Sunday 1 November 2009

LIFE UNDER COMRADE BLAIR IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF BRITAIN



PLEASE DISTRIBUTE AS FAR AS POSSIBLE--

One hears Labour's Gollums in Millbank want the following article 
suppressed. 
The conclusion is they are afraid of the truth and wish "to suppress the truth in 
unrighteousness."

From : The English Traditionalist and Dissident Alliance


LIFE UNDER COMRADE BLAIR IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF BRITAIN

Copyright CJ ARKEL 1998 - Please credit author.

We really do live in peculiar times - and under the most peculiar administration in living memory.

Consider the ‘celebrations’ of Tony Blair’s first twelve months in office.

About three months ago Blair’s chief press officer let it be known that there would be a series of events marking the first anniversary of the election of the Labour Government.

These events would be significant, extensive and popular, and it was the duty of Britain’s free press (if it wanted to remain free, that is) that it should turn up and record the People’s delight in having their representatives occupy the high places for the first time in two decades.

Later, when a few articles began to criticise the triumphalist excesses of some of Blair’s minions, a new line was put out -
May 1st was just another working day in the life of the People’s Toilers, and any celebratory feelings that media folk might quite naturally and spontaneously have, should be muffled in order not to embarrass Tony and his fellow Stakhanovites.

So New Labour Day came and went, with exactly the same amount of publicity for Blair’s anniversary, but with the emphasis shifted to the modest bashfulness - almost shyness - of the those being glorified.

Now, it is rather odd in parliamentary democracies for governing parties to ask those they rule
to celebrate their election birthdays. In 1989, when Lady Thatcher’s government was 10 years old, it was the Conservative Party, not the British nation which was asked to rejoice.

In fact, a significant por tion of the nation, led by The Guardian, the Mirror Group
newspapers, parts of the BBC and Channel 4, took the opportunity to hurl as many insults as
possible at her and all her works.

John Major’s dates with destiny were routinely greeted throughout the land with derision or pity, while the idea of hanging out the annual bunting and red flags for Callaghan and Wilson in the 1970s would have been considered not merely ludicrous, but utterly tasteless and vulgar, and condemned loud and long.

But strangely on May 1st 1998 there was no such condemnation.

Even more strangely, no one in the media asked whether the anniversary of the election of Labour should be marked at all.

Instead, a single message was beamed to the public; that here was a national event to be celebrated according to individual choice - provided any celebrations were modest but ‘positive’. 

It would be naive or disingenuous to show too much boggle-eyed surprise at such trickery.

We all know that Blair’s administration is ruled by spin-
doctors or ‘news management consultants’ as the self-employed among them style themselves.

Nevertheless, their cumulative effect has turned government into a piece of light entertainment, whose success is measured by how long it can keep going.

Since the British (or at least Britain’s tourists) like long-running productions, perhaps Blair and his advisers hope we will give his show as long a run as The Mousetrap.

He has certainly taken no chances. If there is any observation worth making on his first twelve months in power, it is that he is subjecting Britain to a complete political revolution of the sort that is usually caused by defeat in war, invasion or economic collapse.

This revolution is intended to eliminate for all time the conservatism in the country which he and his advisers consider to be detrimental to the interests he represents.

This revolution is being carried out in the name of  The People (or as the Germans used to call it ‘Im Namen des Volks’) but, as with all such revolutions, the chief beneficiaries are an altogether smaller and smarter group than ‘ThePeople’ at large.

And as with all such revolutions, its instigators took the trouble to publish their plans in advance.

In 1995 Will Hutton’s The State We’re In appeared.

From the Acknowledgements it is apparent that he wrote the book over the period from late 1992 to November 1994, a time when John Major’s government was deeply unpopular but Labour’s chaotic, socialist past was still damaging its chances of electoral victory.

The list of helpers he thanks reads like a roll-call of New Labour activists who moved on May 1st 1997 from promoting to carrying out the precepts and plans set out in his book.

David Marquand, David Miliband, Yvette Cooper two of them special advisers to Cabinet ministers and one a prominent MP and Blairite spokesman - represent the new cadre that was then preparing itself to carry out the revolution now taking place.

