I watched the election results from a hotel bedroom in Portugal, where I decided it would be a waste of time to sit up very late into the night. I therefore missed the most enjoyable parts of the bloodbath. Even so, I gave half an hour to watching Steve Baker try to look philosophical. Since I find the man repulsive, I might have waited for his own result. It was enough, though, to glance the following afternoon at the definitive list of the unseated.

I see no point in repeating the details of how the Conservative Party betrayed its voters and their country across four Parliaments. These are known too well. I will instead explain the circumstances of the betrayal. There is no doubt they governed in fear of the usual suspects. The Conservatives made a strategic choice before 2010 to promise a restoration of normality to their voters, but to leave law and policy to the authoritarian left. This let them win four elections, but also let them go about enriching themselves without too close a scrutiny from the Guardian-reading classes. However, while they spent fourteen years sucking up to Peter Tatchell and the critical race people, and to the lifestyle nazis and the Americans and the greens, and so on and so forth, they also remained what they have always been – that is, the party of the rich. And this is perhaps the main charge against them. They did not just make promises, and then break them because it gave them an easy ride with collecting their bribes. They made these promises in the sure knowledge that keeping them could not be in their interests to the degree that they continued to define themselves as the party of the rich.

One can go too far with demonising the rich. They are not the only important people in a country. But, except in countries where even the formality of private wealth has been abolished, the most decisive members of any ruling class will be the very rich. They will determine the political and cultural norms of a country. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the very rich in England were the landed nobility. By the middle of that century, they were joined by the more successful industrialists and merchants and by a growing monied interest. After 1918, the landed nobility lost their already diminished position. Since the 1960s, the industrialists and traders in things have also lost position. Today, the very rich draw their wealth overwhelmingly from the sale of financial services. These are often the descendants of the very rich of earlier generations. But the nature of how they are very rich has given them a different set of interests.

A landed nobility has a long-term stake in the survival of the nation that inhabits the land. So do industrialists and merchants, so far as they have large fixed capitals in the country. When these had a greater presence in the ruling class, their own particular interests had to be taken into account by the monied interest, which often had ties of blood and common sympathy with them. Reduce the weight of these groups, and we are left with a monied interest that has no long-term stake in the country.

For the monied interest as it now exists, England is nothing more than a contingent trading platform. It does business here while it is able to shape the relevant tax and regulatory laws. If it loses control of these, it will relocate. While it does control them, its only concern with the other areas of governance is to ensure the neutralising of potential challenge to what matters. It will keep control by subsidising friendly political movements, and by subsidising friendly intellectual and media interests. The monied interest is rather like those travellers who turn up on a nice village green and set about burning tyres and dumping rubbish everywhere. Individually, these may be reasonable and even rather nice people. As a group,  they have interests different from those of the settled population. An interest they obviously do not share is the wellbeing of the area in which they have temporarily settled. So it is with the monied interest.

This explains the destruction of the working classes since the 1970s. These were a threat to the rich after 1945, so far as they might elect a genuinely socialist government. Even without that, they were a nuisance because of their inclination to strike and to make other kinds of trouble. The monied interest procured a set of laws and policies that made most of the traditional industries in this country less profitable than they might otherwise have been. It also supported membership of a European Union that drew industrial investment away from this country, and then flooded the country with immigrants from Eastern Europe to reduce working class living standards. Even before this, it was friendly to the early forms of political correctness that prevented general resistance to mass-immigration from outside Europe. The benefit of this immigration was that it balkanised the population, making a real challenge to the monied interest less likely. A further benefit of political correctness was that it soon lost any connection with traditional socialism, pulling radical activism away from nationalising the means of production towards an obsession with minority advancements that posed no threat to the established order.

In the same way, allowing the administration to be filled with freakish control activists, and the old laws and ways thereby to be degraded, reduced the possibility of real challenge to what was already an unveiled plutocracy.

Dealing with the usual suspects would have been seriously hard and even risky work for any Conservative Government after 2010. Dealing with the rich was out of the question for the Conservative leaders. For this reason, promises were made that ensured growing majorities of Conservative voters – but these promises were shamelessly broken whenever they proved inconvenient, which was all the time.

This brings us to the last election, in which about half the Conservative vote resigned, and Labour won by default. The Conservative response has been to try attracting back the lost Conservative voters by proposing an alliance with the main recipient of the lost votes. I suspect there will be an alliance. The Reform Party will then finish purging the elderly patriots who embarrassed it before the election, and will replace them with the sort of glib and shifty liars who lost their seats. This will finish the Party as the instrument of change its leaders swore it would be. Even without this, however, the Reform Party has no clear understanding – or chooses not to explore one – of what needs to be done.

From the Monarchy down, every traditional institution has been taken and corrupted. It is actively working for the destruction of England. Nothing like this has happened before. Even in the troubles of the seventeenth century, the argument was over the manner in which England was to become great and wealthy. Charles I stepped outside the law. James II tried to subvert the laws. Neither wanted or tried to destroy England as it can be reasonably defined. We therefore face an unprecedented challenge, and this requires an unprecedented response. Listening to the Reform leaders talk about electoral reform or laws to protect freedom of speech gives us no answer to the obvious questions.

Because I have spent four decades explaining what needs to be done, I will not prolong this Editorial by summarising my proposals in detail. But my suggestion is to stop seeing the very rich – and particularly those who get their riches from anything involving finance – as allies. Their interest as a group lies in keeping England as what it has become. Any attack on the causes of our destruction cannot stop with purging the administration and the universities and schools. It must also involve a demolition of the monied interest. A tax on financial transactions might not raise much money, but would raise the costs of doing business in the City, and might chase a lot of the business away. A restored gold standard would do much general good – but a requirement of payment in cash on demand would put lead weights on the complex and destructive ballet of the City banks. Declaring a whole range of derivative contracts against the public interest, and instructing the courts not to enforce them, would empty whole stories of the looming buildings that have made the London skyline unrecognisable.

Of course, the Conservatives would never have considered a jot of this. The Reform Party would denounce it as Communism. This makes both parties useless as instruments of recovery. I further suggest, then, that we should be more open that we have been so far to new movements that do not look particularly libertarian or traditionalist. During the past few decades, we have moved beyond the point where simple reform is a viable cure. What England needs now is an overt revolution.

The only question is who the revolutionaries will be.

Related posts:

The Election: Time to Move on Conservative Desperation: An Enjoyable Smell of Death Michael Gove and the Negation of God Erected into a System of Government Questions to Candidates in Dover and Deal Nothing to Say about the Riots Anatomy of a Revolution – Arguably Legal to Publish in England Why Reform Threatens the Conservatives More Than Labour: A Rebuttal to Paul Goodman

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