Brilliant post. I am absolutely sick of government thinking they can gaslight us. They seem to not understand that the term racist is so overused and wrongly used that it has completely lost its power. Equally Cooper calling Reform voters plastic patriots is just as insulting and is only likely to lose Labour even more voters. Its madness they are there to serve not dictate
It's a built-in feature of democracy that the demos (the 'people') will sometimes want things that the leaders don't very much want to do. This built-in bug was called out by Plato 2,400 years ago and was a key reason why Plato strongly disagreed with democracy. He thought that the ordinary working classes of Athens would be too easily swayed to vote for demagogues and bigots. Yeah Plato was basically an ancient Greek James O'Brien (albeit a million light years more intelligent). Plato thought that societies should be run by highly intelligent, wealthy and cultured oligarchs instead.
The genius of the British Parliamentary system is that it allows the 'demos' to declare what they want but also has in place many guardrails to, effectively, protect people from their worst instincts and stop them voting for extreme measures that would cause chaos. Our system was created incrementally starting with Alfred the Great's
witan, and improvements and tweaks have been made incrementally over the centuries. This is the beauty of taking a small-c conservative approach to government. It protects the country from violent, sweeping changes and bloody revolutions. Britian is almost unique in having largely avoided the horrors of revolution and civil war. I don't think we quite realise how lucky that makes us.
However I would say that since the end of WW1 (you could argue since the Industrial Revolution actually) and accelerating after WW2, governments and politicians have become increasingly more careerist and less accountable to the people who elect them. There are many reasons why this happened - the breakdown of the class system, the emergence of professional politicians, the domination of neoliberal and Leftist thought in the civil service and professional classes, the advent of the mass media and then the internet, and finally the evil idology of identitarianism, which privileges such things as gender and skin colour over actual ability.
All this has meant in my opinion that we no longer have politicians who believe they are truly accountable to their own people. Nor do they take seriously their long term obligation to Great Britain. In fact I'm not even sure that many of them like Britain that much. They make decisions based on what BBC News and Twitter will say, rather than what they believe is right and best for the country, and especially for its younger and future generations.
So what we've ended up with is a bunch of really not very intelligent people, who don't like the populace very much (especially not the working classes), and just want to keep their salaries rather than make difficult decisions. In fact sometimes they make decisions which are actively damaging to Britain's foreign policy interests, such as the BONE-HEADED decision to reward Hamas by 'recognising' a 'Palestinian state', thus wrenching us unwillingly away from a decades-old and VERY SENSIBLE foreign policy of being in lockstep with the United States on Middle East issues.
Within this context, the idea that it's morally, ethically or politically smart to label one's own populace as bigoted and racist...that's beyond stupid. I would go so far as to say it is morally evil in its lack of due care, respect and responsibility.
Meanwhile the populace gets ever more disengaged and alienated and angry. That doesn't make us bigots. Britons are extraordinarily accepting and welcoming in my experience. They can put up with a lot. But I think they're now reaching a point beyond which their patience is exhausted.
What I'm not 100% sure about is where all this ends. Britain doesn't do revolutions and there's various things about the way our society is set up that makes me doubt there would ever be one (which is a GOOD thing). But something new's going to happen. In fact it's already starting to happen. What exactly it is, I don't know. Yeats put it best:
....but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
archive.ph
