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TW: mention of sexual assault and racism
At the end of last year, the Labour Party released a report led by Gordon Brown entitled: A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy. If that title seems familiar, it’s because ‘New Britain’ is the title of a book by Tony Blair outlining his vision for the New Labour political project. In the introduction, the report claims that Britain needs ‘real change’ when it has been offered only ‘cosmetic change’. This is true. However, what’s offered by Brown and Starmer isn’t change at all – it’s a return to a pre-Brexit ‘business as usual’. Brexit wasn’t truly about supposed economic benefits at all – famously, the Remain side lost because they appealed to the stats while Dominic Cummings’ Vote Leave appealed to people’s hearts and sense of identity.
Brexit was about derailing the top-down social revolution that had proceeded up until then at breakneck speed. Starmer’s political program, summarised by Brown’s report, doesn’t promise to re-join the EU, at least not yet, but re-asserts the Blairite vision of Britain that the referendum vote was a protest against. Instead of accepting the lessons of Brexit, Gordon Brown proposes a host of bizarre and extremely harmful smokescreen policies – clearly the result of 7 years of coping since the referendum. Only once you understand Blairism can you understand Brexit, and only once you understand Brexit can you understand the Brown report and Starmer’s proposed political project.
In 1997, Tony Blair offered the country a spiritual rebirth. The election was very plainly a contest between old and new – between the dead, suit-and-tie-wearing Britain of John Major and the dynamic, modern, rockstar Britain of Tony Blair. Blair’s Britain was a Britain of the Commonwealth, not of empire. A Britain of racial justice and of soft power through an international ‘family of nations’ with the Queen as their head of state. John Major’s Britain was an embarrassing relic of decline, like a prominent footballer transferring to a team in Saudi Arabia at the end of their career.
Cameron and Clegg promised to take up the mantle of New Britain and thus were allowed by a thoroughly Campbell-whipped media establishment to follow on from New Labour. The seeds of ‘Cool Britannia’ planted by Blair and Brown had matured and were ready to bear fruit with the Olympic Games, the fruit being a frenzy of national pride. New Britain, its transformation complete, burst from its cocoon and was showcased to the world. The opening ceremony was a perfect snapshot of what our country had become – utterly philistine, plastic-wrapped, ignorant of its history and alien to its traditions. Few noticed this, though – most were swept up in the ecstatic climax of state-approved patriotism of that year. The Olympics gave us a plethora of modern British success stories that remain household names today. The heroes of the past – Drake, Wolfe, Nelson – are now just fossils frozen into the pages of history textbooks, replaced by new cultural icons – Mo Farah, Stephen Fry, David Attenborough. Unserious, vacuous and insecure celebrities taking the place of heroes.
In 2016 everything changed. Brexit was a disastrous splurge of racism onto the pristine Union flag. Unbeknownst to the political class at the time, bitterness and disillusionment had been bubbling away in Britain. The country’s white working class had borne the brunt of the negative effects of Blair’s social revolution, and their attempts at protest had been ignored and sneered at for a decade. Blair and Brown engineered a quadrupling of immigration between 1997 and 2010 under a deliberate policy of ‘rubbing the Rights noses in diversity’ to create a ‘truly multicultural country’. Curiously, however, ministers were ‘nervous and reluctant’ to discuss the move publicly out of fear of alienating Labour’s ‘core working class vote’.
Under Cameron’s Tories, the project continued, with net migration increasing a further 250% from 2010 to 2022 and total migration topping out at 1.1 million visas granted in the year to June 2022. Integration of such a volume of people with cultural values and practices so different from our own was impossible, and its failure caused race riots in Oldham and Bradford in 2001; street battles in Birmingham between Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities in 2005 in response to the alleged abuse of a Black girl by an Asian gang; and battles in Leicester between Hindus and Muslims just last year. What’s clear from the latter two examples is that this wasn’t just a white vs BAME phenomenon; cultural friction is occurring between ethnic minority groups as well. To make matters worse, the sacrosanct Blairite values of equality, diversity and inclusion, and legislation like the Equality Act that enforces those values, made keeping the public safe in this new social climate almost impossible. In 2012, police in Rochdale were accused by Labour MP Keighley Ann Cryer of failing to investigate grooming gangs because they were ‘petrified of being called racist’.
