Off with their heads

There was no posting over the weekend because I was down in London attending the 3rd British Blogger Bash. Some of my fellow bloggers were depressed about the state of the country. One thought that we were in the equivalent of the year 1635 in terms of the civil war (the War of the Three Kingdoms according to Norman Davies). Another yearned for an immediate rising by the people against the hated Blair clique, but wasn’t too optimistic.

I commend to my two friends the latest article by Scotland on Sunday’s Gerald Warner in which he writes about the proposed ban on foxhunting in England and Wales:

POLITICIANS are trash. Even this column must occasionally voice a non-contentious opinion. For if there is one sentiment that commands nationwide consensus and is incapable of provoking controversy in the most argumentative public bar, it is the loathing and contempt for the political class that now pervades Britain. This universal alienation is unprecedented. It portends the next evolutionary change in our political history - the demise of the parliamentary system.

This is likely to be consummated in the course of the next decade, having been greatly accelerated by the advent of the poisonous phenomenon of New Labour. No man has done more to subvert British parliamentary democracy than Tony Blair: that is how he will be remembered in history.

Warner believes that:

Country people made one fatal mistake: on the day that Tony Martin was jailed, they should have marched on the prison where he was held, torn it down brick by brick and pledged that their response to the next provocation would be to treat 10 Downing Street in the same fashion.

Perhaps we are “in 1635”, for the foxhunting proposals ...

….. could accelerate a process that already looks inevitable - the British people turning their backs on the discredited talking shops at Westminster and elsewhere that have now betrayed all their legitimate expectations, not least of law and order. Subsidiarity could turn out to mean something very different from what MPs and Eurocrats intended - self-policing rural and even urban communities, for example.

There is more to constitutional change than the Great Charlatan scribbling on the back of an envelope. Parliamentary pseudo-government is doomed, just like feudalism and absolute monarchy before it. Charles I could not see it coming: neither can Blair. Yet come it will, even if its precise character cannot be predicted. As a former lefty, Blair should be familiar with the maxim of that other great charlatan, Herbert Marcuse: "Out of chaos, something will arise.”

Mr Warner regularly attracts opprobrium from the usual useful idiots. I have a funny feeling that he is merely a wee bit ahead of his time. Roll on 1649.