In These New Times

Cailean Buchanan

4th May 2008

Much has been made of the collapse of the New Labour vote at the local elections. What is really striking is this: two British Prime Minister’s have burnt out in less than a year. Brown is now less popular than Blair and its fair to suppose that his successor will rapidly become more unpopular still. This unprecedented situation is undoubtedly a reflexion of the collapse of British financial power and the attendant economic crisis. But it also reflects the impotence of government in the face of it. For Britain is now a fully-fledged oligarchy where good governance is, at every turn, subordinated to the power of financiers feverishly engaged in looting the country, its treasury, its public assets, its pension funds, its local authorities and its people; the kind of regime which was once reserved for our colonies.

This situation hasn’t come about overnight: it is merely the culmination of the process of destruction set in motion by the Thatcherite revolution. Having gone this far, though, it is difficult to see how it can go much further without such expedients as the elimination of the surplus population and the formal declaration of the return of feudalism. At some point there will be a swing of the pendulum. But to what in a country without industry or agriculture to talk of, without a free press , without an opposition: a country where power and wealth are shored up by a sort of nomenklatura, a massive class of liars, spies,private security agencies, manipulators, spin-doctors, politicos, experts, academics and charlatans?

To the Tories, of course. To the party that set us on this course in the first place; the party to stand up to foreigners who don’t want our currency anymore; the party to oppose the iniquitous Euro; the party who opposed the reasons given for the Iraq war; the party which will stand by the City just like New Labour; the party for whom no sacrifice is too great to make sure the banker’s losses can be met out of the public purse.

With that old bulldog spirit we have shown at the polls that we will not be diverted from our headlong course towards oblivion.