Their presence at the birth of Hutton’s opus gives it even more legitimacy than Labour’s manifesto - a mongrel document knocked up by Mandelson and Campbell to seduce the more mindless of the middle classes.

Although he only earns one entry in the index, Hutton addresses his thoughts to Tony Blair, who took over the Labour Party during the writing of the book.

After publication, it became well-known that Blair took most of his new revolutionary theory from Hutton, though Hutton recently complained on Radio Four’s World at One (22 December 1997) that Blair was not sticking to the script and was uninterested in the slums of Sunderland.

Hutton’s book was widely welcomed but generally misunderstood.

Auberon Waugh [Literary Review July 1995] called it a masterpiece which ‘if not entirely comprehensible, is strangely comforting’.

The reviews and discussions following publication portrayed Hutton as a moderate, EU- friendly boffin who in the best British tradition had come up with a political compromise between Left and Right which would suit most tastes.

Out with ‘Thatcherism’ and rabid old unions; in with designer ‘intermediate institutions’, proportional representation and a national industrial policy run from Brussels (by Brits, with a little help from the Germans).

And the party to administer the changes could only be the Labour party if it modernised and did what Blair and Hutton instructed it to do.

That was what The People were told the book was about.

Those of an independent turn of mind who read the book at the time, wondered what precise connection there was (other than Hutton’s name) between the text published by Jonathan Cape and the reviews of it printed in the papers.

Those of an independent turn of mind who now read the book and its sequel,

The State to Come, will not fail to see the last twelve months -
and maybe the next ten, even twenty years - laid out in exact and chilling detail.

Hutton’s over-arching demand is the abolition of what he calls ‘gentlemanly capitalism’.

This in effect is the web of connections which links the City to the Court, the Services and the
Conservative Party.

He mocks Tony Crosland for prematurely declaring in the 1950s ‘that the welfare state, full employment and nationalisation had achieved the socialist blueprint’[The StateWe’re In, p.50].

‘British [gentlemanly] capitalism, pace Crosland, proved to be very much alive, from the City of London to the House of Lords, the public schools to the great landed estates.

All were left intact as breeding grounds for the Conservative renaissance’[p.51].

Hutton hopes his book will show how to destroy those ‘breeding grounds’ forever.

Indeed it does. Throughout the book the centres of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and the ‘royal state’ are identified and the methods for their demolition are set down.

City institutions such as banks and pension funds are to be subjected to greater state and external regulatory control.

The commanding heights of Britain’s financial institutions - the banks and the pension funds - are to be ‘republicanised’.

The Bank of England - at the apex of the Tory state - is to have its intimate financial and supervisory links with commercial and clearing banks severed and turned into an interest rate think tank.

No longer should it be allowed to ‘manipulate ....... the vast short- term money markets’.

As we all know, Gordon Brown obligingly made this into his first policy statement in May
1997.

The Bank of England was given the ‘independence’ to set interest rates - in exchange
for everything else it used to do.

Having knocked out the Bank, it was the turn of the pension funds.

They were hobbled in Brown’s July budget by the effective imposition of a 20% tax on the investment returns they made for pensioners.

Hutton’s other targets - the public schools, landed estates (especially in Scotland),the Army, the House of Lords, the ‘constitution’ - are all receiving or about to receive similar treatment.

Each is to be so altered that it will be impossible for any future British conservatism to re-establish itself as a political force.

Otherwise ‘the elements that make up the Conservative hegemony would still have immense negative power, even if they were no longer formally in control of the state. Private financial interests, private schools, self- governing professional groups all face major change .......... but they can be relied upon to resist it to the last, invoking every ancestral tradition and idea.

Likewise, a significant element if not a majority will resist playing any part in theconstruction of a social-market Europe.

Co-operative capitalism, intruding into the private networks of shareholders and the boardroom, and insisting on the reciprocity of obligation, is an utterly foreign concept to them.