Mrs Cryer campaigned for years to bring attention to the failures of multiculturalism, to the issue of forced marriages, honour killings and the increased prevalence of birth defects caused by extraordinarily high rates of cousin marriage in the British-Asian community. She received death threats and had to install a panic button in her home for being among the very first to speak out about the issue of ‘gangs of Asian men sexually abusing children in Yorkshire’ [Wikipedia’s words]. A career Labour MP and lifelong member of CND from a family of Labour activists and suffragettes, Cryer was no skinhead thug, but when she first brought the issue of grooming gangs to light in 2003 she was ‘branded a racist, a liar and a fantasist’. All was well in perfect new multicultural Britain and anyone who said otherwise, regardless of who they were, was a racist.
Working-class communities themselves raised the alarm about racially motivated rape gangs in Rotherham, but instead of politicians addressing the issue, memes were made ridiculing them. ‘Islamic rape gangs’ was turned into ‘Muslamic Ray Guns’. The EDL was formed as a result of the consistent dismissal of concerns about immigration by the Blairite establishment. The EDL was overwhelmingly a working-class movement, a coalition of football hooligan firms drawing its rank-and-file primarily from the men of those working-class communities in the midlands that were so callously neglected and treated with disdain by the authorities. In summary: working-class communities in England that tried to raise the alarm about multiculturalism were cruelly sneered at, their cries for help made the subject of ridicule, and as a direct result of establishment inaction thousands of people suffered. The grooming gangs scandal is the injustice of a century.
Cameron dismissed UKIP as a party of ‘fruitcakes’, ‘loonies’ and ‘closet racists’, but the disaffected white working class voted for them in ever greater numbers. By the time the establishment took notice, too much potential energy had built up – too much righteous anger. Brexit was supposed to be the opening of a pressure release valve, but it was an explosion. Voters across the country said the same thing – they would be ignored no longer.
A decade of international PR, ruined. The jewel of EU membership – the badge of a grown-up nation with a seat at the table – was stolen from the New Labour crown; their final victory, denied. The psychic shockwave sent Alastair Campbell mad with grief and caused an epidemic of psychosomatic mental illness known as ‘FBPEism’. Across the nation, avid, patriotic Blairite men and women were beside themselves with grief and horror over what had been done to Britain’s international image. It’s all a bad dream! Britain had gone from being a beacon of progressivism and sensible centrism to a country of uneducated louts run by old men with delusions of empire – the country of Mo Farah to the country of Nigel Farage. No, no, no, it was impossible! Russian manipulation – lies on buses!
People laugh at lunatics like Steve Bray but properly understood, their condition should elicit nothing but sympathy. They’d grown up knowing nothing but decline, scuttling through hallways too big for them, built during the height of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Suddenly, a liberator was born to them – Tony Blair. A great lawgiver who finally delivered to them a country they could be proud of. This country – or rather, the myth of this country – was shattered overnight.
Many ‘pundits’, ‘commentators’ and other know-nothings wrongly interpreted Brexitism as the Empire striking back. Instead, Brexit Britain was the coarse successor of imperial Britishness, where Blair Britain was imperial Britain’s usurper. Farage and his brand, by associating themselves with the Union Flag, completely undid the work of the previous 10 years and ruined Britishness for everybody. The Blairite standard was now the EU flag. Where the Union Flag had come to mean Arctic Monkeys, it now meant ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘Take Back Control’. In these islands the EU flag was once the symbol of a mundane but benign bureaucratic regulatory body, now it signified the home of a Remainer Zanryū nipponhei, someone who just wanted their country back.
To illustrate more clearly, it would be best to use an example. On Question Time recently an audience member sternly addressed the panel regarding his inability to import continental European wines, a clip of which can be found here. What isn’t shown, though, is that another audience member responded by telling the first gentleman to ‘Buy British’ with a smile and was treated with eye-rolls and scornful guffawing. Another idiotic Brexiteer! In these millions of small battles we see the drawing and re-drawing of cultural battle lines. Dominic Cummings won the referendum for the Leave side, but it’s Nigel Farage that haunts Remainer nightmares, draped in the Union Flag, stomping on their blue-with-yellow-stars-coloured Corgi. This was a progressive, forward-looking vision for Britain, and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise, dear reader. A Britain of low taxes, low regulation, slick administration and a swashbuckling, two-fingers-up attitude to bloated, antiquated international institutions like the EU. The Remain side wanted to keep us frozen in the past – politically stuck in the 90s, forever.
