On Living in a Political Vacuum
by Sean Gabb

The other evening, my wife and I dropped in for coffee on our good friend Rebecca Baty. For a while, we sat depressing each other with talk of all the new taxes and regulations heaped on us by this worthless and tyrannical Government. My biggest complaint of the evening was the discovery that sole traders must now register with the tax authorities before doing business. There was a time when a change of this nature would have been headline news, gathering endless discussion. Now, it had crept in almost unannounced – I had only discovered it when I heard some patronising wireless advertisement put out by the revenue authorities. For her part Rebecca complained about the increasing weight of regulations imposed on private landlords, one of which she is thinking to become. Almost as an aside, she mentioned the persistent rumours we all keep hearing that the Government is considering how to impose capital gains tax on the sale of only homes.

At last, just as I was getting ready to suggest we should all go and hang ourselves out of pure political depression, Rebecca brightened and suggested that the people might finally be getting restive. Not so, I said bitterly. Most people were sheep, and they would go on forever grumbling about the world but doing nothing about it.

 “No” said Rebecca firmly. “There comes a time when sandpaper on the skin starts to hurt. We are reaching that point. This Government has had an easy eight years squandering the fruits of Thatcherism. Now, the cupboard is bare, and a hungry state will not find many friends.” 

This was well said, and I cheered up for the rest of the evening. A few evenings on, and I can see that Rebecca came out with a good epigram, not necessarily a good argument.

The Lack of Opposition

There is no doubt that the Blair Government now has more enemies than friends. It has turned this country into a militarised, politically correct police state. It has alienated the liberal middle classes and the conservative working classes. It has upset the most respectable and politically engaged ethnic minorities. It is alarming everyone who has been prudent enough to acquire a freehold or a little capital. It has stolen our pensions. It has given us a police force unwilling to protect our lives and properties, but eager to use lethal force against anyone who might seem inclined to look at them in a funny way. It has raised up a terrorist threat that did not exist before – nor would have existed without – our joining in a failed war of conquest with its attendant atrocities in the Middle East.

All this can be said, and more. But it means nothing. The Blair Government is no more open to effective political challenge than it was in May 1997. It has spent the past eight years destroying or co-opting nearly every institution of civil society that might once have provided means of resisting it. Whether we look to the media or the universities or the administration or most corporate business, we see a solid phalanx of placemen or collaborators in positions of control. There is room within the phalanx for argument over points of detail – the wisdom of joining in the war against Iraq, for example, or the precise objects of the police state now almost completed over our heads. But there is no dispute over the ultimate objects of government in New Labour Britain, which is to provide income and status for an illiberal and anti-English Establishment.

There is, I grant, a firm judicial resistance to much of the evil heaped on us by this Establishment. But we should not expect too much. In the first place, justice can be had against the State – but only at a price that few can afford. In the second place, we can plainly see that the Ministers are trying to pack the Bench with yet more placemen. It may be proposed in the name of “diversity”. But what real purpose can there be to a scheme of change that involves appointing patent filing clerks to the Bench? It will involve gross miscarriages of both criminal and civil justice when the Judges are too stupid to understand the issues brought before them. It may be that a few scandals will bring further changes – in which the Judges preside in secret, and are guided in their decisions by informal committees of government lawyers and civil servants. But the judiciary has not bowed to the storm as every other institution now has – and this includes the Monarchy – and so it will be broken.

The Conservatives as Party of the Quisling Right

And there is no political opposition. The unofficial parties of conservatism failed in the general election of earlier this year. The Conservative Party itself has plainly committed institutional suicide. The farce to which its leadership contest has now descended can leave us in no doubt of this. How can a group of men unable to run their own party be expected to run the government of this country? And even when they do finally agree on how the next leader is to be chosen, what an unappetising choice they have set before us. We can have a Europhile who talks the occasional word of sense about the war and about civil liberties – though he cared little enough about this latter when he was Education Secretary and Home Secretary. Or we can have any one of a half dozen non-entities who speak no continual sense about anything at all. Whatever the case, it is obvious that the Conservative strategy – so far as one can still be discerned – is not to dash the cup of New Labour abominations to the ground, as rather to transfer it into Conservative hands with as little spillage as can be managed.

Some of my friends on the Internet are Conservative apologists. They continue to assure me that there is little room for announcing real Conservative policies. These would be misrepresented by the media and the Government, and the voters would be frightened off. For this reason, I am told, the Conservatives must speak in code, and we must be patient while they do by stealth what they dare not do in the open.

I have much respect for my friends – even for Christina Speight – but this will not do as an argument. The Conservatives have been out for office for eight years. Even if they could not realise how long they would be out in May 1997, they should have known they would be out for at least four years. That was more than time enough to set their own terms of debate.

