We are beyond civility in politics.
By Pete North - October 18, 2021
Night after night I sit down at this computer to write a post. I bash out a couple of sentences then hit a wall. Nothing new comes to mind. I’ve said it all. I couldn’t match my best writing of the Brexit era if I tried. I’m really quite tired with it all and it may even be the case that I no longer care what happens any more.
Recent changes in the behaviour of this government have convinced me that public debate no longer has influence over politics. We are free to respond and react to the agenda they set and chase after the bones they throw us, but setting the agenda or shifting the Overton window is no longer possible. The machinery of government isn’t listening. It limps from one bad headline to the next in crisis management mode with no long term vision.
As far as Brexit goes, Brexit is now dead in the water. It could have made a difference but the establishment has chosen to ignore it as best they can and pretend as best they can that it didn’t happen. Brexit is now reduced to a series of empty slogans. Net Zero is their new toy under the banner of “building back better”. We could have reformed and revamped food, energy, waste and industrial policy but we won’t. It’s not just the remainers of Labour who can’t imagine doing anything differently to before. It’s the whole of our politico-media class.
Being that much of the media is the dog in the manger and FPTP is designed to fend off insurgencies, no new ideas from the outside will ever penetrate. Voting can’t change anything. However attractive a party may make itself, it will always be a bait and switch scam. And we’ll keep falling for it.
In the meantime, in just about every area we are coasting toward a collapse largely due to decades of policy neglect, and nothing will be done until there is a collapse. The Westminster system is incapable of anticipating. It can only ever react to the problems it causes – and it is we who pick up the tab.
There are plenty of areas where it could act to head off disasters. With an eighty seat majority this government could resolve any number of problems yet it sits idle. It will let energy bills skyrocket, it will let transgender ideology rip through the institutions (effectively abolishing hard won women’s rights), it will allow tens of thousands more invaders in through Dover. It will let machete crime become an every day inner-city norm. Murder will be an every day facet of city life. Islamic extremism will fester unabated. The establishment is asleep at the wheel.
As we plebs are left to rot, those who can afford to get out of the cities will do so, and the inner suburbs will be abandoned to inter-ethnic gang warfare and drugs. All the while MPs demand more protection and greater safety while they rob us blind, flushing the country down the pan, and expect us to show greater civility toward them.
But we are beyond civility. They feel entitled to raid our wallets while filling their own boots. We are told David Amess was “one of the good guys” yet spent his entire career gaming the expenses and allowances system to acquire houses, yet we’re all expected to compete for newbuild shoeboxes with “refugee” families who arrived yesterday. And then MPs tell us they can’t get by on their £80k salaries. At this point I feel no particular sadness that any of them should come to harm.
Now that one of them has, instead of addressing the cancer of Islamic extremism exacerbated by a de-facto open borders policy, they instead talk about more censorship, with the obligatory equivocation about the far right. That won’t do them any good though. You don’t need to be exposed to far right material to become radicalised. You just have to compare what politicians say with what they do.
Take Priti Patel for instance. She’s given us endless assurances and announcements of muscular policy sometime in the future, but none of it ever materialises. She has failed and yet her job is in no danger. Meanwhile, the bodycount of black teenagers climbs ever higher and Cressida Dick is handed another term in office. Insofar as they can bring themselves to mention the murder epidemic, it seems that half the Met are deviants and the other half are psychopaths. As to the PM, we having EV’s and heat pumps foisted on us whether we can afford them or not, while China is laughing at us. Boris Johnson is now to the left of Joe Biden.
With public opinion having no real influence and voting even less, change is not going to come through the normal democratic means. Insofar as our rigged system can be called democratic, that is. The people are going to have to become ungovernable. But they won’t, because the government has most people by the balls and if they don’t the banks do. Nobody wants to put their head above the parapet and Brits will tolerate an awful lot just for a quiet life. That leads me to believe things will have to get a whole lot worse because they get a whole lot worse. I just don’t see a turning point in the near or distant future.
Lately I’ve managed to overlook the many shortcomings of Ukip and I hope that something of its former standing can be resurrected being that Tories only listen when their seats are not safe. Though Brexit was something of an accomplishment, it was also a hammer blow to the insurgency on the right, and it will have to be built back almost from scratch, with the media doing its best to airbrush it out of the picture. I don’t have high hopes to be honest. There is too much fragmentation and I don’t think the penny has quite dropped with the wider electorate that politics is in a deep, almost unfixable crisis. They will vote Tory simply to keep Labour out again, not realising that the material difference is negligible.
Being that our system of “democracy” is on its last legs and basic governance is falling apart, and the public are reduced to powerless spectators whose voices don’t matter, politicians are going to have to get used to a level of uncivil language directed at them. They themselves have created this situation, fiddling while the country burns. They can take away our online anonymity, they can outlaw expressions of hate and arrest us for spicy tweets, but that doesn’t make the burning resentment go away. One can imagine that if they keep going on this way, the slaughter of politicians is another job the British will no longer outsource to foreigners.