The end of the Idea of Britain

With public voices from Elon Musk to Professor David Starkey ringing the alarm bells about the state of British democracy, Sir Lindsay Hoyle's interview with the BBC was cause for greater alarm.

What is ‘The Idea of Britain’? I concocted it to clumsily explain the complex web of threads of culture, laws, constitution, traditions, union, institutions, freedoms and democracy that has been forming ever since the ancestors of my English cousins sat around a hearty in the dark Teutonic forests and came up with the idea of Common Law. The ‘Idea of Britain’ spread around the world, taking enlightenment, trade, progress, the rule of law and democracy with it. The ‘idea of Britain’ seeded the great Republic of the United States, its principles founded the United Nations and the idea of international law. The Idea of Britain is the threads that hold us together as a society. However, I am rapidly drawing the conclusion that the relentless attacks on the Idea, cultural, political, internal and external; sorely abused and mismanaged by those elected to govern, have destroyed the Idea of Britain and it will be impossible to recover it and with this end will follow the end of the nation state of Britain. 

Like many of you I have been very concerned with the speed at which events have unravelled since the election of Starmer’s Labour Government. Understand that Starmer’s election win and conduct since winning is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, the assault on the Idea of Britain has been underway for a very long time now. 

So how far have we fallen? How severe is the damage? 

Enter Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons. When he became Speaker, his appointment was universally welcomed as a panacea to Bercow, a man who by all accounts appears to have been a tyrant to his staff and who  decided throw any semblance of neutrality to the wind in his loathing of Brexit and his desire to see it reversed. Sir Lindsay, a man whose good nature, balance and respect for the office he now held in the institution he now oversaw gave everyone a sense that Parliament was in a safe pair of hands.

So febrile is our politics these days that it was only a matter of time before Sir Lindsay was tested and unfortunately, his ever so slightly hysterical reaction to the incident, his ham fisted fumbling over the SNP Gaza amendment was seen for what it was: appeasement and pushing the limits of his office to the very rubber stops, justifying his action with the universal get out clause for all decisions: ‘I was worried about Member’s safety’. In doing so Sir Lindsay undermined the authority of his office, himself and, more distressingly the once implaccable Parliament which had stood up to Kings and continental dictatorships, showed itself cowed in the face of the ‘evil-which-shall-not-be-named’. Within a year of this appeasement, and hard on the back of soaring crime figures and civil unrest, that same Speaker now demands the end of freedom of speech for our own safety.

When the draconian responses to COVID were implemented, many warned that these would have consequences we couldn’t possibly understand and that we had effectively signalled that we were happy for the government to decide to take away our freedom for ‘our safety’. So Sir Lindsay, Sir Keir, Sir Mark Rowley and the others who hold power in our nation feel no shame when they once again, convince themselves that we are in a period of national crisis, that requires extraordinary measures. Reichstag Fire, eat your heart out! 

Those of us outside the Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff bubbles shake our heads in despair as we see freedoms that took centuries to win, torn up in front of our eyes, when we are told to respect institutions and laws that increasingly shameless politicians bend for their own gain. 

Actions have consequences and high senior MPs in all parties are never out of the press, so swamped in individual scandals be they Boris, Rayner, Yousaf or Davy. Incidents of political and executive incompetence which would have triggered resignation from office as little as 20 years ago, are brushed aside. In all three Parliaments on Britain, the respective governments have been mired in grubby actions. Every time this happens, another nail is hammered into the coffin of British democracy. 

One of the best examples of this, and one that didn’t make the headlines it should have was the most blatant abuse of power in British since the 1700s:  Nicola Sturgeon’s blurring of the boundaries between the Criminal Justice System and her own government through the politically motivated prosecution Alec Salmond  and her subsequent cynical use of the error of not granting MSP’s Parliamentary Privilege and press gagging order. Desperate to stop the publication of the report into her conduct, she had her attorney general threaten MSPs in the Scottish Parliament with arrest if they discussed it. Had it not been for David Davies, a close friend of Salmond, reading out the report in Westminster, where he had Parliamentary Privilege and the courage of The Spectator, the report would have been buried. 

