Dalrymple writes that the Chinese virus crisis has in the West reinforced a tendency to authoritarianism and emboldened bureaucrats with totalitarian leanings. He has been surprised by
how meekly the population has accepted, on the say-so of technocrats, regulations so drastic that they might have made Stalin envious. There has been no demand for the evidence that supposedly justifies severe limitations on freedom.
One view is that the authorities
are trusted by the population to do the right thing. Much as we lament the intellectual and moral level of our political class, there are limits to how much we despise it. We believe that our institutions still work, even when guided or controlled by nullities.
A less optimistic interpretation, says Dalrymple, is that the population
is so used to being administered, supposedly for its good, under a régime of bread and circuses that it is no longer capable of independent thought or action. We have become what Tocqueville thought the Americans would become under their democratic régime, a herd of docile animals. Only at the margins — for example, the drug-dealers of the banlieues — do the refractory rebel against the regulations.
Creepy weekly state-sponsored ceremony of compulsory applause
The Wuhan flu has revealed that,
whatever our traditions, we are less proof against authoritarianism than we like to suppose.
Authority, says Dalrymple,
is rarely content to stay within the limits set down for it, but is like an imperial power always seeking the means of its expansion.
He warns:
There is no human activity that has no consequences for health, either individually or in the aggregate; and what is the public but an aggregate? Public health, we have learnt, is the highest good, the precondition of all other goods. A solicitous government has the right — no, the duty — to interfere in our lives to make sure that we stay healthy. And authority once taken rarely retreats of its own accord.
The political class has set itself against the people’s will
Dalrymple writes that the temporary suspension of Parliament by Boris Johnson
has been depicted, in the world’s Press and in Britain, as all but a coup d’état, the manœuvre of an incipient dictator, at the least an authoritarian measure.
It is, he says,
the opposite. It is designed to prevent a coup. The mirror-image of truth has largely prevailed.
Three years of manufactured chaos
Dalrymple lays out the facts.
Parliament agreed to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Although it had no force from the purely constitutional point of view, it was not intended as a glorified opinion poll and it was implicit that the winning side would decide the issue. No strong objections were raised in advance by those in favour of Britain remaining in the EU because they felt they would win with ease. Despite — or because of — the support of David Cameron and Barack Obama for the campaign for Britain to remain, those in favour of leaving gained 52% of the votes. Parliament, the majority of whose members were in favour of remaining, passed a resolution in obedience to the result; it would have been too brazen a defiance of the popular opinion that they had canvassed to have done otherwise. But having done this, they opposed both the deal negotiated by Theresa May and the withdrawal of Britain without any agreement. The EU had reiterated that it would not renegotiate the terms: it had no reason to do so, given May’s surrender on all fronts. Thus Parliament wanted neither the only deal then possible nor no deal.
The élite knows best
Parliament was
attempting to prevent any kind of withdrawal whatsoever, even in May’s extremely attenuated form. It set itself up against the will of the people as expressed in the referendum. Parliament was expressing its authority over popular opinion, presumably on the ground that it knew best what was good for the people on whose opinion on the question it had sought. If anyone could be accused of mounting a coup, albeit a slow-moving and indirect one, and of political authoritarianism, it was Parliament.
Suppose, says Dalrymple, that the vote had gone the other way — that 52% of those who voted had done so to remain.
Does anyone suppose for a moment that the disappointed leavers would have refused to accept the vote and manœuvred to thwart the will of the majority? A few might still have argued for eventual withdrawal, but would not have obstructed or threatened the continuance of the government as the remainers have done. Who are the democrats round here?
Those who demonstrate against Johnson’s manœuvre
do so because they claim to want Parliament to have its say. But Parliament has had its say for three years, without resolving the issue, and with a determination to thwart implementation of the resolution it had passed — because it never had any intention of carrying out the people’s wishes as expressed in the referendum.
Dalrymple notes that
to hold a plebiscite and ignore the result is now a European tradition, but to call it a democratic procedure is to twist the word beyond any possible meaning. Both the French and the Dutch publics voted against the proposed European Constitution by a wider margin than that by which the British voted to leave the EU, but got it anyway in a revised form, as a binding treaty rather than as a constitution. The political class thus triumphed over the population, banking on the fundamental apathy of the latter. But this a dangerous game.
Outraged dignity
The protesters against Johnson’s manœuvre
are not trying to defend parliamentary democracy, about which they do not give a fig: what they are protesting against is that the votes of those persons whom they consider ignorant, uneducated, prejudiced and xenophobic have a chance of being taken seriously, indeed as seriously as their own. This is an outrage to their dignity.
But as Dalrymple points out,
the educated are not ipso facto wiser than the uneducated, nor are they necessarily the stoutest defenders of freedom, a fact evident on many American campuses where opinion is free only as long as it coincides with the doxa. Among the greatest foes of freedom today are many of the educated. They are the anointed whose vision must prevail, and mirror-image truth serves that end.
He adds that
time is short, but ample enough for further betrayal.
A real ray of sunshine: Philip Hammond is one of the leading Quislings
The anti-Johnson protesters are enemies of democracy
Dalrymple writes:
You would have thought, from the howls that greeted Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament, that he had appointed himself prime minister for life. Our democracy was in danger, said the demonstrators, meaning that Johnson’s manœuvre had made it harder for Parliament to obstruct the wishes of the people as expressed in the referendum.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, he says,
was right when he said that the outrage was bogus: it was that of a spoiled child who doesn’t want to go to bed.
