Stephen Moriarty
We live in strange times: if we leave aside surveillance and the speech laws (which are only sporadically enforced) for a moment, we are experiencing a libertarian experiment. In addition to the now long-established economic liberalism (the government is currently seeking to destroy trade-union power completely), modern communications allow one to access almost any idea or cultural product and to avoid all state propaganda. Furthermore, through multiculturalism, the state has permitted a range of lifestyles, communities to live in enclaves, and children to be educated separately.
Some groups are even using their own legal systems and eschewing the police. There has been some rhetoric from the Home Secretary, but there is no will to do anything about this, and it is not easy to see what the state could do without breaking “human-rights” laws. Of course, when crimes of sufficient seriousness are committed, the state still takes action (for many lesser crimes, such as drug use, it does not bother); but it can do nothing if it never becomes aware that a crime has happened in the first place. At the same time, CCTV means that public life is eerily calm for the most part, and one is free, due to state enforcement of such liberties, to dress and worship how one likes without inconvenience.
However, when people are granted freedom, they often choose to enslave themselves. Many of these groups have loyalties to foreign powers of one form or another. As a consequence the British state can seem to resemble that of late nineteenth-century China: prevailing over an anarchy, with its antiquated institutions are at the mercy of foreign investors. In addition to Britain having signed treaties that make nationalisation and other interventions in the market illegal, many of these investors think they have sufficient raw power, if only through the agency of their “fifth columnists”, to make the state think twice before adversely affecting their commercial or political interests. Whatever the de jure position with regard to sovereignty and property rights, it is the de facto position that matters.
Constitutionally and in terms of territory, the British state is also weak. The first-past-the-post voting system, once claimed as a source of strength, becomes less legitimate as the demos becomes less capable of consensus. It is thus an engine for Balkanisation, as people move to ensure that their group has a local majority (as Dr Gabb has pointed out, when national identity is destroyed, ethnic identity takes its place as people seek security from each other and from a state that claims no special loyalty to or from any group; this kind of liberty paradoxically results in increased conformity as people feel obliged to affirm their ethnic loyalties). With regard to political leadership, the quality of many MPs is poor due to the “Party List” system, which allows the Hedge Funds to make sure that they are biddable types. Something similar can be said of the “reformed” House of Lords, and Westminster as a whole, not entirely justly, is now a byword for sleaze and incompetence.
Neither has the irresistible force of nationalism finished its work in Britain. National feeling in Scotland and Wales is so strong that no British government can afford to antagonise it further. Even Cornwall has been allowed to develop the sense of victimhood that is the soil of separatism. Bourgeois Londoners see themselves as sophisticated cosmopolitans, and London has been given a separate political identity through its mayor. In other ways as well, foolishly heeding Terence (“If she is not mad enough herself, egg her on”), British politicians have encouraged these centrifugal forces through initiatives such as locally elected mayors and police commissioners, devolution, the “Northern Power-House”, “Free” and “Faith” Schools. There is even a move to weaken the public-service remit of the BBC.
Foreign policy has been so ineffective as to have caused a complete loss of nerve. Membership of the European Union is an explicit death-wish, but it is the interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya that revealed the incompetence and impotence of our leaders most tellingly. We were told that British intervention was in order to prevent the training of terrorists who might attack us. Traditional border-control would have been a more appropriate policy, but this was impossible for our leaders, not just ideologically, but practically. People who couldn’t run their own country thought they knew how to run some of the most intractable regions in the world and that the bloodshed would be worth it. At the bottom of this evil was political correctness combined with economic liberalism (the former is the cultural arm of the latter). These interventions were destined to failure because of the tribal nature of humanity, yet this made them inevitable. They were grotesque displays of ideological purity necessitated by the subliminal knowledge that the ideology was false. There was a circularity about them: what really worried our leaders was the effect of terrorism on “community relations” at home, but they could not bring themselves to admit that it was multiculturalism that was the source of difficulty, so they embarked on foreign adventures in order to convince themselves that the threat was external. By this they only reinforced the motivation of terrorists, whose tribal loyalty across borders was undiminished. When a society adopts as its control mechanism a guilt complex about one of the most important survival instincts – tribalism – it becomes fatally incapable of perceiving reality.
Does Britain then, as David Cameron has said, face an existential threat? The question arises because it has “bet the farm” on globalisation and multiculturalism. These terms were, in any case, really only excuses for hypocrisy and incompetence. The failure of multiculturalism in particular could take the British state down with it, not merely because such a failure is in itself catastrophic, but because the British state is now synonymous with it. Only colonising groups and their sponsors use the term “British”, but this identity is now shattered beyond repair even for these groups: the antagonisms between some of these groups are far more serious than between any of them and the English.
At the beginning of this essay, however, I mentioned surveillance. This is one thing that the British state is quite good at. Huge amounts of money and talent are expended spying on people who, not without reason, could never have been expected to have much loyalty to the British state in the first place, and have been given little incentive to alter their views. Increasingly, indeed, almost no one can be expected to have much loyalty to the British state. Hobbes conceded that one owed no loyalty to a state that could not fulfil its raison d’etre – to keep the peace – but to keep the peace the British state is now obliged to spy on its citizens, and is thus incapable of arousing any loyalty beyond that which we might feel towards a kidnapper who has thus far desisted from carrying out his threats.
I feel as though I and my children have been taken hostage by the British state: it offers no long term security and yet has become so powerful it can afford to let us run about like a cat with a mouse. There is no course of action that would allow any of us to show that we are loyal citizens. This was always the sadistic motive behind “diversity”. I would rather have made this bargain the other way around: I would be happy to show loyalty if I were granted privacy, freedom to speak my mind, and long-term security.
