By PETER HITCHENS
I fear a British Donald Trump. I fear such a person will steal the slogans of the Right and the merciless, dishonest propaganda methods of the Left – as the US President has done. I fear that the rise of such a figure is the likely outcome of the catastrophe caused by David Cameron’s folly in calling a referendum, and everyone else’s folly – of walking into such an obvious trap. It barely matters now how the whole thing ends. The sense of disappointment and betrayal now abroad is here to stay. A lot of people are not going to be forgiven for their part in the EU referendum fiasco.
Can anyone really have thought that this great greasy, congealed granny knot, tied and retied and tightened for nearly 50 years, could be undone by a single clean stroke? Did they think it could be undone without any effort on their part to change the British political, legal, cultural and media elites which had for 40 years supported our membership of the EU? They might as well have expected all the nation’s rivers to reverse their courses, or stood around waiting for figs to grow on thorns.
Armoured by resentment and a desire to pay back years of humiliation, such a leader – who like Trump will come from the world of TV or from nowhere, which is roughly the same thing – will have far more power than any US leader
Can they really have thought, in a controversy so profound and passionate, that a vote of 51.89 per cent to 48.11 per cent was a shining, decisive mandate in which the winner could hope to take all and the loser should be left to grind his teeth in perpetuity?
Well, if they did, it was a bad mistake, and the resulting divided country – in which one half will barely speak to the other, or acknowledge membership of the same nation – is the last and most bitter fruit of half a century of self-delusion, from which we have all now been roughly roused by real life.
Of course, the sensible response to that awakening would be to take a long, hard, cool, reasonable look at our country and work out what might be a wise and affordable compromise, and where we went wrong.
But I fear we will not do that. I fear we will have one last fantasy instead, a Great Leader cheered by adoring loyal crowds as he promises to punish other people on their behalf.
AND worst of all, I fear that such a person, and his supporters, will bring our long age of free civilisation to an end. Since 1945, democracy has been about voters trying to improve their own lives by choosing the parties which seem to promise them most. That is gone. We will soon look back on it with nostalgia.
From now on, democracy will be about a sullen, cheated, resentful majority wishing to make sure that everyone else now suffers as much as it has been suffering. We are moving from the politics of self-improvement to the politics of vengeance and spite, conspiracy theories, scapegoats and calls for the jailing and humiliation of the defeated.
Armoured by resentment and a desire to pay back years of humiliation, such a leader – who like Trump will come from the world of TV or from nowhere, which is roughly the same thing – will have far more power than any US leader. The President’s freedom of action is greatly limited by the US Constitution’s separation of powers and by the Supreme Court. We have nothing of the kind.
Margaret Thatcher’s vaunted revolution, promised in 1979, with its flashy wrappings and bold slogans at home and abroad, devastated our manufacturing industry and did nothing to halt or slow the great Left-wing moral and cultural revolution which now has us in its grip
This will be the price we pay for the complete failure of our parliamentary system to reflect the fears and wishes of the British people over the past few years, culminating in the tragi-comedy of Theresa May’s premiership.
For the absurd Westminster manoeuvres of the past few weeks, and of the weeks to come, are not an isolated event. They are the end of a far longer process of decline and decay.
I do not think Parliament as it now is, or our political system, will survive for very long after this. We are no longer adult or wise enough to cope with either, or to use them properly.
Each one of the repeated failures of democracy comes at a high cost. But the accumulated bill is now so great that it cannot be paid except in anger and disillusion.
Since the 1960s, when advertising men moved into politics, and our national leaders were sold to us like foreign holidays, we have been repeatedly let down and disappointed. And there has been no redress.
Harold Wilson’s technological shiny New Britain, promised in 1964, never materialised. Instead, we had devaluation, strikes and the catastrophic destruction of one of the best state education systems in the world.
Ted Heath’s supposed gritty realism, promised in 1970, ended in the Common Market, plus wild inflation and the three-day week.
Margaret Thatcher’s vaunted revolution, promised in 1979, with its flashy wrappings and bold slogans at home and abroad, devastated our manufacturing industry and did nothing to halt or slow the great Left-wing moral and cultural revolution which now has us in its grip.
