage and Brexit. The simple solution to remove fears, recover what is lost, shine a light on a bright new future. In all humility the writer understands how the uneducated masses can be so taken in, but it is still, after all that happened in the 19^th and twentieth centuries, a simple wonder that the level of naivete required to facilitate such potent but grotesque politicking is so readily available. To be sure, the depredations of gross amoral and atheistic state socialism has accelerated the disaffection, compounded with the ‘no more money’ sign going up outside the British exchequer, but something far darker has taken over. And that thing is the collapse of the western perspective on how to command a state and an economy. 

Watching China, the monolith full of what looks so often like clever ‘clones’, the direction of societies in America and in Europe looks amateurish, chaotic, and worse, ineffective. We are invited observe the stupefying achievements of the communist party in China, the vast new cities, the 1200 km long artificial river to take water from the south to the north, the ‘belt and road’ system connecting them to the world of the east, Europe and Africa. And against this we have nothing but obvious indebted tiredness. Only tiredness, and the rage so many special interest groups, all ripping the body politic apart for personal advantage, with mutual suspicion and open hatred everywhere. In America look at how Democrat voters absolutely hate GOP voters and vice versa. A vision of insanity.

So in Britain, the response is simply to hell with it, we will look after our own interests, think only of ourselves, trust nobody south of Dover – or west of it now, and thus espouse the safety of nationalism, of patriotism, of the certainty that we can do what we want, and the others had better get out of our way. 

Hence the New Tory Party. Aggressive-assertive, Britain first and last, free to act across the globe, contemptuous of the moderation of its aristocratic past approach, keen to reject European states it sees as the direct inheritors of the chaos of the violent past. For this New Tory Party, economics is trumped entirely by patriotic feeling, by national awareness, by corresponding diminution of regard for ALL others. This latter is the subliminal way the New Tory Party faces up to the recognition of the decline of its American protector.

British humour is always close to the surface but often understated.  This hedge is in Nap Hill near High Wycombe.  The home owner's political beliefs are unknown.  Perhaps the human being consumed is the old Tory Party?

For many of the members of the New Tory Party, their disconnected pragmatism encourages them to accept Huawei and scorn the American reaction. For them, daily commerce and the promise of China trumps all else.

For them there is NO cultural continuity in the west that matters – that is for them simple sentiment and of no worth. They never understood what the Reformation, the Renaissance and all that followed on actually meant – for them it is French flummery – so moving society to China and bending the knee to the Chinese state so long as there is a yen or two to be gained is exactly the same as their grandparents taking the Yankee dollar after 1945.

Cultural values, civilization, commonality is nothing to them. Only the daily trade gain is of moment. And those people are the ones who drive the New Tory Party now. They are driving the future. And the amusingly bumbling Labour Party run by a bunch of whining dysfunctional superannuated Leninists are nowhere in the national conversation.

Of course the BBC gets NONE of this. Nor does the rest of the local hack media.

Britain, via the New Tory Party, kicked into action by the oddity that is Farage, is comprehensively rejecting the enlightenment and all that came from it in the west, to replace it with whatever works, however totalitarian, however alien, however dangerous in the long term, however likely to cut the West adrift from its points of origin, of its origins from Greek classical luminosity so searing it lasted for two and a half thousand years

Make no mistake, Britain is at the start of a deep revolution. One that is cutting the past away. Hacking at it with machetes and letting the people move without any sense of direction to new and never-before-experienced shores. It is the  New Tory Party, at present engaged in formulating a potent poison to dispatch the unimaginative and heroically timid May. - Terry Field