Booker and alienation
Saturday 28 April 2012
For Booker readers looking for FCO 30/1048 (with annotations), it is here (.doc format). We have our own look at the issues he raises in this piece, with a review of the Booker piece below. And, for an in vivo example of alienation, go to Witterings for Witney.
Meanwhile, the idiot d'Ancona prattles on, asking whether this is "David Cameron's last chance to regain the public's trust?". At least one of his commenters notes the fatuity of the proposition. This is the man whose party failed to gain a majority in the general, demonstrating that he never had the public's trust. Janet Daley (yes, the whole claque is piling in) suggests that we are back to a Conservative Party – and a country – that is being run as a club. And indeed, we have returned to the idea of party cabals and the "old gang". More of this later. 
Just about every media political commentator at the moment is addressing the issue of political alienation, or the consequences of it, but very few – as does Booker in today's column - put the EU centre stage.
When you think about it though, to discuss current sentiment solely in terms if Cameron and the failures of his government, is parochial to an extreme, the ultimate in "Little England" politics. And Booker points out, political alienation is not a uniquely British phenomenon. It is Europe-wide (and spreading beyond). In Europe though, from the riots in Greece to those protest votes for Marine Le Pen, the then George Galloway, we see signs of how alienated people now feel from the "political class" which rules over our lives. Alongside the Greeks, the French, and even the Germans, we see our masters as out of touch with the rest of us, without meaningful opposition, no longer responsive to any democratic control. And thus does Booker look for one of the common factors, which is of course the European Union. And, for an explanation of why the political process should be so afflicted, he too goes to FCO 30/1048. This document, he tells us, predicted with chilling candour, that it would take 30 years for the British people to wake up to the real nature of the European project that Edward Heath was about to take them into, by which time it would be too late for them to leave. Its author(s), writing in 1971, made clear that the Community was headed for economic, monetary and fiscal union, with a common foreign and defence policy, which would constitute the greatest surrender of Britain’s national sovereignty in history. Since "Community law" would take precedence over our own, ever more power would pass to this new bureaucratic system centred in Brussels – and, as the role of Parliament diminished, this would lead to a "popular feeling of alienation from government". It would therefore become the duty of politicians "not to exacerbate public concern by attributing unpopular measures … to the remote and unmanageable workings of the Community". And hence thrives the European elephant in the room. Politicians of all parties were also warned to be careful to conceal the fact that controversial laws originated in Brussels. By this means it might be possible to preserve the illusion that the British government was still sovereign, "for this century at least" – by which time it would no longer be possible for us to leave. In other words, says Booker, here was a civil servant advising that our politicians should connive in concealing what Heath was letting us in for, not least in hiding the extent to which Britain would no longer be a democratic country but one essentially governed by unelected and unaccountable officials. One way to create an illusion that this system was still democratic, this anonymous mandarin suggested, would be to give people the chance to vote for new representatives at European, regional and local levels. A few years later, we saw the creation of an elected European Parliament – as we see today a craze for introducing elected mayors, as meaningless local figureheads.
Entirely deliberately, though, I choose to call them elected mares. If Caligula had a horse for his consul, we now have mares.
Returning to the anonymous FCO author(s), where they were perhaps shrewder than they knew (the paper has the feel of multi-authorship) was in predicting how all this would eventually lead to "we the people" feeling alienated from the whole process of how we are governed. We now see a gulf yawning between, on the one hand, the consensus government of our new nomenklatura and, on the other, all the rest of us, aware that we are democratically powerless. To the growing groundswell of contempt and resentment that this is creating, those who rule us with such sublime incompetence will eventually find they have no answer. Thus, as I wrote in my piece, this feeling of alienation is neither perverse nor untoward. It was predictable, predicted – and it has come to pass. Oddly though, there are still those are those who regard opposition to the EU as a "single issue". If you want to claim that "politics" as a whole is a single issue, then I suppose that is the case. But, as the man once didn't say, some issue – some neck. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 28/04/2012 |
There is no rush
Saturday 28 April 2012
 "Mr Cameron", the Great Moore doth solemnly declare, "stands in the pivotal place. If he plays this right, he will be the leader of change. If he gets it wrong, he will be the last, tottering representative of the ancien régime". Then sayeth the Sage Of All Sages, "For all his mistakes over the Murdoch saga, he does not deserve the latter fate". Back in the real world, however, we learn of an observation by actor Damien Lewis, who recently attended a White House State dinner and sat with Cameron, Obama, Warren Buffet. That an actor should be in such company, in such circumstances, says a great deal, but the account of the meal is worth having. The two Americans, apparently, wanted to talk about how to solve the economic problems and create jobs. Cameron, we are told, kept changing the subject to his belief he could take Obama at tennis. This is the sort of thing that, if it isn't true, should be. It seems to sum up so perfectly the tenor of our Great Leader. Whether it is or not, though, we are certainly not rushing to judgement. We knew he was a wrong 'un in 2005 (nor were we alone) and have proceeded on that basis ever since. Our judgement has been long, slow and is by now well-matured. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 28/04/2012 |
A popular feeling of alienation
Saturday 28 April 2012
Frederick Forsyth did a piece last Wednesday about the evils of "the establishment" which, he writes, "runs the country and has done for centuries".
