Saturday 16 May 2009

What are the aims ...

... of those who have instigated the parliamentary expenses scandal?

I maintain that their long-term intent is to pass England into the ipso facto ownership and control of the United States - to have it literally ruled from Washington, with a puppet government holding no genuine power.  I say "England" advisedly: they would ideally impose such a fate on the entire UK, and they would not be happy if Scotland became a "glaring gap" in NATO's defences, but they have come to accept that Scotland and Wales would never accept complete control from Washington and, on the principle that selling most of their territory would be better than selling none of it, have come to accept that the partition of the UK would be necessary for the achievement of their aims.  To bring this about, they have to reduce English confidence in Westminster to the point where significant numbers in England would regard it as so rotten, so irredeemably corrupt, as to be worth abandoning altogether and replacing with a mere rubber stamp, while at the same time further increasing public feeling in Scotland, and to a lesser extent (at least for now) in Wales, that it is such a discredited, lumbering old monolith that they can get by perfectly well without it.  This past week, they have achieved far greater success in these aims than they could ever have hoped for.

But in the short term the effects of the past week's revelations will be manifested in revulsion against the entire "Westminster mafia", in a belief that anyone who isn't implicated in this universal (and clearly deliberately exaggerated) corruption must be, in some way, preferable. Including, I fear, a British National Party which almost certainly feels it has gained more than anyone else from the scandals - when Nick Griffin says his party is "unquestionably now part of the mainstream", he speaks with the self-satisfaction of someone who knows he's on the brink of some kind of victory, even if only by default, that the mainstream is now so hated that absolutely anyone who isn't part of it, however vile their views would have been considered previously, is to be admired simply because of who they're not.  This is what we are left with when Blair's post-politics - the abolition of politics, almost - completely collapses - all reasoned arguments, proper debates, were silenced on the assumption that post-politics would last forever.  It hasn't, but its legacy is that there is no true politics on any side left to replace it, and that (combined with the Tories' alienation of the ex-industrial North and Midlands in the 1980s, which has killed off what used to be a strong "respectable working class" / lower-middle-class Conservative vote among owner-occupiers in those areas, which is the main area - not the largely non-voting underclass - in which the BNP has built a support base) is why the BNP has got where it has.

Griffin predicted in 1997 that the coming New Labour years would see UKIP becoming the main party of protest votes in the shires, with the BNP - if he succeeded in taking control of it - gaining a similar role in the former industrial areas.  The accuracy of this prediction, which many would have complacently dismissed at the time, alone shows how much he understands and how strong his sense of where the wind is blowing is - far beyond any other far-right leader probably in British history (Mosley had the knack for a few years, but lost it rapidly in his own self-absorption - Griffin seems to understand realpolitik in a way no other British far-right leader ever has, which only increases his danger).  The most worrying thing is that the two parties of reaction - popular not for who they are but for who they are not - seem to be growing strength, not weakening, as New Labour dies.

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