It is a sorry weather vane on how low our politics has sunk that neither the report of her conduct and the cynical attempt to cover up the scandal ran off her back like water off a duck’s whilst those of us who remember that there was a time when honour would have demanded her resignation, if not the resignation of her government in entirety. It is revealing that this scandal, and the following on exposing her handling of COVID in Scotland, never mind the expenses scandal all bounced off her and it took her foolish wandering into the murky swamp of gender politics to finally bring her down, 

The catastrophic level of distrust in our politicians, bordering on contempt is not just a product of sleaze. It is a product of broken promises, of a political class for whom the point of politics is power and not service. Politicians no longer fall on their swords to protect the integrity of the system, they would rather manipulate that system in a desperate attempt to cling onto power.. 

Voters aren’t stupid. Whilst Ms Sturgeon congratulated herself at successfully silencing the MSPs through her exploitation of a loophole left open during the preparation of the half baked cake that is devolution, voters were moving their respect for parliament, politicians and our institutions down another dozen slots on their internal ‘Dregometer’. 

Those of us who are students of ancient history will recall that in the years before the Republic fell to be replaced by firstly a trio of dictators, civil war, the murder of the victor, more civil war before dictatorship and Empire; it was wracked with decades of increasingly febrile scandal and shenanigans. Politicians and warlords cast aside the principle of prioritising public service, of responsibility to the ideals of a state  over personal power and gain and as such fatally holed the reputation of the Senate and the Res Publica. 

A bloody attempt by Sulla, using emergency powers  to stabilise this scenario by effectively executing and proscribing the families of the powerful, brought a temporary reprieve. But the bloody medicine opened fresh wounds and by the time the next generation, politicians like Cicero, Cato, Crassus, Pompey, Lucullus and Ceasar jostled for power before resorting to open civil war. Principles like law, order, civic peace were cast asunder as these men used their wealth and power, enforced by gangs of thugs, lawyers and eventually legions to settle their differences. The consequences of their struggles had tentacles that stretched beyond the borders of Rome, in the west Gaul was conquered and destroyed, Britain subject to military expedition so Caesar could crow to the mob in Rome and amass the wealth he needed to fund his rise to power. The war absorbed Gaul into the Empire but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many many more enslaved. In the east, Pompey, Crassus and Lucullus sought to build their reputations - Lucullus won military glory but was politically outmanoeuvred by Pompey. Crassus, conscious that his victory against Spartacus and the slave revolt was some time in the past, smarting under Caesar and Pompey’s goads , bit off more than he could chew and picked a fight with Rome’s deadliest enemy, the Parthians Empire resulting in catastrophic defeat and the death of his son, Publius in battle, Crassus was captured and put to death by having molten gold poured down his throat deliberately chosen to be symbolic of his folly of greed. The death of Roman democracy was a tragedy that tore the ancient world apart.

When people comment that some of the western democracies are heading towards civil war, they are comparing the state of our societies, our institutions, our politicians with the myriad examples in history. You don’t have to read Glubb Pasha to understand this, even a cursory knowledge of the collapse of the Roman Republic or Athenian Democracy or the French Revolutionary Government is enough to draw parallels between then and now. It is not hyperbole to ring the warning bells of history, after all those who won’t learn from it, are destined to repeat it.

So why the history lesson? Well you see it strikes me, and many others, that the conditions that ended democracy in Rome are disconcertingly apparent in several western nations including our own. That the rot starts when the threads that hold the idea of Britain  together are stretched by the ambitions of politicians who should know better:  the Union, the Constitution, the Church, The Crown, and the institutions that represent those pillars: Parliament, the Law, The Churches of England and Scotland, the monarchy; undermined firstly by the attempt to marry our Common Law bottom up system with the Bonapartist legislative top down ‘democracy’ of the EU. By the Blairite tampering with our constitution, Parliamentary structures, with the imposition of a Supreme Court over the Common Law. By the relentless attack on the culture and traditions of our nation. All is justified in the name of ‘progress’. When this doesn’t work then the justification is ‘safety’.