This is the sort of thing Forsyth can toss off in his bath without even breaking sweat, and it might have been more interesting if he had got past the clichés and looked a little harder at the dynamics that keep his "establishment" in power and the people under control. Jim Greenhalf has been doing just that, thinking that some of the problems can be put down to a "national identity crisis", which stretches from before we joined the EEC to the current day, a period during which this organisation has had almost as many incarnations as Shakespeare's seven ages of man. But with the help of a very interesting document known as FCO 30/1048, he has concluded that the identity crisis has been a distraction. While the nation was getting knotted up over identity, a huge amount of national sovereignty has been sheered away from the white cliffs of Dover, deliberately not accidentally. What has vanished, says Jim, is not the national character. Quoting from FCO 30/1048, we are told by distant foreign office scribes that the British are all deeply conscious through tradition, upbringing and education of the distinctive fact of being British. In a document written by anonymous officials in 1971, they tell us that, "given our island position and long territorial and national integrity, the traditional relative freedom from comprehensive foreign, especially European alliances and entanglements, this national consciousness may well be stronger than that of most nations". When "sovereignty" is called into question in the debate about entry to the Community, these anonymous officials say, people may feel that it is this "Britishness" that is at stake. Hence Rippon's then pointed question: "are the French any less French?" for their membership (of the EEC). Nevertheless, these officials were predicting that entry to the Community would mean major change, and that it was "natural and inevitable that this should be disliked and resisted by many". But, "as a middle power" we are dependent on others "both for the effective defence of the United Kingdom and also for the commercial and international financial conditions which govern our own economy". Thus, the task will not be to arrest this process of "accommodation and alliance over large areas of policy, domestic as well as external". To do so would be "to put considerations of formal sovereignty before effective influence and power". Instead, to counter the "popular feeling of alienation from government", our masters had then determined that "strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies" would be "essential". In a literary turn that I cannot match, Jim then refers to Dostoyevsky who, in his Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879, had already told us that mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. In his book, Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor describes how a select group of 100,000 will run the lives of thousands of millions by taking away the anxieties that come with freedom. Ruled by Miracle, Mystery and Authority, the masses will be allowed to work and play and sin, strictly under the control of these religious Bolsheviks. And so says Jim, the dictatorship of the proletariat has moved westwards. For the time being at least, for all empires fall eventually, we take our orders from a governing class of federal technocrats. Thus, while the existential crisis of who we are and what we believe is, like the poor, always with us, the carving away of sovereignty, however you define it in relation to power and authority, is a twentieth century decision. The deliberate and progressive erosion of sovereignty, like gum recession, has weakened the teeth of the British bulldog. And, in a final barb, we are warned that there is no point in seeking assurance from Churchill. In his time, this was a man who suggested an international air force. Emerging from this dissertation, therefore, is the sense that things are catching up with us. FCO 30/1048 was a prediction, a warning that a "popular feeling of alienation from government" would ensue from our membership of that is the EU. And we cannot avoid noting that the idea of giving us elected mares is one of the militating strategies. The one comfort we can get from all this is that our current feeling of alienation is neither perverse nor untoward. It was predictable, predicted – and it has come to pass. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 28/04/2012 |
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