The only way I can make sense of England today is by understanding it as an occupied country. This, increasingly, is what it feels like – the public ruled over by a vast civil administration which, virtuous in its own rectitude, holds us in contempt. Governments come and go, but they all operate on a similar premise: the public are there to brass up and shut up, and that is that.
Metaphorically speaking, throw a stone in any direction and you will hit an institution run by the occupiers, be it public services, education, police, the legal profession, even the armed forces.
Newspapers publish official figures about crime, sentencing and prosecution rates, sexual abuse, drug abuse, official incompetence in the fields of health and social policy and so on which are shocking and embarrassing in a so-called advanced and prosperous country, but these are soon forgotten. Questions that should be asked are avoided and the army of occupation resumes its work of sedulously acting against the wishes and interests of the people who pay it.
Concepts of justice, liberty, standards and private life have been bent out of recognition. Politicians who claim to oppose this trend with their tedious and endless calls for ‘change’ do the very opposite: the past eight years of so-called conservative government has cemented the handiwork of New Labour which came before it. In any given week there will be a story that, if you stand back and think about it for a moment, reveals the occupying power’s true interests and values. Last week it was the Grenfell Tower bonfire night outrage. While children in London stabbed each other to death on a daily basis and crime inched further towards being completely out of control, the police were scrambling to find grounds to charge a few people who constructed a sick joke in a back garden.
The prime minister and her coterie of political class handlers evidently felt there was no choice but to become involved in the whole ridiculous episode. An honest and courageous leader with a decent underpinning of intelligence and common sense would have used the moment to demonstrate to the occupying army’s media outriders that burning cardboard models on bonfires and making vile jokes is not illegal, nor should it be. Instead Theresa May gave her seal of approval to the lynch mob, and no doubt pushed liberty a little closer towards extinction.
I did not really wish to bring Brexit into this piece. If you are like me, you long ago became bored to tears by it and the machinations and chicanery, so obvious to the seasoned observer, to prevent it happening. However, Brexit brought our new hegemony out of the shadows: the civil service, the Treasury and senior members of the Tory government. News media, dominated as it largely is by middle-class Left-liberals churned out of the universities in their thousands with the same opinions, published every disaster forecast by the Treasury quite uncritically. Mark Carney, the Canadian Governor of the Bank of England, made himself a laughing stock when almost all of it was wrong. At the national newspaper where I worked in the months after the referendum, news editors suddenly announced themselves ‘European’ on their Twitter feeds and their jobs largely became copying and pasting apocalyptic press releases from the Treasury and civil service. No one in my trade seems to have considered how much damage this foolish and obvious puppetry would do its reputation: fake news as a concept could gain traction only among a public that has become jaundiced by news routinely skewed to a particular agenda. The BBC in particular, a prime weapon of the ‘occupying forces’, has ruined its reputation with its bias to the Left in all matters (while resolutely claiming to be the final bastion of defence against fake news).
And it is the Left who are doing this; it is the Left which is the occupying power. I am not talking about the decrepit and discredited socialism as espoused by Corbyn and his repellent band of anoraks, Islamists, malcontents and anti-Semites. What he proposes has never worked anywhere and will collapse in on itself if Corbyn gains power – after wreaking havoc and economic destruction and misery, of course.
No, the Leftism that runs Britain is the postmodern variety, the technocrats: social and economic liberalism, diversity, multiculturalism, globalisation, green propaganda, open borders, policing as social work, education as social work, culture as social work and all of it driven by deep, deep political correction.This is the hegemony we live under today.
In the field of crime it is not uncommon to see a senior policeman ‘breaking ranks’ to propose that police catch burglars and the like. Such officers soon disappear from public debate. After the London Bridge attack in 2017 a friend said to me: ‘Surely they will do something now?’ He meant the government and the occupying power. I said: ‘Yes, they will do something now: they will step up their diversity policies and step up immigration. You will have your nose rubbed in their doctrine until you say you like it.’
Multiculturalism is not about assimilating immigrants: it is a tool for the disestablishment of the host culture. It is a similar situation with the Brexit plans. The Tories have no intention of controlling or reducing immigration or ‘free movement’ if they can help it. To test what you really feel about the honesty of this government, ask yourself how much you would be prepared to bet on immigration being lower in a few years than it is now.
Of course, not everyone employed in the establishment forces is a believer. As in any epoch in history you have the ideologues and the agitators, but you also have many more sharp-elbowed careerists and timeservers who do not wish to rock the boat but do wish to progress to larger salaries and more power.
Can the new model army of the post-modern Left be displaced? In theory, yes: you turn the money tap off. But any leader who took a scythe to the public sector would have a battle royal on their hands. Margaret Thatcher tried and failed, leaving office with the public sector more inflated than when she arrived. Then look what happened to her: people danced on her grave decades later. Any politician who wishes to have a grown-up conversation about, for example, the NHS and how it is run would soon find themselves on a bonfire in effigy form – and there would be no outrage about that on television and social media.
Make no mistake, as an army of occupation it is entrenched and only a courageous politician could begin to remove it. And those are in short supply.