The Roman Republic collapsed because the glue that bound the rival political factions together - loyalty to the principle of the Senate and People of Rome, the supremacy of Res Publica was pushed aside by those who put their own power above these principles. Those who when they seized power, then abused or manipulated the hallowed rules and traditions of the state to hold onto it. The miscalculation such leaders make is to assume that the state will survive such abuse, the thing is, it never ever does. 

The Plebes Sordida of Rome, the ‘Great Unwashed’ the free Roman citizens who constituted the Roman mob, mostly unemployed, most surviving on the grain dole, most with too much time on their hands and most too ready to nail their grievances to the standard of whatever politician promised them bread and circuses gradually lost what respect they had for the institutions of state, for the laws that supported them. Civic order broke down, respect for law, violence ruled the streets. As Cicero himself said ‘a house divided cannot stand’ and indeed peace was only restored when a strongman, in this case Octavian, won power, despatched all potential threats including the aforementioned Cicero and declared himself Emperor Augustus. Augustus brought peace and safety to a state which had been wracked by civil war and unrest for nearly 100 years. Absolute power justified by ‘safety’.

The Plebes Britannica are not stupid, they can see this, they can see how our institutions have been abused, how they have been politicised, culturally captured. They have now seen the open contempt with which the so called ‘intelligentsia’ hold them from AC Grayling’s appalling demands that only by restricting the vote to graduates could the nation be saved from itself to the universally held contempt of Westminster, the courts, politicians, police that the British are a mob of unruly bigots who should never be trusted with the truth because they are so filled with hate that they will form lynch mobs to attack the innocent. But contempt flows both ways and I cannot recall a time since I became an adult in the 1980s, where the contempt for politicians, institutions, the police, the courts and the state has been so universal and so visceral. What did Professor Grayling, Mr Starmer and Sir Mark Rowley and their ilk think was going to happen? If you wish the respect of those you lead, you must respect them. If you treat people with open contempt, that contempt will be returned with interest. 

So how close are we to the collapse of democracy in Britain? How damaged are our institutions? With public confidence in the impartiality of the law, in the police and in the institutions and government at an all time low iIt was Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s demands for mass censorship that, for me, indicates the beginning of the end of the idea of Britain more than anything else and, perhaps the final severing of those final threads. That he is unable to answer the question ‘what is disinformation’ but demands for whatever it is to be banned, presumably by Sir Lindsay and his friends in Parliament? That a senior politician, the Speaker no less, should blatantly ignore the principle of democracy:  that we get to the truth of any situation, that we decide what is ‘disinformation’ through open and vigorous debate is deeply concerning. The conclusion being that either: our Parliamentarians have lost confidence in our system, the system that appointed them, have lost confidence that democracy and the common sense of the British people which has kept us on a broadly even keel for 300 years now; or that they have decided that the reigns of power should be taken from the people, that Parliament, the embodiment of that Democracy, should be replaced by a kritocracy - a rule of lawyers. Given Mr Starmer’s avowed continuation of Blair’s project  to replace Parliament with unelected quangos and to further hand power to unelected judges, I suspect it is the latter.

Brexit terrified the political establishment in this country, their mask slipped and what we are seeing here is the deliberate deconstruction of the structures of Britain that made the Brexit vote possible. The uniparty will not be defied, the foundations of those structures will be changed ‘for our own safety’, after all the precedent COVID set was that anything goes if ‘safety’ is at stake. So a man with impeccable liberal values, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, convinces himself, in his confirmation bias bubble, that censorship, that freedom of speech, the single most important bastion of British democracy must be curtained ‘for our own good’.

Can our nation survive this? Yes, it can survive this. Can our democracy survive this? No. It cannot. It grieves me greatly to say it but I do not believe that the idea of Britain can survive, I do not believe that we will have an actual democracy ten years from now. We may have the parody of such, as the Roman Senate continued but so much damage has been done, deliberately, to the idea of Britain, in order to function at all, democracy will have to die, the final justification will be ‘for our safety’.