Let us suppose they had done as I recommended at the time, and started their time of opposition with a radical break. Let us suppose they had denounced the European Union in honest terms, and promised withdrawal if genuine changes to our membership could not be achieved. Let us suppose they had announced and made a strict defence of our constitutional liberties – these to include a promise to end the failed war on drugs and the terrifying war on “money laundering”. Let us suppose they had opposed first the Serbian and then the Iraqi wars, and argued that these were not in British interests and would be attended by great crimes and would fail in their stated objects. Suppose they had done this. What would have happened?

The answer is that they would have lost support in the short term. They would have been placed in the full blast of the Government lie machine. Today, however, on just about every issue, they would be able to tell us they had been right. They could certainly expect to have done better at the general election of earlier this year.

As it is, the Conservative Party really does look finished as an institutional vehicle for conservatism. Writing just after the election, I suggested that the Party had established its claim to political leadership of our movement. I was wrong. That the Conservative vote did not collapse was not due to Conservative skill. It was due to the desperation of several million voters who were willing to do what they thought necessary to throw out the Blair Government.

The Conservatives went into that election with every possible advantage. The Government had failed in all its policies. It had got us into a disastrous and immoral war. It had raised taxes. It had shown over and over again an utter hatred of the English people and their ways. And the Conservatives still lost. If they cannot win an election in those circumstances, it seems fair to say that they are finished. This being so, I am not sure how many people will vote for them next time round.

The question, of course, is who, if not the Conservatives, will get these votes? Though I vote for it, the UK Independence Party is nothing more than a receptacle for wasted Conservative votes. Veritas was a complete failure. This being so, it is reasonable to expect the existing Conservative vote to fracture. Many votes will go to the Liberal Democrats, who are beginning to sound more like economic liberals than at any time in living memory. And their opposition to the war and to the abolitions of liberty this was used to justify was admirable. If only they will moderate their enthusiasm for the European Union, they might get my vote at the next election. But many other votes will disappear. Already, most of my friends do not bother to vote.

Why the BNP is NOT the Answer

As for the rest, they will go in a slow but cumulative trickle to the British National Party. I have been following the ideological changes and the Internet outreach of that Party since Nick Griffin became its leader. I have written about this at some length elsewhere and will not repeat myself. But the BNP is transforming itself from a national socialist to a white nationalist movement. Despite fevered claims to the contrary, the first has never had any mass appeal in this country. The second has much appeal. White nationalism has room for a certain regard for historic liberties and settled ways of life. Mr Griffin speaks well. He writes well. He can be very charming. He has a formidable and growing awareness of how to get the best out of a profoundly hostile media. He is currently facing trial for offences that would not exist in a free country. I suspect that by the end of his prosecution, the authorities will wish they had never charged him.

But none of this is an endorsement of Mr Griffin or his Party. Whatever ideological changes are being made – however genuine those changes may be – the BNP has grown out of a national socialist movement. And these roots will be dug up and ruthlessly exposed to view every time it looks as if the BNP is doing well in local or national elections. Any views – however reasonable these may in themselves be – taken up by the BNP will be tainted by association. Any patriot who gets himself involved with the BNP will be ruined – and this ruin may in some sense be contagious to all his friends and associates.

In any event, we all know that the BNP has at least been penetrated by the security services, who will arrange for it to collapse at the appropriate time into the same autolysis as finished off UKIP. We know this because experience and common sense both point to it. And we know this because we have seen such interference by the security services trailed in the television drama “Spooks”

But if we are not to bother with the BNP, what other institutional means have we of resistance?

An Answer in the Streets?

My answer is that I have no idea. England today is very similar to England in the 1630s, or to France before the Great Revolution, or to Central Europe before 1848. We have a ruling class that has carefully stifled all peaceful means of dissent. The result is a crust of placidity over a mile depth of superheated magma.

If Rebecca is right, the sandpaper on the skin will eventually begin to hurt. But the resulting convulsion will not be limited to the ejection of the Blair Government from office. The force of the convulsion will be proportionate to its previous containment. We are looking at an explosion of anger such as England has never seen.

When will this start? Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next year. Perhaps after one more failed placing of faith in a Conservative Government. What will be its immediate cause? As with other revolutions, it will be some issue of such local significance that the more plodding historians will forever shake their heads over it in wonder. But unless some real party of conservatism can emerge in short order, and establish itself as a government in waiting, there will be a revolution.

Now, because I do not wish to become a victim of one of those new police state laws we were assured the Government needed to contain the threat of Islamic terrorism, I will say here that I do not advocate overthrowing the established order. I am certainly not the kind of person able to lead such an overthrow. Instead, I am only observing what seems to me an obvious truth. Because the rulers of this country will not read the letters and e-mails of respectable complaint, they will be forced one day to listen to the roar from the streets.

That is why Rebecca and I did not discuss who should be our choice to lead the Conservative Party. That is why I will not even raise the matter with Dr Tame. It seems now irrelevant who is to lead the Party of the Quisling Right. We may live at present in a political vacuum. Assuredly, though, some unstoppable force is about to fill it.