The psychological copes developed to explain away Brexit over the last 6 years are plainly visible in the report’s introduction. People weren’t ‘represented’ adequately, you see. If all of our policies were exactly the same, but people had an extra local politician to represent them, the ugly Brexit revolt would never have happened. People feel abandoned, not because their concerns over things like immigration have been ignored for decades, but because some of Britain’s regions lag behind others economically. Devolution hasn’t worked (Tony Blair has admitted so); the answer must be greater devolution. Above all, Britain needs REAL change: astronomical public spending, increased immigration, further devolution and more bureaucracy. Academia is abound with manifold explanations for the ‘populist moment’ of 2016 – Russian intervention, social media misinformation, white insecurity – anything and everything except ‘people had legitimate concerns’.
The report includes a whole host of misguided proposals with the aim of tackling ‘over-centralisation’ in Westminster. Codifying the Sewel convention places Westminster utterly at the mercy of Holyrood, effectively ending the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty that has defined politics in this country for 334 years. The next time the democratic will of Scotland clashes with the will of the broader United Kingdom, the government will be powerless to smash the deadlock and will have to choose between subordinating Britain to Scotland or divorcing our 300-year-old national partnership. The devolved administrations – glorified county councils – will be given a whole host of new powers designed solely to dress them up as national governments. Members of these bodies will be given enhanced status on par with MPs – status they do not deserve. To make matters worse, Labour want to ramp up devolution beyond pseudo-national government and increase both the number and power of local officials.
Runaway devolution would defuse responsibility down into a murky and opaque soil of countless overlapping bureaucracies. Government by endless, Kafkaesque maze of local councils and committees, staffed by an inexhaustible army of curtain-twitching busybodies. The further ‘empowerment’ of local authorities would create private fiefdoms for power-mad local jobsworths, far from prying eyes and too numerous to be properly scrutinised. In the case of Rotherham, the Labour council were able to turn a blind eye to complaints of abuse because local councillors had total control over proceedings and there was simply no one around to hold them to account. Devolution creates administrative nooks and crannies for minor officials to commit abuse in the dark.
What Gordon Brown proposes is a sharp reactionary turn, as ridiculous as if Jacob Rees-Mogg promised to bring back witch-burning. The report sets out a program to resurrect the Britain Brown was instrumental in creating. The alte Kamaraden of the old order are still very much around and have gained back their confidence after the disaster in 2016 and the dismal failure of Brexit’s reluctant guardians, the Tories. Britain’s crisis is deep-seated, but the report proves that Starmer’s Labour has stubbornly refused to learn any lessons from the last 10 years.
Peter Hitchens said after the referendum that the greatest thing it did was momentarily reveal the *real* divide in this country –Remainers and Brexiteers. For the duration of the campaign the two true parties of the country appeared like apparitions briefly before vanishing again afterwards. The Tory party was momentarily possessed by this Brexit spirit in the aftermath of the vote, but it was only ever a Jekyll and Hyde schizophrenia. With most of the ardent Brexiteers run from government, Starmer is now free to suggest bold Blairite reaction. Already, the Tony Blair Institute cynically writes papers suggesting that Brexit can be ‘fixed’.
The only chance this country has of prosperity in the future is if some political event were to force the re-emergence of those two Remain and Brexit parties again, even under different names. The choice will then be, as it was with Brexit, between continuity and change. What Keir Starmer and Gordon Brown offer in their report is not change – it is perfect continuity, a resumption of politics as it was in 2015. Devolution, debt and mass immigration.
This country could choose a different path, though. A real bonfire of EU regulations – a bonfire of all regulations. The total gutting of the civil service. An end to devolution – every man, woman and child represented by an MP, with local councils responsible for little more than bin collection. A pause to immigration and an end to our reliance on migrant labour. A Britain that looks inwards to its own population of 5 million on out-of-work benefits as the solution to labour shortages. A return to meritocracy in education and an end to our obsession with university attendance. Radical reform that would place us decades ahead of every nation on earth that is still languishing in bureaucracy. We could have it all – liberty and justice; a Britain that is rich, powerful and free. This is what Brexit could’ve meant. This country is crying out for that vision, and all it would take is for one person to raise the black flag, articulate this vision to the nation and once again declare war on the establishment.
Read more:
Wikipedia page of former Labour MP Ann Cryer
Ritchie Report on community self-segregation and the Oldham Riots
Where’s the black flag coming from Andrew, with a system rigged against new parties, i.e UKIPs 1 seat despite 25% vote share in 2015, it seems very difficult for such a situation to reoccur. With referendi now so unpalatable to the public will we ever see this vision enacted as promising at it sounds.