Britain is the Un-World: an Un-Democracy

Britain is the Un-World: an Un-Democracy, an Unprecedented Land; an Unbelievable Place, run by the Unelected.

Welcome to the Circus. There are levels of hell.

First up we have the Freak Show of charlatans and carpet-baggers, the toxic commentary that parade the studios and pages of the tabloids, occasionally being anointed by the state broadcaster to liven-up a particularly dullard Question Time or enflame a talk-show. These include Darren Grimes, Neil Oliver, George Galloway; Katie Hopkins; Nigel Farage; the Foxes (Lawrence and Claire); Kirsty Allsopp for some Kath Kidston pop-politics; and a roster of low-level online shysters all pumping out their shit. Junior apprenticeships for the Freak Show have been awarded to the likes of Sophie Corcoran who appear out of the ether with a whiff of brimstone that must mean dark money. Their function is to entertain and enrage, giving a voice for the perpetually outraged and a target for social media entropy.

This group has a bridge to the Door-Keepers by figures like Richard Madeley or Piers Morgan. Their function is to bring some of the Freak Show Energy to day-time TV.

Then you have the curators and the Door-Keepers, the editors producers and presenters and star reporters. These high-salary figures function is to bring much-needed credibility and gravitas to the performance, they promise ‘insider knowledge’ and whispers and leaks from the great.

Next in the ring we have the Actual Politicians, some elected, some elevated some just hanging around but perpetually offered a platform to air their fascinating views on a loop.

Then there’s the next level down, the sort of Incredulous Liberals (aka the Orphaned Centrists) who gawp open-mouthed as the realisation dawns that their country is a shitshow and the media is a fire-bin. They cling on between the other three groups gasping as they watch always-expectant of some crumb of comfort to maintain their delusion. “Surely NOW they’ll resign!!” they mumble into their keyboards/microphones/cameras.

So as the torpor of partygate staggers on and on and on notice this: the Tory party is holding the nation (s) to ransom, yup, yours and mine.

The Tory Party are not going to evict Boris, they’re just not. They don’t care. The media will fluff and whine and wail but nothing will happen, nothing. The other politicians will tour the studios and perform at PMQs and nothing will happen, nothing at all.

The Tory Party are not going to commit to onshore wind energy or mass insulation because their pals in a handful of constituencies will feel the Gammon Rage of nimbyism. The Green Party and other environmentalists (like me) will whine and wail and nothing will happen at all.

The Tory Party will suppress a Section 30 Order for as long as they possibly can. The SNP and independence supporters (like me) will whine and wail and nothing will happen at all.

All of this is mediated and justified by the Freak Show, the Door-Keepers, the Actual Politicians and the Incredulous Liberals who interact and cross-fertilise in a self-justifying Venn Diagram of performance politics. This is an elected dictatorship with a meaningless constitution and a powerless people.

They won’t do any of these because they don’t have any commitment to democracy at all, they don’t have any social values at all and because there is no constitutional mechanism to hold them to account at all.

None of this is really questionable.

But what it means is if you want to change the PM (arguably irrelevant) or force the necessary energy strategy – or to demand a democratic vote in Scotland, it means stepping out of your comfort zone, stepping out of the conventional narrative and stepping beyond your tried (and failed) tactics.

We need some of this energy …

 


None of this is new despite all of the protestations that this is all ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unbelievable’. It’s not at all. The Tories assert power in Scotland despite their track record of loss or rejection over the last 50 years …

To have seen the Tories win the most seats and votes in Scotland you would have to be a minimum of 88 years old.

Soon there’ll be non one left at all who can remember a Tory victory in Scotland.

They maintain this power because we allow it.

Time to run away from the Circus.

Comments (16)

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  1. Robbie says:

    WELL LETS GET THE F** K OUT OF IT THEN , I am 3years short of your date Mike and I want to be shot of them before I go . Feel nothing but disgust for them .

    1. Irene Crichton says:

      I am 2years beyond and have been a member of the SNP since 2014 patiently waiting for independence and like you would love to see it happen before i go at the moment i will at least have to live till I am 92 ! things are getting much worse i find myself telling some of my 16 children and grand children(the 17th on the way) not bad for an only child !all living in the same town !I find myself telling them how good things were during the war! Listening to the radio marking on a map with a pin where the army were advancing to. Spending our sweety coupons 6ozs on a good week , nothing wrapped in plastic , i could go on and on !playing out with pals till bedtime. Right now I feel we are living in the middle of a horror story !The rich getting richer the poor getting poorer ,people living on the street lucky if they can use a food bank , at least we all got our fair share during rationing each week .Thinking how great things will be when the war ends ! Now look at us !!!

  2. Squigglypen says:

    Step out of your comfort zone and quit whining…be brave….UDI.

  3. Gavinochiltree says:

    I wouldn’t wantScotland to become too problematic for England to keep.
    I wouldn’t want, for example, folk to blow up the electricity inter connectors south.
    I wouldn’t want, for example, folk to blow up the gas pipelines to the south.
    No, now is not the time!

    No, none of that.
    We must play nice, and ask, and ask for a democratic choice to be available to us.
    Like Boris, Starmer and Daley have stated for Ukraines rights should be respected.
    But for Scotland, now is not the time.