Plebiscitary democracy,
in which a government puts questions to the population in the expectation of getting the answer it wants, is dangerous. The modern European tradition is to hold a plebiscite and take no notice of the result if it is ‘wrong’. This is what the demonstrating ‘defenders of democracy’ want. If they had objected beforehand to the procedure, pointing for example to the absurdity of deciding so complex a question on the basis of a single vote decided by 50% of the votes plus one, they might have had a point. But they did not. They expected to win the referendum and only turned against it because of the unexpected result.
Parliament, Dalrymple points out,
has conducted a long rearguard action against putting into effect the vote that it called. The majority of MPs were opposed to Brexit, but instead of coming straight out with it, they prevaricated so long and so efficiently that they almost scuppered the whole process. Having canvassed public opinion in a supposedly binding referendum on a vital subject, to ignore the result can only strengthen the impression that the political class is a law unto itself.
Dalrymple points out that Brexit required leadership, but
there was none to be had from the political class.
From the very first, the political class
overwhelmingly opposed Brexit. For some, the eventual prospect of a tax-free, expense-jewelled job in Brussels was deeply alluring.
But the political class
found itself in a dilemma, since it could not openly deny the majority’s expressed wish. Many MPs sat for constituencies in which a solid majority had voted for Brexit.
The Brexit imbroglio, Dalrymple says,
has the merit of revealing to the British public the extent of its political class’s incompetence.
However,
if it is accepted that people get the leadership that they deserve, thoughts unflattering to self-esteem ought to occur to the British population.
seems to be doing what is unforgivable in a democratic politician, for it will make life difficult for all the others who come after him: he is keeping, or trying to keep, his election promises.
Dalrymple suggests that many of the 52% who voted for Brexit in the UK European Union membership referendum might have done so
because they feared that the ‘European project’ was the creation of a vast sovereign state to slake the thirst for power of megalomaniacs of the political class, impossible of even minimal democratic oversight, a giant Yugoslavia.
The leaders of France, Germany, and Italy have said that they want to push forward to closer political union. Dalrymple comments:
Consider the following. The French government, whose legitimacy no one will deny even if he denies its competence, is attempting some weak reforms of the rigid French labour market. This has resulted in months of conflict and continued violence. But at least the reform is the work, or attempted work, of a French government. Imagine if the reform were imposed by fiat of a European government despite the opposition of the French government and members of the European parliament.
He had discriminated against no one, but made a speech in which he called for ‘fewer Moroccans’.
The law against incitement to discrimination
is implemented in a discriminatory way. One sometimes has the impression that liberals want to provoke the very reaction that they say they fear, so that they don’t have to think about such unpleasant questions as, ‘How many Moroccans do we want or need?’
Wilders’ movement, Dalrymple explains, is
a reaction against the moral arrogance of the political class.
a very large proportion of immigration was in accordance with the family reunification program. The original economic migrants, principally from Morocco and overwhelmingly male, were felt to be suffering from loneliness.
So it gave the political class
a nice warm and fuzzy feeling inside (a bit like that experienced in the gullet after a shot of whisky) to let immigrant labourers be reunited with their families—in the Netherlands.
One thing led to another,
and suddenly 11% of the population, much of it economically inactive, was of immigrant origin.
Unfortunately, Dalrymple notes,
those who had the warm and fuzzy feeling—which included the knowledge that they were not repeating the less than glorious record of their country during the Second World War—did not bear the consequences. But they felt good about themselves.
Into the stew of ethical narcissism
was poured multiculturalism. Its object in the Netherlands was the opposite of, or at least very different from, what it became. Moroccan economic migrants were originally encouraged to maintain links with their homeland and continue their cultural practices so that when they became surplus to the Netherlands’ requirements for cheap unskilled labour—that is to say, of pensionable age or sooner if there were an economic downturn—they would be able to reintegrate easily back into Morocco. As Goethe said, however, grey is theory, but green is the tree of life.
For many years, Dalrymple writes,
the political class and much of the educated middle class refused to see that there was a problem—not only because it did not obtrude much on their personal lives, but because they had created it, and they would have to lose their ethical virginity if they tried to do anything about it.
Unfortunately,
molten lava has a habit sometimes of breaking through the placid surface of the earth. The rise of Pim Fortuyn was the tremor and his murder, as well as that of Theo van Gogh, the eruption.
Fortuyn has found a successor in Geert Wilders, who
is accused of incitement to hatred and discrimination. But it is quite clear that he has done no more in regard to Islam than, say, an anticommunist might have done in claiming that the implementation of communist doctrine inevitably leads to tyranny.
Dalrymple reminds us that in the 1975 EEC referendum, Scotland
was considerably less enthusiastic about membership than England.
Scotland, he notes,
had the only two regions to vote against membership — in one case by three-quarters of the vote.
These were areas that had been
economically dependent on fishing, and were very aware that, in an act of stupidity only too frequent among the British post-war political class, Britain had given away, in negotiations to join the EEC, its exclusive rights to fish its own waters.
Britain,
though an island with a very long coastline, now imports twice as much fish as it exports, and catches half of what it caught in 1970.