As for the Blair-Brown-Cameron era, which began in 1997 and still drags on, people are only just beginning to realise the scale of its foolishness and its crazy revolutionary radicalism.
For most people the thing is just too big to understand. In a few short years, Britain became somewhere else. Criminal justice collapsed. The police became paramilitary social workers uninterested in the problems of the public and obsessed with sex and the internet.
Schools failed to teach the most basic knowledge yet preached the gospel of Stonewall. The word ‘husband’ disappeared from government documents, Christianity was officially dethroned as the national religion, the beliefs of a small coven of Marxist revolutionaries became the official family policy of a great and ancient state, terrorism was bounteously rewarded with amnesties, territorial surrender and power, and its gory dead-eyed practitioners invited to white-tie dinners at Windsor Castle.
But a nation that gave up defending itself against its real enemies in Belfast suddenly became furiously keen on overthrowing selected tyrants in the Middle East, squandering lives and money on adventures that had no conceivable benefit for us, and which would in the end bring great woes to our doorstep.
Absurdly posing as the foe of terror, even as it gave power and concessions to the terrorist godfather Martin McGuinness, it smashed up the ancient liberties of its own constitution, and engaged in disgraceful state-sponsored kidnaps overseas, which are only just coming to light.
And, rather than opposing all these dreadful ideas at home and abroad, the Conservative Party enthusiastically adopted and copied them, until it was impossible to tell it apart from the Blairites. The price of these adventures is still being reckoned.
But the most evident of them was the great spasm of mass migration from the devastated Middle East and across the Mediterranean, both direct and traceable results of our interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The current insoluble migration crisis of Europe, convulsing almost every continental country, was also the great unmentioned reason for much of the rage against the EU in 2016.
Immigration inevitably affects the poorer parts of the country, and it was Britain’s gloomier, more depressed areas which had already had their noses well and truly ‘rubbed in diversity’ (as New Labour’s insiders smugly described it), by the largest episode of immigration since the Norman Conquest.
The idea that the great columns of migrants advancing across the continent from Greece, or from Libya, might now end up in Boston or Birmingham or Slough was too much for Labour voters to bear.
Labour voters? Yes. It is the most astonishing fact of our past few decades that traditional Labour voters (such as Gillian Duffy, dismissed as a ‘bigoted woman’ by Gordon Brown) secured the majority for Leave.
Released for the first time from tribal allegiance, they took revenge on a party which had taken them for granted all through its long march of liberal intellectual policies.
They had put up with the withdrawal of police from the streets, with the treatment of criminals as sick people to be pitied rather than bad people in need of punishment. They had endured the closing of the gates of good schools to all but the rich, and the state’s weird obsession with sexual revolution. They had seen manufacturing industry, steelworks, coal mines, shipyards, car factories and council housing disappear.
Now, just for once, they could roll those resentments up into one missile, and hurl it back at the heads of the London pseudo-intellectuals who had taken over their party.
What a pity it had never happened before. But the sad truth is that both the big parties long ago turned their backs on their supporters.
At election times, they were advised by PR men to make vague promises: ‘More bobbies on the beat’, ‘Education, education, education’, ‘We will rescue the NHS’, or ‘The NHS is safe in our hands’. But these were either things they had no intention of doing, or they were things they could not afford.
And so we came to the end. We had a Tory Party that openly despised its supporters as fruitcakes, and a Labour Party that openly despised its supporters as bigots.
We had a series of governments that could not afford to pay for their promises and so had borrowed dangerously. It could never be enough, so nothing worked properly. We had a population which could not get used to the fact that it now took two wages to pay for the family life that had once needed only a single income. And even then, although there was officially no inflation, everything seemed to get more costly every week. So they borrowed too.
And then the effects of 50 years of bad schools began to work right through into the whole of society, with a million young people more or less unemployable, their jobs done by Poles and Romanians and Bulgarians.
I can just remember another country, a place of austere self-control, of unwrecked countryside and sober cities, serious schools, heavy coins, visible, authoritative policemen, flourishing industry. You could not take any long journey without seeing the forges and furnaces and shipyards which made almost everything we used.
If I’d known how soon it would vanish I would have treasured it more. Instead, I can do no more than try to find out why and how we threw it all away.
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