Social Disorder Possible in the UK?

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field, takes to the keyboard to express further dismay of the unraveling, in his eyes, of political discourse and social conventions in his homeland. - GNH

An Accurate Representation of Reality in Britain

by Terry Field

The retired judge from the British Supreme court very recently suggested that British institutions and political conditions had degraded to the point where violence and social disorder could be the next stage.

This sounds to some outside the country as an extreme observation, but for the writer it seems to be an accurate representation of the local reality.

The fractures in British society are represented by unshakably held extreme positions on the matter of Brexit. When one hears people describe their attitude to the European Union, often expressed using the language of conflict, often explicitly invoking the remembrance of war between the nations, such is usually spiced with an attendant arrogant loathing and hatred that is dissociated from the reality of Europe. Many of the people expressing such hatred have never or almost never visited Europe. Were they asked in any sort of detail why their hatred was so profound, they would – and when they are asked do – flounder, bluster and repeat the slogans other political manipulators have put into their blanc-paper minds.

In every social collapse, every revolution, every war, hate dissociated from experience, becomes the common currency underpinning sequences of increasingly deranged, violent and inhumane actions. - Terry Field, pictured left

It is not a given that such a trajectory must be repeated in Britian, but it has become far more probable. The ‘left’ has worked to stop the actions of the Johnston government to prosecute a no deal exit from Europe whilst pretending it is not doing any such thing. The moderate wing (often with 35 or more years as party members and Members of Parliament) of the Conservative Party has been cut off like a gangrenous limb, and the remaining element that constitutes the Conservative Party has emerged as a radically different hard-as nails thing and one not seen in Britian in the last full 119 years.

Now we have a party of government that has created a condition it knows can drive the Celtic fringe of Scotland Northern Ireland and even pacific Wales out of the union and out of conquered province status, to join the EU again after the impeding rupture.

The Corbyn left postures and wishes to fill the streets with objectors. The usual marshmallow-soft virtue signalling that the left never seems to understand is entirely ineffective and barren.

The left is not the primary danger here for the moment. But only for the moment. It wishes for electoral power, but is as soft as butter whilst not directing the levers of state control. The British government as directed by the new nationalist zealots treat Europe as an unstable weak entity to be dictated to, and particularly Ireland as a wayward colony to be shaken into compliance. They seriously consider Europe to be so weak as to be readily intimidated by Britain threatening to withdraw its military protection offering security to Europe.

An outsider would simply laugh at the propositions contained here. They would not believe a country could be so captured by such Ruritanian lunacy, but with England, there is a class of people who have always thought like this; they have always lived the desired continuity of the nationalist/imperialist reality. For them there is a presumption of the magnificence and exceptionalism of the British – and particularly the English – state. For them, the hard reality of their power-imperative derives from a semi-mystical perception of what it is to be English/British.

They now have, after the referendum, smashed the parliament they see as incorporating degeneration and ineffectiveness, replaced with a focused certainty that they will not be stopped from leaving Europe, constructing a distinct and naturally aggressive English nation state, and gathering the rebellious Celts to their feet in supplication since for them the idea that the EU is a viable alternative for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is something they both loathe and entirely reject.

So far so unpleasant, but nothing more.

Far more radical, dangerous and unprecedented in England is the changed attitude of much of the hard right, and the hard left, to the sovereignty relevance and desirability of the Westminster parliament. Many in the hard Brexit group see their function as the replacement of the sovereignty of parliament with the ‘sovereignty of the people’, This was explicitly stated by the leader of the house, Rees-Mogg, where he stated Parliament gains its legitimacy from the people, and thus the referendum of the people trumps and replaces parliamentary legitimacy and freedom of maneuver other than to deliver the ‘decision to leave Europe’. Note that Mr Rees-Mogg and his colleagues ‘understand’ the meaning of the referendum vote. They and not others are empowered to ‘achieve’ Brexit, and all those in Parliament unwilling to offer a hard Brexit or the style of exit designed by this regime are ‘betraying the people’.

Well, there it is. They appeal to the sovereignty of ‘the people’, and they know what the ‘people’ wanted and vilify all others who would dare to defy their divine comprehension. I recall this from The Caudillo, from Hitler, from Mussolini, from Stalin. Every dictator invokes ‘the will of the people’. Always the same.

‘The people are held in my heart, I know their needs, I will deliver what I know they want and need, I will protect them from their enemies’. In this case, Parliament Assembled if it has a will of its own.

Accordingly, anyone who stands against this within the Conservative Party are to be purged, removed, expelled. Made nothing in the political firmament of the righteous. Thus the will of the people will be met.'

All this in Britain.

The world sees it.