The British officer class has been leaving its men in the lurch for a verylong time.’ [pp. 320 - 321]

In 1994 a Labour victory at the next election was by no means a certainty. In order to guarantee it, Hutton astutely saw that not only the Conservatives but conservatism itself had to be utterly discredited and publicly seen to be so, especially in the eyes of ‘middle England’.

This could be done by accelerating the disintegration of‘the totems that lend it non-political appeal as the guardian of middle England - the Royal Family, Britain as a Great Power, the aristocracy, the Church of England’ [p.322]

Hence the well-founded rumours detailing large amounts of money raised for Labour Party funds before the election being channelled through the tabloids to individuals selected by, say, the Max Cliffords of this world, provided they had a tale to tell which would heap contempt on all of conservatism’s ‘totems’, particularly the Royal Family.

For this purpose, the ‘turning’ of the late Princess of Wales into a New Labourite was crucial. Indeed Blair admitted that her death deprived his administration of a figure-head which it was going to use to ‘re-focus and modernise’ the monarchy - in other words, kill its conservative traditions stone dead.

This set-back has, however, been turned in Blair’s favour. In the week following her death,
Campbell and Mandelson took over all media access to and from the Royal Family, and Mandelson has appointed himself a permanent fixture of Prince Charles’ circle, as his new ‘best friend’.

Should the Palace receive approaches from any remnant of ‘gentlemanly Conservative capitalism’ in future - or, less likely, attempt to open up independent lines of communication with disgruntled members of the House of Lords, the Armed Forces or the Law - the Blairites will be ideally placed to snip them off at the root.

To prevent conservatism ever regaining power, Hutton proposes the thorough-going republicanisation of all British institutions, from the monarchy to the structure of the private company [p.298].

At the local level this will operate to restrict the rights of owners over workers; at the national level, the constitution is to be reshaped so that European Union institutions absorb the competences of our sovereign parliament [pp.316-318].

First Citizen Blair (with his First Lady alongside) has shown himself the keenest student of Hutton’s prescriptions.

Two of Blair’s first acts were to implement the Social Chapter provisions of the Maastricht Treaty and to rescind all the objections which John Major’s government made to the Amsterdam Treaty.

The Social Chapter will allow the European Union a direct and unrestrainable power to determine relationships between virtually all employers and employees in Britain.

The Amsterdam Treaty demotes Parliament permanently and irrevocably to the status of a regional assembly, subject to the supervision and correction of the European Court of Justice and certain organs of the European Commission, most notably in juridical and fiscal affairs. In the event that the Amsterdam Treaty is ratified by Britain, no future conservatism will be able to revive the sovereignty of Parliament without Britain seceding,through an act of rebellion, from the European Union.

Of course, The State We’re In is not quite Blair’s ‘Little Red Book’. Like all revolutionaries once they gain power, Blair has had to make compromises - largely with Rupert Murdoch on the timing of the abolition of the pound; for it was The Sun ‘wot won it’ for Tony in 1997, just as it won it for John Major in 1992.

Nevertheless, Murdoch is neither economically invincible nor politically incorruptible. He is prepared to do a deal with the European Commission over broadcasting rights on the continent.

And to ask this Australian born, USA naturalised, international republican to be the last defender of British monarchical conservatism, is rather like expecting Krupp and Thyssen to have revoked the Nuremburg Laws in 1935.

There was nothing in it for them, and there’s nothing in it for him - It wasn’t the deal he did
with Blair when he granted our ‘Dear Leader’ a brief audience Down Under two years ago.

Blair’s revolutionaries are also exploiting a peculiar phenomenon that has
arisen recently. 

There is a neat symmetry about the positions of Blair now and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties in relation to their parties. In 1997 the middle classes voted for Blair and the working classes for Labour.

In 1979, and to a lesser extent in 1983 and 1987, the working classes voted for Margaret Thatcher and the middle classes voted Conservative.

The Blair revolution, as adumbrated by Hutton, aims to keep the middle classes voting Blair for ever and a day, and to prevent them from returning to, and reviving, the traditions of British conservatism.

So life under Blair in the Federal Republic of Britain will be fine -
for those who have spent their lives hating conservatism with the passionate envy of a Hutton.