    Starmer’s party has a long relationship with the SDLP, an Irish Independence Party.
    Labour has stated it would be neutral in any border poll.
    But Scotland?
    No. Labour must not have anything to do with a Scottish pro-independence party.
    Just because.
    Because Starmer does not recognise or respect Scotlands democratic right to choose.

    1. Alan Crocket says:

      I’m sorry, but this is absolute nonsense.

      Independence has been, and remains, on a silver platter for Scotland. All that is required is for its independence party to put up the appropriate manifesto at the next general election, to turn it into an plebiscite. If a majority of the people of Scotland then voted for it, independence would be ours.

      That is the simple truth, and the plain legal and constitutional position, in addition to being fully democratic. For what it’s worth, it is also endorsed by London. Our own political leadership must give us the vote, and we must vote Indy.

      English obstructionism has nothing to do with it. London may possibly prevent a referendum, but all that will do is turn the whole referendum business into a complete red herring. To make out that there can be no independence without London’s cooperation is factually wrong. As to why a large part of the movement has fallen into this error, ask my party, the SNP.

      1. 220414 says:

        I don’t know what the legal status of the result would be, but issuing an election manifesto that would be in effect a prospective programme for an independent Scotland would at least give the electorate something substantial to vote on, a practical vision of what an independent Scotland would look like if a majority of us were to vote for that programme. We haven’t really had that up till now. All we’ve been offered by the independentistas so far is a pig in a poke.

      2. The only point I made was that Johnson’s government would obstruct a Section 30 Order. Is that nonsense? I don’t think it is.

        There are of course other routes to independence, though having established a referendum as the previous route it takes some explanation to change that course.

        The problem is not, in my view, ‘English obstructionism’ as the SNP’s failure to make the case or build the conditions for independence. Not all of this is their fault imho – but a considerable part of it is.

        1. 220414 says:

          To give the Scottish government its due, it has been building the conditions for independence over the past 15 years by developing the bureaucracy it will need to assume full control of civil society, developing civic institutions that have a distinctively national branding, and engineering serial conflict with the UK government to cast it in the unifying role of a national threat.

          In a sense, this is the route that the Scottish government is taking to independence: by building an alternative state apparatus that will secure and consolidate the existing political regime and the socio-economic order it supports; a route that will change nothing essentially. And that’s what we’ll be voting for or against in the next referendum (unless we abstain through sheer indifference or spoil our ballot papers in protest, of course).

        2. Graeme Purves says:

          Exactly so!

        3. Alan Crocket says:

          My comment was in reply to Gavinochiltree.

    2. Alasdair Macdonald says:

      But Keir Starmer has TWO Union Jacks – that proves he is NOT Jeremy Corbyn. What more do you want??????

  4. SleepingDog says:

    But even if you had a functioning majoritarian representative democracy these essential and rational environmental decisions may still not have been made. There are some collective decisions that democracy is not optimised to make. This is why I argue for a constitutionally-encoded biocracy. Whether that happens or not, the likelihood is that there will be phase shifts into unprecedented political-economic systems, just as surveillance capitalism and nuclear-armed superpowers were new forms. Predicting these new forms, however, is difficult.

    I was reading Samantha Crompvoets’ Blood Lust, Trust and Blame (2021) book about lessons from the investigations into alleged Australian Special Forces atrocities 2009‒2013 against Afghans (mostly prisoners or noncombatants). It is short work of sociology, and therefore contains little evidence (though it points to resources). The relevance is its focus on small elites disconnected from larger society, protected by secrecy, where apparent formal hierarchies are not reliable guides to who is exerting power. Crompvoets is arguing that you need to look beyond ‘culture’ and look at “how does power operate, both formally and informally, within and between all the different levels”, notes that misconduct can spread through social networks, and rather than large transformative cultural programmes recommends extensive analysis to find specific practices that can effect real changes. The last approach is also the way that we were taught how British politics typically works: some of the mechanisms are critical and therefore very hotly contested (like any procedures for finding MPs or Lords guilty of conduct that renders them immediately unfit for office). This is also why some constitutional amendments can be so significant. For example, curtailling the powers of the monarch by transferring royal prerogative powers to Parliament, or changing the Treason laws, or removing the formal influence of the City of London, or the Privy Council; but also much smaller procedural reforms (like some of those called for by Green MP Caroline Lucas and like minds) could have positive effects apparently out of all proportion to their place in the British quasi-Constitution, whose obscure cruft is often purposely-wrought armour for the privileges of status quo disguised as fuddy tradition.

    I would also note that reform does not rule out revolution, and indeed often precedes it, for exactly the reasons specified.

  5. Joe Killman says:

    Eye-Opener Mike. Love the way it’s laid out. Thanks. Joe

  6. Ottomanboi says:

    Scotland should have a «Day of Rage». Let the joyous anger flow.
    Being law abiding, polite, nice does not work with colonialist bullies and their «eunuchs».
    Check out the decolonization literature.

    1. 220418 says:

      How many folk do you imagine would turn up to this ‘Day of Rage’? Most Scots are fairly content.

  7. Ewen A Morrison says:

    Thank goodness for such absolute honesty and expressed in a range of languages, ranging from Mike Small’s intelligently written piece to the woman swearing like a squad of angry troopers; I’m a bilingual Scot who’s used to working with certain hardworking/swearing people… but the two people I’m talking about are the best of all of them – “Co-mheasail” is Scottish Gaelic for ‘Equally respectable, of equal respect’…

    This world needs many, many more people like these!

    Ewen

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