Hurtling Backwards
The Tories are running the most inept and chaotic election campaign ever seen as they slide into electoral oblivion. In desperation they have plucked National Service out of the ether in an attempt to shore up their elderly vote. It’s a catastrophic idea described hilariously by a pliant media as “the first major policy announcement of his election campaign”.
It’s an admission that there is no voter base among young people for the Conservatives but the idea is so riddled with issues its not true. How would conscription work in Northern Ireland? How would it be enforced, if, as James Cleverley has said, no teenagers will be sent to prison for avoiding the Conservatives’ proposed “mandatory” national service. How is it mandatory then?
Of course it won’t really happen because the Tories are abut to be annihilated. It is a performance aimed at offsetting the Reform Party on the Tories right. As Adam Payne of Politico magazine said: “The National Service announcement seems squarely focused on trying to squeeze Reform. It’s a defensive move to mitigate defeat, not win an election.”
But it does show you where post-Brexit Britain is. Ideas that were once the sort of thing that would be raised at fringe meetings at party conference in the 1970s, like ‘Hang Mandela’ or repatriation or bring back hanging are now front and centre policies. Ideas that were thought to be too repulsive in 1974 are now just fine. John Harris has called this ‘brazen populism‘ and described Tory politics as febrile and poisonous, but its far worse than that. The Tory worldview is vomited up from their own weird fears and orientations, their own psychological insecurities projected out into the real world and into grotesque policy formulations.
Sunak is playing to a playbook that seems familiar to many, this is Project Fear 2.0, in which brave Little Britain is surrounded by enemies and threats – the Chinese, the Russians, the Scots – its a continuation of the Brexit themes of False Victim Status. A large current of it stems from a set of assumptions about a false victim status that England cradles in its arms. From Boris and his Bananas to the grand presumptuousness of ‘Thirty Years of Hurt’ to the Brexit campaigns squalid, racist NHS broadcasts – to Farage’s foul conflation of sexual and racial threats – the false sense of entitlement and idea that England/Britain has been stolen or undermined by some external force (not the failed elite they elect) is palpable and enduring.
It’s an exercise in massive self-deception foisted on the public by a governing class that have been systematically asset-stripping the NHS and the rest of the public sector for a very long time. Blaming it on Brussels or immigration is an age-old trick of the stage-hypnotists but it doesn’t stand a moments scrutiny. The politicians conjuring this world of the 1950s will never have done National Service themselves. This is an entirely imaginary Britain they are trying to re-create in a desperate attempt to create an alternative to Starmer’s offering of a bland new order.
Casting about for the perpetrator of this great tragedy, the Tories have settled on 18 year olds as the real problem. That’s the 18 year-olds dragged out of Europe, facing climate catastrophe, job insecurity, housing crisis, and in Scotland, denied independence. These are the 18 year-olds that are the problem. What is the remedy to this entirely false victim status that the Tories have conjured? The remedy is the military. Facing the challenges that we face today, the solution from a discredited and panicking political elite is two things: scare the public with a story about a dangerous world and force young people to join the army.
Anglo-Britain is increasingly a parody of itself. A fetid stagnant backwater shut-off from the world and descending into bitter recrimination. It’s characterised by failing public services, endemic poverty and broken political institutions. The party standing on a ticket of ‘Change’ spells out daily how it will change nothing at all.
If this tragi-comic policy were ever to come into being – and Britain is such a weird place you never know – it would surely by the recruiting sergeant of the biggest rebellion of young people ever witnessed.
Scarfolk is excellent.
Don’t!
The danger of this national service proposal is that it ferments away in a side room of right wing party events and gains momentum among a small group and becomes more mainstream. There will be almost inevitably a right wing taking advantages of a post Starmer political scene. We need to snuff out such proposals.
Next week they’ll revive the ”You’ve never had it so good !” slogan .
I think the focus on this decaying psychology is correct, the desperation to mythologise just one righteous war (which precipitated National Service) contrasts tellingly with all those British wars and conflicts these Conservative voters don’t want to mention in public. A series on these wars would make for interesting content, but I doubt Bella has the space to dedicate an article for each.
#karmaphobia
The fact that the crimes of the cream (curdled, curdling) of the royalist British armed forces are being currently examined are another symptom of this psychotic break with history and reality. The glee with which the British militaristic establishment abuses its own child soldiers while fondly enabling the murders of foreign child civilians tells us more than enough about the moral degeneracy gripping electoral British politics.
I had a teacher colleague in Glasgow during the late 1970s who was also a Tory Councillor in Glasgow Corporation (I think they called themselves The Unionist Party in these days.) She regularly raised issues about Mandela at Corporation meetings, condemning him as a ‘terrorist’ who should be hanged. Of course she got a fair bit of publicity in the Scottish media and had a vocal clique of supporters in the staff room. At the time, the Science teachers at the school were also piloting a sex education course for which STV produced an accompanying series called ‘Living and Growing’. The clique was incandescent and the Science teachers were openly abused and insulted in the staff room by the clique: ‘perverts’, ‘destroying the innocence of children’, ‘promoting immorality’, ‘causing teenage pregnancies.’ At the same time there was a campaign by some teachers, mainly these Science teachers at the school, to abolish corporal punishment. This was vehemently opposed by a majority of teachers in the school.