The ‘administocracy’ which now rules us will tax us extensively but ‘fairly’; offer us consultative referenda and local elections until even the X on a ‘Spot the Ball’ competition will be absorbed into the machinery of ‘participative democracy’; and it will tell us what to do, when to do it, and how much good it will do us when we obey in the true communitarian spirit of the ‘People’.

If we disagree, we’ll be branded as old-fashioned Tory die-hards who have had their day - ‘Dinosaurs’ as one of the Evening Standard’s junior reporters and Blair groupies put it. If we continue to disagree, we will run the risk of being declared xenophobes, having our tax affairs investigated, our private lives combed for signs of paedophilia and - if we make too much of a fuss - the European Court’s Judge of Freedoms will issue a warrant for our preventative
detention by the European People’s Prosecutor, and we’ll be banged up in a Euro-jail for nine months without trial to cool our heels and wash our mouths out.

However all revolutions, except Conservative ones (like Pinochet’s and Margaret Thatcher’s first term) end in failure; it is only the evolutionary changes that last.

We have evolved a continental culinary style both at home and in the restaurant over the last twenty years without any ‘ukases’ from Whitehall or Brussels.

Continental economies and polities might have in time evolved too, had they not been stuffed into us like dodgy vitamins down a recalcitrant child’s throat.

But Blair’s revolutionary ‘administocracy’ is in a hurry. 

The state they have seized is in an unstable condition, caught between the rising expectations they themselves unloosed beforetheir assumption of power, and the tight fiscal over-lordship imposed on Britain by the European Commission.

This latter requires member states to behave as though they are competitors with their inhabitants for the wealth of their territories, in much the same way as the Soviet Union forced its constituent regions to plunder their peoples.

The result is that the productive middle classes continue to have more and more taxes wrung out of them, but the cash raised, instead of being used to buy off the under-classes, pays off Whitehall’s and Brussels’ bills.

In some areas of life the modern Euro statelet has become an immensely privileged competitor.

In Britain, its powers to levy taxes on us without effective appeal and to distrain our assets in settlement of its demands have become draconian over the last five years or so, and look like becoming tougher still.

Yet in other areas it seems to have given up. 

It is uninterested in ‘disorganised’ crime - that is, crime against an individual or his property, rather than a crime against the state or its property.

‘Disorganised’ crime is still to be the purlieu of the social worker and the social experiment, whether domestically -the new play-school for delinquents in Kent - or internationally, where most of Britain’s armed forces are to be turned loose as uniformed social workers, doing odd-jobs of peace-keeping on the global village’s streets.

The administocrats have thus gained a powerful weapon to keep the tax- paying middlish classes in awe, but have only weak defences against an under-class that cares not a stuff for Blair or any human ever likely to occupy his position in Westminster or Brussels.

So they have a race on their hands. 

They need to choke off all possible paths that might lead British conservatism and its ‘gentlemanly capitalists and officers’ back to power, before the morons of middle England who believed that it was ‘time for a change’ are disabused of their folly; and also before their ballot-fodder in the under-classes turns nasty.

If they succeed in obliterating British conservatism and destroying our independence by abolishing our currency, they will have won.

For then, they will contentedly negotiate an agreed merger of UK plc and Brussels International S.A. which will guarantee them good jobs, pensions and whatever other goodies may charm and divert their leisure hours.

Such a triumph may be short-lived, though.

To buy off the under-class they spent their years in opposition encouraging, they will be forced to compete ever more ruthlessly with the productive tax-paying portion of the country.

This eventually will arouse great discontent, of which the Countryside Rally was only the mildest of foretastes.

Discontent brings about a loss of loyalty, and loyalty is a quality that administocratic revolutionaries never inspire in the general populations of the countries they seize - except by fear.

Without the loyalty of the middle England it has so assiduously wooed,

Blair’s revolution will fall to bits; either peacefully, or -if the country has been chopped up and muddled into the European Union - messily, as in Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. It’s rather a ‘baleful prospect’ [Hutton, p.318, in a somewhat different context] isn’t it?

But then, in the ‘People’s Republic of Britain’ under Comrade Blair, we are indeed living in the most peculiar times.