Allister Heath is a sensible young man, and his article in today’s Telegraph does a good job tearing the new budget to shreds.
This is what he meant to do, and he did it well. But in the process the sensible Mr Heath did something I don’t think he intended. He delivered a scathing, if unwitting, denunciation of democracy.
Writing about our Labour government and its new budget, he moaned that “they have unleashed full-blooded socialism on a country that never voted for it”. Really? What does he think the country did vote for?
Essentially, Mr Heath is saying that the country first elected a Marxist government and then gasped with horror when it started acting in character. Or did they not realise they were electing a Marxist government?
That makes the electorate thick, irresponsible and illiterate. If they couldn’t read up on the record of every member of the Labour front bench, they are illiterate. If they could do so, but chose not to, they are irresponsible. And if they did the responsible amount of study and still didn’t realise they were voting for Marxists, they are thick.
What should have tipped them off, but didn’t, was Starmer’s waffle when he was asked to define the ‘working people’ he was promising not to hit with new taxes.
Anyone with a modicum of nous should have known that Marxists define working people as those who aren’t working and are therefore dependent on the state’s largesse. People who actually do work aren’t ‘working people’. They are marks for highway robbery.
If Mr Heath means that some of the things Labour announced yesterday weren’t in their election manifesto, then that’s true. But it in no way changes my regretful branding of the electorate as thick. How else would you describe people who believe every word politicians, especially Left ones, utter during election campaigns?
Mr Heath is effectively saying that, the British electorate being what it is today, democracy is no longer operable, not in its present form at any rate. Any functional democracy ought to have in-built safety valves blocking self-destructive voting.
To use an extreme example, if people vote to sell themselves into slavery, there should be a tripwire mechanism preventing them from doing so. There isn’t though, as witnessed by the fact that the 2024 election ushered in a close approximation of slavery, or perhaps an intermediate stage on the road to it, if you’d rather.
“This is it, the day we all dreaded,” writes Mr Heath, “a milestone in Britain’s descent into collectivism of the most repugnant kind.” He describes the situation accurately enough, while making it sound as if that dreaded plunge came unexpectedly.
Yet anyone with half a brain knew exactly what to expect. Marxist budgets don’t enrich or stimulate; they punish. Marxist taxation pursues punitive and authoritarian goals, not economic ones. Taxes are frontal assaults in the class war, something Marxist governments always wage and, in the absence of robust opposition, win.
The inevitable result, ever-present in history, is that, when Marxists run a country, they run it into the ground. What part of it did the British electorate not know or understand?
Many people were saying that the Tories were useless, and I couldn’t agree more. Hence, they had to be ousted, went the next argument. Surely things can’t get any worse?
That’s where I emphatically disagree, and did at the time. Things can’t always get better, but they can always get worse.
Thus, hardcore Marxism is infinitely worse than the Socialism Lite practised by the Tories. The Tories were vapid, inane, cowardly and incompetent, but at least they weren’t evil. They genuinely wanted to make things better, although they didn’t have a clue how to do so.
This Marxist government is evil, which Marxism is by definition. Evil governments don’t want a free and prosperous country. They want to turn people into a dependent herd, with the state cracking the whip.
If any parts of the constitution stand in their way, such survivals of the past will be destroyed mercilessly. This doesn’t just include such basic constitutional provisions as property rights, which this Marxist government interprets as its own right to confiscate property.
Even the jury system, an institution that has existed in Britain for 800 years, since the reign of Henry II, also finds itself in Labour’s crosshairs. David ‘Celebrity Mastermind’ Lammy, who holds the posts of Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, has announced that henceforth some 95 per cent of criminal cases will be tried by a single judge.
Even the Bolsheviks had their troikas, three judges including a CheKa officer, the local party secretary and the state prosecutor. Yet British courts will make do with just one member, and never mind the eight centuries of constitutional tradition.
When that distinguished class warrior, David Lammy, appeared on Celebrity Mastermind, he expressed his firmly held views that the Rose Revolution (under way at the time) took place in Yugoslavia, Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize, and Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII. Now that functional moron is vandalising the world’s most venerable jurisprudence.
The details of that constitutional sabotage haven’t yet been released. Apparently, jury trial will be reserved only for cases of murder, manslaughter and rape. In other words, a man who rapes a woman will be tried by a jury of his peers, whereas a man who beats a woman to a pulp won’t be afforded that luxury.
This is similar to the way jury trial works in France, where it’s reserved for the most serious crimes only. In such cases, the jury is usually made up of six members, one of whom is a professional lawyer.
That system has its pluses and minuses, as does ours. But if Lammy didn’t know the difference between Marie Antoinette and Marie Curie, he may be unaware that the French legal system is fundamentally different from ours.
It’s based on the Napoleonic Code that goes back to Roman Law. The English Common Law, on the other hand, is precedent-based. As such, it can be traced back to no English counterpart of Justinian or Bonaparte. English law, developed gradually and organically, is as different from French positive law imposed from the top as our Parliament is different from the French Assemblée Générale.
Someone like Lammy may be ignorant enough not to know such primary-school basics, but that’s not why he is gunning for our ancient legal system. He and his Marxist accomplices have declared war on all ancient institutions specifically because they are ancient.
This lot are driven by hatred and the urge to punish, destroy and totally control the rump country left over after they finish. That’s what Marxists are; that’s what Marxists do.
And if democracy, as it now is, can’t protect itself from an ignorant, irresponsible and generally thick electorate voting for collective suicide, there is something fundamentally wrong with democracy. That’s what follows ineluctably from what Allister Heath said.
But he couldn’t have made this logical inference even had he wanted to. He writes for a respectable newspaper after all.