These three issues were conflated into one and a general opposition to these Science teachers who were deemed to be ‘communists’.
Your mention of ‘hang Mandela’, brought these long dormant memories into my mind. What they showed was how they can appeal to different section of the population and become melded into a single focus, against, at that time, ‘communist perverts’.
The response was to use humour against the reactionaries and such people annoy take a joke. There were other factors such as being pretty well liked by the pupils and their parents and having influential supporters because the sex education programme was being implemented well and because, in the specific circumstances of this school, which was one of only two open plan secondary schools in Scotland, the Science teachers had demonstrated that it was practicable.
The reactionary group was so convinced of their own ‘rightness’, that to them it was inconceivable that parents, young people and figures in the higher echelons of Scottish Education, could support these ‘communists’.
The ‘National Service’ policy displays a similar lack of any understanding of the wider range of people in the population.
@Alasdair Macdonald, are you sure that
“The reactionary group was so convinced of their own ‘rightness’,”
?
Is it not more probable that the hierarchies of British imperialism combined all of these moral crimes: racist oppressions, corporal punishments of subaltern including children, sexual abuse of children by royalist/religious/militarist/imperialist institutions? In other words, these reactionaries were more likely to be hypocrites, who supported or indulged in such crimes, while expressing moralistic cant?
I’m writing in the context of the revelations that the “Church of England’s ties to chattel slavery went to top of hierarchy”:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/25/revealed-how-church-of-englands-ties-to-chattel-slavery-went-to-top-of-hierarchy
I think if the history of British imperialism shows anything, it was that the perpetrators of its crimes were only too aware of their nature, and sought to whitewash their reputations once the tide turned against their abuses.
I am also reflecting on the most disturbing chapter I’ve reached in philosopher Susan Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil (2019, 2020): Faces of Emmett Till. According to some commentators, there is significant support for bring back racialised chattel slavery in the Southern States of the USA now, today. What racists, child beaters and sexual abusers talk about among themselves is often today revealed during investigations uncovering private chat groups. And guess how many of these present a pious public face?
Psychologically, and although we did not formally study the link at university between politics and psychology as it was too hot a topic we could read between the lines, there is evidence for the rough Left-Right split in European traditions falling into self-perception and projection lines: those who privately consider themselves evil are more likely to assume others are evil, and call for authoritarian hierarchies to punish others (this maps to the ‘Lawful Evil’ alignment in D&D). Whereas those who privately consider themselves good are more likely to give the benefit of doubt to others, and be more relaxed about people generally making better choices on their own (‘Neutral Good’). There are many complexities and counter-cases to this (someone who has experienced evil through childhood, someone who has repented evil ways) and subjectivities/cultural biases/indoctrinations to consider, but there are certainly enough hypotheses to investigate. Not that I regard the Left-Right ideological categorisation as particularly helpful either, and prefer a multi-dimensional approach to politics, and a recognition that a core of our ethics comes from our shared biology.
But people who celebrate the vicious racist, misogynistic, child-abusing violent/sexual/extractive/destructive/genocidal/ecocidal crimes of Empire (publicly or privately) are naturally going to be afraid that the wheel of fortune will turn, and political/legal/social changes will call them into account, which is essentially what I mean by karmaphobia. It has been astoundingly jarring and eye-opening for me, to give one example, to read English-language accounts of Victorian colonial wars on the difference between descriptions of looting by British troops, British civilians, British-Indian troops, despised European classes, and Other Foreigners, in a ludicrous hierarchy (looting by British troops is almost always good, looting by Other Foreign irregulars or civilians almost universally despicable). Incidentally, these views can be death sentences to civilians in war zones, like the French civilians who took German weapons from Normandy battlefields and were summarily executed by Allied troops, according to historian Antony Beevor.
I disagree in part. I don’t think the Tories want to win this GE. They know that UK Inc is in deep deep sh!t, they know they caused it, and they know they are going to get the blame. Sunak is now a useful idiot for their longer term plans. As his recent media appearances have shown, from drowned rat in Downing Street, turning up in brewery (sans piss up), using the Titanic shipyard as a backdrop, and being pictured under the exit sign on aircraft, he is being made into a clown. Not that he cares, he has more money that most people can even imagine, and will be off to the USA to grift even more once he’s out of office. Five years of Kid Starver spinning round policyless and clueless will allow them to blame Labour for Tory failings, the compliant Tory media will run rampant with headlines like “you’ve never had it so bad”. The English illiterati will be back to voting Tory in droves, whoever the frothing gammon they have as leader by then.
Just so.
@Doug, we briefly studied Japan’s system in politics class. There are examples of what is sometimes termed a ‘one-and-a-half party system’ worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_System
It is characterised by deep corruption, financing bubbles, precarious public services and decay of civil society. However, there are significant differences between the British Empire (which survived WW2, though in foreign policy terms as a vassal of the USAmerican Empire) and the Japanese, which was essentially stripped and made a demilitarised vassal through conquest and mass annihilations of the civilian population, while largely incorporating its most vile criminals into the new regime. Gangsterisation flourished almost everywhere the war touched, continuing to flourish under neocolonialism.