Why am I not surprised? Well, unlike foreigners who look on and think inevitably of the England of the past, a state of Churchill, Atlee, brave wartime, resistance, post war gentle chaos and benign eccentricity, the kindness of a sophisticated people, I have seen a much darker reality over the last half a century or so, and one that has expanded like Styrofoam in the post war period.

The key here is economic failure together with profound social fracturing that has profoundly hurt the poorly educated, and the vulnerable poor. Britain is fragmented, rich and arrogant on the one side, vast numbers of the all-but dispossessed and ignored on the other. The easy comfort of a declined ex-Empire that offered the people a dreaming of dreams after the 1939-45 catastrophe has given way to a ratcheting up of poverty, misery, anger, and hopelessness, particularly with the 2008 evacuation of wealth, and all the while the very rich getting much richer.

At the same time, the society has inverted all its values, financial and social, from a structured conservative (small-c) serious-minded monoculture to a free-flowing multicultural ethnography, living in all reality in mini-ghettos,and accepting sexual variation in a way never before considered even slightly tolerable.

Mass deindustrialization has replaced self-respect and good incomes with suppressed eternal sadness, poverty, mass drug-taking and hellish depression in the council estates and worse. In the country at large now, there is an explosion of severe violence, damaging and killing large numbers. Gangland violence completely unknown a lifetime ago are expanding across the counties outside the old worn-out inner cities.

Fear, uncertainly, political coercion and un-natural enforced compliance with the new values   This further reinforces the sense of anomie. The country is described as being one of the most toxic in the advanced- and indeed in much of the developing world – for children to live in.

There is a developed crisis in housing that shows every sign of becoming even more corrosive. The healthcare system is pathetically inadequate – only a week ago, it is reported that the state monopoly healthcare non-provider has failed to diagnose hundreds of thousands of people with cancers in anything like the time needed to benefit from effective treatment. I accent here the dread reality. The NHS is a soviet-style monopoly provider. Without it working effectively, for the vast bulk of the people there is NO alternative. Their choice, if they are treated too late, or otherwise ineffectively is a simple one, and it is simply to die.

The multi-faceted failures are of such a degree as to ensure that people know well that their lives are directly threatened as to quality of life and even longevity.

Such failure is endured. The British can be kicked hard in the guts, and all they do is stand up and take it.

Not now they do not. They are utterly enraged.

The hate fest against Europe is pure displacement. They do not even know why they hate as they now do. I hear local, ill-educated folk rail against the EU. I doubt they have been to Europe short of a week on a beach, I bet my fortune that they know absolutely relevant or significant nothing about Europe, it’s history or the functions of the EU and its relationship to the European nation states. 

It is a striking feature of these highly manipulated, hate-filled people that their hate is dissociated. Of course it is! They have been programmed by radical clever right-wing people recently (and by left wing radicals over the last forty years) that the EU is the centre of all evil. They know not why. They have no knowledge, less awareness, and parrot slogans to a degree that I am reminded of Mao and the little Red Book, and the hordes in Germany raging against alien groups to assuage their pitiable condition after their state collapsed in 1918.

We are right back to the world of the early 20^th century, and it is expressed most forcibly in England. A once-immense power, now a husk, but with a cold, determined, super-arrogant would-be ruling autocracy who see the present circumstance as their golden chance to do so.

The world sees all this.

It now disinvests. It removes more and more of the timezone City-of-London functions to Paris, Germany, Holland and Ireland. The car plants and so much more will leave fast even though the Japanese have invested 165 billions to pump their cars into Europe. To have to trade on WTO terms -with the EU, compounded with the EU /Japan trade deal, absolutely kills their UK viability and need to be in Britain. The same applies to pharma, aviation technology and so much else. So much dislocation. More severe, more caustic, more dreadful, a deep-seated cultural rupture. English people are isolated from Europe at the emotional and aspirational-cultural level, to a degree that recalls the periods of the wars that so destroyed social intercourse from the 18^th century until 1945 with short breaks of fractured rationality.

The sinister reality – the Tory right embraces all this as they hope fervently to leave on their or no terms. For them, this is a matter of recovering the New Jerusalem. It feels like a John Bull version of zealous Zionism. The sacred wonder of the free nation-state shrink-wrapped and newly virginal after escaping the Ghoul of the EU will usher in an Age of Gold.

To get this, I doubt that the British Parliament would survive for five minutes if it really got in their way. Johnston is their creature; an emotional, absurd Mussolini-style comedic yet vicious figure.

I believe that we are FAR closer to violent failure and irrecoverable marginalization from the world than most people understand.

 If you doubt that, look at what waits in the wings. Trotskyism.

The fat has been burned. The body scrawny and lean. Imagine what can follow. - Terry Field