PM understands what his critics don’t

Perhaps ‘understands’ is the wrong word. It implies a prior intellectual effort, and I don’t think Sir Keir is capable of such exertions.

Yet on a purely visceral level he understands the nature of modern politics better than his Leave opponents – and I mean real Leavers, not people like Boris Johnson who saw the light purely for career reasons.

Starmer’s surrender to the EU has caused a predictable outcry in all the expected quarters. The prime minister is accused, correctly, of betraying Brexit and, also correctly, of being a lackey to the eurocrats across the Channel.

Leavers, which tag applies to all my English friends, say that Starmer has ignored the democratically expressed will of the people. That’s true, considering that more Britons voted to leave the EU than have ever voted for anything less. Starmer, my friends continue, has surrendered a chunk of British sovereignty, and so he has.

Yet all of it is irrelevant when seen against the background of the current version of Western democracy. I mean its subtext, not text; its connotation, not denotation; its undercurrents, not its undulating waves.

Democracy has succeeded in some things, but it has failed in perhaps the most vital one. It no longer elevates to government those fit to govern. This is a deadly disease and, like everything else about modernity, it’s progressive.  

Tocqueville – and he was a champion of democracy – warned against this with his usual prescience. But he missed one detail: he thought the onset of this disease was a possibility rather than a certainty. It was the latter though, an inexorable result of a steadily expanding franchise and the concomitant laxity in the demand for proper qualifications to take part.

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office,” wrote Tocqueville, “but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” (Replace ‘the United States’ with ‘the West’, and the prophesy would be just as accurate.)

It ought to be remembered that Tocqueville formed his ideas of American statesmen on the basis of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to name but a few. One wonders what the Frenchman would say today, observing modern politicians in action. The reliable guess is he would feel that what has come true was not his prophesies but his nightmares. The former, after all, were always leavened with optimism.

Modern politicians don’t persuade people to vote for them. They trick them into doing so by making promises they have neither the means nor indeed the intention of keeping; by telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

They unfailingly claim an undying commitment to democracy, and this isn’t a lie, although neither is it the whole truth. They do appreciate democracy, but only as so many rungs on the ladder they can scale to power.

When they get to the top, our newly elected leaders justifiably fear they will be found out. Hence they strive to put some serious acreage between themselves and the people who have elected them.

They seek to remove every remaining bit of power from the traditional local bodies, which stay close to the voters, and to shift it to the centralised Leviathan, claiming all the time that the people are governing themselves.

The subsequent transfer of power to international bodies, which is to say as far away from the national electorate as geography will allow, is a natural extension of the same process. This explains the otherwise inexplicable rise of the European Union, for one has yet to hear any rational argument in its favour. 

Thus expanded franchise inevitably leads to greater centralisation, and for that reason it is wrong to complain, as today’s conservatives so often do, that growing centralisation undermines democracy. This is like saying that pregnancy undermines sex.

The burgeoning political centralisation of modernity also reflects a deeper trend, that of reversing two thousand years of Christendom and reverting to idolatry and paganism.

People have been hollowed out, their metaphysical certitudes removed or inverted, the resulting vacuum filled with idols whose selection is left to individual choice independent of any group affiliation or loyalty. Falling by the political wayside is the familial localism inherent to Christendom.

It has been replaced with hysterical adulation of central government, leading in extremis to totalitarianism. In an important way, however, all modern states are totalitarian, in that they seek control over areas hitherto seen as being off-limits for governmental meddling. In that sense the differences between, say, the USA and the USSR are those of degree, not principle.    

While perpetrating centralisation run riot, the ostensibly democratic, but in fact neo-tyrannical, state acquires more power over the individual than any monarch ruling by divine right ever saw in his dreams.

French subjects, for example, were shielded from Louis XIV by several layers of local government, and the Sun King wielded more power over his loftiest courtiers than over the lowliest peasants. The King was aware of this, and his famous pronouncement on the nature of the state fell more into the realm of wishful thinking than reportage.

Modern ‘democracies’ never tire of insisting that sovereignty resides with the people. Yet they, along with their ultimate supranational extensions, consistently demonstrate how far this is from the truth. Britain is the only country where the ruling elite couldn’t ignore the popular vote against European federalism, for the time being.

David Cameron agreed to the 2016 referendum only because he was sure people would vote Remain. They didn’t though, in spite of all major media, especially broadcast, campaigning for that vote with unabating vigour and maniacal persistence. Yet our EU gauleiters sensed that enough of the British political ethos was still extant to make it impossible for them to ignore the vote.

Not so with the democratically held referenda in Denmark, Austria and Ireland. In the first instance, the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty. In the second, Austria voted in Jörg Haider, who today would be described as far-right. In the third, the people of Ireland voted not to ratify the Nice Treaty on the enlargement of the EU.

In all three cases, the European Union, that great champion of pooled democracy, put its foot down and its boot in. People’s choice is all fine and well, provided it’s the choice the elite favours at the moment. Otherwise, people will have to choose again – and keep choosing until they get it right.

Removing sovereignty from the people and vesting it in supranational institutions is the keenly felt imperative of modern mainstream politicians, regardless of their party affiliation. Sovereignty, as they understand it, must run away from the national electorate all the way to the national capital – and then keep running until it finds a safe haven beyond the nation’s reach.

Starmer, with his unerring instincts of a career apparatchik, senses this in his subcortex. That region of the brain is responsible for sensory processing, which functions in lieu of reason and, push come to shove, overrides it completely.

In that, he and the whole nomenklatura to which he belongs resemble animals who are also driven by their innate instincts. Hence they act without choice, just like dogs who drink from puddles and chase cats because their DNA tells them to do so, not because they have rationally weighed the pros and cons.

Our apparatchiks’ instincts demand that they drift towards Brussels, towing the whole country behind them. Since they couldn’t dismiss the Brexit referendum outright, they have to rely on the subterfuge of rejoining the EU by a series of stealthy incremental steps, each seemingly insignificant.

Should acting that way jeopardise their power, another instinct may take over, that of political survival. In that case they may slow down, or even temporarily discontinue, that drift. But barring such a threat, they’ll continue on their meandering path.

They won’t be stopped by any appeals to reason, morality or especially the traditional political culture of Britain – any more than a dog will listen to sensible arguments about the inalienable feline rights of cats.

These people can’t be persuaded; they can only be ousted. And I don’t mean Starmer or any other particular politician – the whole political cabal must be unseated.

But a distinct danger exists that such an upheaval may throw away the baby of political tradition with the bathwater of political corruption. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.