And some parts of these Empires, including the British, are still classed as non-self-governing by the United Nations.
That Starmer has reneged on promises to nationalise key industries gives perhaps a sense of the modern version of zaibatsu, only in Britain corporations are more likely to be controlled by foreign families (or temporarily, hedge-fund asset-strippers), not unlike perhaps the feudalist aftermath of the Norman Conquest when corporations outside London were primarily land-based.
So, whoever Sunak and Starmer really work for, perhaps the British metropolis is not self-governing either. That does not excuse people who vote for them, though.
Exactly! That this guff has traction with Union minded Scots of a business, rather than a public sector background, still amazes me. Just back from a golf holiday with onesuch- ex whisky industry, production side- there’s no persusion/evidence that works- once you become Gammon, there’s no way back!
‘Anglo-Britain is increasingly a parody of itself.’
And yet, it looks as though, in Scotland, this election will lead to an increase in support for parties committed to the Union.
If Mike Small looked beyond the obvious failures of the Tory Party he would see that the party which has dominated Scotland for the past 20 years is likely to lose badly to a Labour Party which is still recognizably the same one that was led by Jack McConnell, Kezia Dugdale and several others whom I – and everyone else – has forgotten.
Mike Small and others have written several articles over last few months critiquing why support for the SNP (not independence) has been falling.
I would suggest you read them but as you are a frequent poster on this site I am sure you are aware of them, read them and have possibly also commented on them.
I have John
My question would be what actually is ‘Anglo-Britain’, ‘a fetid stagnant backwater shut-off from the world and descending into bitter recrimination’?
The term seems to be applied here to a version of the Tory party and its supporters (and possibly some Brexit voters) and their deeply old-fashioned views, but can hardly be applied in the same way to all Labour supporters and voters (or Green, or LD), or indeed the millions of quite progressive people in England.
On the surface it appears to be an extrapolation of a narrow world-view held by a relative minority. I would agree that that exists but simply to call it ‘Anglo-Britain’ means what exactly?
Niemand – AngloBritish exceptionalism- is a view of Britain which is based on the view that England and Britain are virtually one and the same entity and that the terms can be used interchangeably. The exceptionalism aspect comes from an assumption that this form of Britain is world beating largely based on a rose tinted view of British Empire.
While I agree that there are large sections of society in England that do not conform to this view it is an extremely important political force.( magnified by Westminster FPTP electoral system).How else could you explain why the impact of Brexit, let alone how to reconnect with EU, are hardly ever discussed by all the main UK political parties or the UK media?
It’s the author’s default megaphone shock-trope. I would take no notice of it. I presume that he isn’t really that stupid and totalitarian and just does it out of habit and environment.
I suppose its to distinguish between ‘Britain’ which doesn’t really exist any more as a coherent unitary polity and the thing that dominates Britain and British politics which isn’t just ‘England’ but ‘Anglo-Britain’ as England in an of itself is rarely allowed to manifest itself.
That does make sense and was not clear in my mind. Literally it just seems to mean England / the English as part of ‘Britain’ but I take the point of the ‘anglo’ influence of a particular mindset across the whole of this island.
Both these things can – and are – true at the same time Florian. The SNP is clearly in deep electoral trouble – and Anglo-Britain is increasingly a parody of itself. Why would one preclude the other?
The problem is that, for independence supporters such as yourself, there is a zero-sum game. The SNP is, in electoral terms, the independence movement. (I have not decided this, the voters have.)
When the SNP is in ‘deep electoral trouble’, the independence movement is also in deep trouble. The other side of the coin is that the UK is the beneficiary, despite being a failed state – as is written so often – or being ‘a parody of itself’ or ‘a weird place’ or ‘a fetid, stagnant backwater’ and so on.
After Nicola Sturgeon’s failed decade, a bounce back recovery can not be taken for granted. The SNP has no money, an increasingly tawdry reputation and a shortage of political talent. This last is probably the most serious.
Tom Devine said a few months back that independence was off the table for a generation. For its supporters, this is a frightening thought.
What would you like me to say?
I would like you – or anybody else on the pro-independence left in Scotland – to make an honest assessment of where this political grouping is, going into the July 4th election. Something along the lines of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Forward March of Labour Halted.’
The decade past has been a failure. The SNP has ignored it, it has given up on fighting elections and it can not claim to have significant influence on public opinion. All the evidence is that the beneficiary of the SNP’s present many troubles will be SLAB, which is still recognizably the party of Jack McConnell and Kezia Dugdale.
Or alternatively, you could try to convince me – and many others who share my scepticism – that the pro-independence left is, contrary to what I have written, in rude, good health.
Thanks. Will do.
I have spoken to Belgians, Croats and Estonians who went through national service. They all said that it was a farcical waste of time, from which they gained nothing.