I am at something of a disadvantage because for the last
year or so I haven’t watched any TV. I’ve never watched GB News. But I do
sometimes listen to the monologues by Neil Oliver online. I used to watch his
documentaries about the history and geography of Britain and found what I
watched to be unusually intelligent. GB News has given him a different platform
and his is a rare voice. I don’t think he is always right. Sometimes I disagree.
But he is trying to say something important about Britain. The thing that is
important is that we are stuck in a stultifying rut without any possibility of
change.
Britain since the Second World War has been dominated
by a consensus between the Labour Party and Conservative Party. The Welfare
State was combined with managed decline so that by the 1970s most of us were
poor. For decades it didn’t much matter who you voted for. Wilson and Heath
were much the same.
There was a very brief interlude where it did matter.
The Thatcher Government changed everything, and we reached the 1990s with a
Britain that had been changed as radically as it had been by Atlee. But since then,
we have returned to consensus.
Blair and Brown gave us social democracy that hoped to
use the market economy to produce higher taxes for public spending. David
Cameron and the coalition did the same. But so have Theresa May, Boris Johnson
and Rishi Sunak. The exception was Liz Truss who attempted to change things,
but through a mixture of mismanagement and establishment opposition failed
dismally.
The vote in 1979 made a difference as did the vote in
1945, but in between the only other time Britain voted for real change in 2016
it was thwarted. There are all sort of reasons why people voted to leave the EU,
but the main one was that they wanted change. The UK did leave the EU, but did
anything else change? No not really. The same consensus remains.
The situation I think is similar in Scotland. We voted
for devolution in 1997, but it is hard to think of a single respect in which Scotland
has improved. Scottish independence may have produced radical change, but I
rather doubt it. The SNP has been in charge since 2007, but it has not made
Scotland more prosperous, worse it’s model of ever-increasing taxation and
state spending within the EU is not essentially different from that of Blair
and Cameron.
The Scottish establishment is just as powerful as the British
establishment. If you read the Herald or the Scotsman, then you find the same
cosy consensus. The main political parties differ over independence, but not
much else. I have the distinct impression that most SNP MSPs and MPs are
concerned more about their salaries and keeping their pleasant jobs than
independence. They accept that independence is not happening any time soon, but
let’s keep pretending to the gullible that it is, because it gives us access to
that nice bar in Westminster or that delightful Bute House in Edinburgh.
But the situation is no different in London. We will
soon have a choice between Labour and the Conservatives again. Keir Starmer may
be Prime Minister and Rishi Sunak, or successor will stand opposite each other
pretending that they are saying something different, but the difference will be
minimal.
We saw this during the pandemic. We now know that life
expectancy in Scotland has fallen sharply due to lockdown. We know how many
people died due to Covid. But we now know due to the fall in life expectancy
that many more died due to lockdown. But no one will admit that lockdown was a
mistake and they would do the same again.
I don’t think it mattered very much what we did. A
certain number of people were always going to die due to Covid. It would happen
quickly if we did nothing or slowly if we had lockdown, but we are as helpless in
the face of viruses as we were in 1918. If Boris Johnson had told us at the
beginning, I’m sorry there is a new illness, be careful if you are old, but otherwise
carry on as normal, we would have saved huge numbers of lives.
But no one said this. There was as with everything
else a political consensus. Dissenting voices were cancelled. We weren’t
allowed to even think about the issue. We just had to do what we were told.
It didn’t matter if your leader was Nicola Sturgeon,
Boris Johnson or anyone else. The BBC went into full propaganda mode and grotesquely
exaggerated the danger that for most people under fifty was relatively small.
Given this consensus our democracy becomes largely
pointless. It won’t matter much if Labour wins the election, the civil service
will tell it what to do just as it is telling Sunak what to do. It won’t matter
very much if the SNP win or even if it won independence. The same Scottish establishment
would be in charge.
Independence would merely be Brexit with kilts,
because it is founded on a lie that the SNP is different from the wicked Tories,
and we are still living in the 1980s when Thatcher closed down our pits and
steel works. They would have closed anyway. There is no real ideological
difference between Sunak, Yousaf and Khan. They are all social democrats. The
hatred that is the foundation of Scottish nationalism is entirely manufactured
between people who think the same.
But the cosy consensus won’t do. Britain is two
trillion in debt. We are falling behind other countries in the far east and
eastern Europe. Our economy is hardly growing and if we continue in this way,
we will decline in just the same way as we did between 1945 and 1979. Our
standard of living will soon be such that many of us won’t be able to afford a
car or heat our houses or go on holiday.
The establishment solution is mass immigration. Brexit
was supposed to give us control over our borders, but the Conservative
Government does not want to control our borders. It pretends to want to stop
people arriving in small boats and talks tough about the European Court of
Human Rights or Asylum law. There is manufactured outrage from Labour. Meanwhile
legal migration with visas to the UK approaches one million people a year.
But if mass immigration were the solution we would not
be where we are now. We have been trying this experiment since 1950. Has it succeeded
or failed? Thirty years from now Poland will be more prosperous than Britain
and it will still have tiny levels of migration. The Poles will vote to stop
it.
There is a concerted effort to cancel those few who
are outside the cosy consensus. Scandals are manufactured or exaggerated. Media
hysteria is always against those who dare to say the unsayable.
I don’t want to be overly cynical. Politics does matter
and even if you cannot change the world, you can be a decent moral person and
that matters more than anything.
The Brexit rebellion largely failed, but that doesn’t
mean real change is impossible.
Thatcher and Atlee mainly succeeded and changed
everything. Meanwhile we must focus on small battles like kicking out the SNP
because of its corruption and incompetence.
There will be a bigger battle one day, but we will
only win it if dissenting voices like Neil Oliver’s are allowed to speak.
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