The Australian Labor Party’s victory in Australia marks the end of almost a decade of Liberal Party rule. Indeed, the Liberal Party bears many similarities and its philosophy and ideology derived from the Conservative Party in their mother country. Having just scraped a majority in 2019, Scott Morrison has led the Liberal Party to its worst defeat since 1944. This claim however isn’t based on losing government but more critically losing its affluent seats like Goldstein, Higgins, North Sydney, Mackeller and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah failing to be won by the Liberals again. But with the shock victory of independent Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong suggests a worrying foreshadowing of what is yet to come in Britain.
Poor Leadership, Good Results
Firstly, the presumptive narrative that ‘Keir Starmer is an awful leader, so we’ll get back in’ is to be questioned due to the Australian election. Net satisfaction with Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s performance fell to a record low of minus 14 per cent – the worst for an opposition leader since Bill Shorten – just in mid-April. Starmer too shares an abysmal rating with 53 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll in April judging him to be ‘doing badly’ as Labour leader in Britain. Nevertheless, with a shared cost of living crisis due to high inflation and rampant house price increases, both conservative parties have failed on their perceived core mission of safeguarding the economy.
The Wavering Middle-Classes
May’s local election results in the UK display signs of dissatisfaction with the current Tory government. The Liberal Democrats (not to be confused with the Australian Liberal Party) exploited the dissatisfaction among middle-class Tory voters in historically safe Tory areas. Australian Labor too exploited this dissatisfaction with middle-class Liberal voters. Being dubbed the ‘teal independents’, predominantly female, middle-class, wealthy, small-l liberal and climate-conscious candidates swept through solid Liberal seats. Teal itself being a mixture of green and blue (the Liberal Party’s colour) displays similarities with NIMBY-minded candidates in solid Tory wards during the UK May election. England’s results saw a net increase of 194 councillors for the Lib Dems and 63 for the Green Party with Labour seeing an increase of only 22 councillors at the expense of a loss of over 336 councillors for the Tories.
Forget the ‘Red Wall’ concept in Britain and in Australia, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party are seeing their core base desert them before their very eyes.
Repercussions for Australia and Dangers for Britain
Republicanism is strong in Australia and the return of the Labor Party with outspoken republican Albanese at the helm, coupled with the culture war heating up over trans rights during the election, this presents danger to the future of the monarchy in Australia once again. For Britain, the story is already well understood since Blair that a Labour government (no matter how appealing to traditional middle-class Conservative voters) will irrevocably vandalise the British constitution once more.
One key lesson learned from this election is that it is a massive challenge to hold onto the prosperous middle classes (which are a core rightist constituency) without compromising on conservative social values. Values of ambition and enterprise have been consistently championed by each Tory government since around the 1860s, yet this current Tory government is the first to not encourage – or even boldly talk – about these values. To fight the culture war without a sound handling of the economy risks losing both to left wing manipulation and thus conservatives are once again in opposition dominated by a left-wing hegemony in economy and culture.
The implication of defending traditional values by the Liberal Party and – supposedly – by the Tory Party without the confidence of the middle-classes on the economy is to pave the way for a leftist victory. Due to the shared Anglo traditions of parliamentary sovereignty, this leaves Australia’s institutions open to vandalism and destruction.
Conclusion
With the end of almost a decade of Liberal rule in Australia marks the beginning of a new era of Labor government. The recriminations inside the Liberal-National Coalition will begin as the moderates seek to flex their dwindling muscle to make the case that the 2022 electoral strategy of chasing ‘Red Wall’ voters cost them their heartlands. Right wing Liberals who protested Scott Morrison’s party by voting for the United Australia Party or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may return home, but this election has marked the end of solid conservative dominance in Australia.
The Conservative Party in Britain should be worrying. The long-held belief that the Tories will stay in government due to Labour being unable to produce a competent-enough leader has been proven wrong. Ineptitude in optics over Partygate and 40-year high inflation (the highest among G7 countries, currently) is cutting away the Tory Party’s electoral backbone. Forget the insipid ping-pong of which party leaders held illegal gatherings during lockdown and focus on the disastrous state of the economy. If the awful May local election results weren’t a warning of what is yet to come for the Tories, this Australian election result should scare the Tories to death beyond the years of Brexit.
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On The Nature of Monarchy
In 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies (KTB), a deep and penetrating analysis of the relationship between monarchy and the public realm. In this magisterial work, Kantorowicz explained with unmatched clarity the language of the medieval theologians and jurists, from dignitas to fisc to corpus mysticum, all of which have passed out of the bounds of our quite technocratic political language, but have, in many ways, shaped and laid the foundations for its articulation. The corpus mysticum, for instance, made the very notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ even thinkable, not merely conceivable. This article is an attempt to distill my research into Kantorowicz’s theory of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, of the corporeal function that kingship played, in both the continuity of a people and in the question of the acting body, to show what the nature of monarchy actually is, beyond a simple constitutional component.
In Kantorowicz’s analysis, there are three consistent themes: first, the synecdochical relationship assumed between the physical body of the king and the unphysical ‘body’ of the people over whom he ruled; second, the important function of continuity that the office performed; and third, the normative relationship between ruler and ruled. However, before turning to these three themes, it is important to note that Kantorowicz’s analysis revolves around two significant observations: first, that there was an awareness of the difference between ‘the King’, meaning of the office of monarch, and ‘the king’, meaning the actual person who occupied that office. This is the origin of Kantorowicz’s chosen title: ‘that by the Common Law no Act which the King does as King, shall be defeated by his Nonage. For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic’, a juridical fiction which, logically, ‘conveys “immortality” to the individual king as King, that is, with regard to his superbody’ in such a way that, in one court case, loyalty to King Henry VIII could be demanded as if he were ‘still “alive” though Henry Tudor had been dead for ten years’ (KTB:: 7, 13-14).
The second significant observation is that of the role played by Christian theology in the creation of a language of organic unity between ruler and ruled. It was St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 12, verses 12 and 27) that affirmed the image of the Church as a single body, with Christ as the head, with whom the laity enjoyed unity, but the systematic expression of such a unity was St. Augustine’s to make. He referred only ever to the Church as the ‘Body of Christ’, or in his native Latin, Corpus Christi – though interestingly, the phrase the ‘mystical body of Christ’ was not St. Augustine’s but was coined much later. Regardless, Corpus Christi refers to the idea that Christ ‘is to be taken no longer as an individual, but in His fullness, that is, with the whole Church, with all of the members, of whom He is the Head, as constituting one unit, one whole, one person’ (Grabowski, 1946: 73-75). It is important, however, to bear in mind how one individual person might join the body of the Church: through confirmation, and communion; in other words, through express desire, and continual affirmation of membership. Such an act ‘constitutes a spiritual entity which is [Christ’s] Body here on earth’ that results in ‘the incorporation into the Body of Christ’ (Grabowski, 1946: 84-85). As Kantorowicz shows, such doctrine was used as the basis for the relationship between people and k/King. Though Pope Boniface VIII intended to reassert the Papacy above secular powers, and remind them of their ‘purely functional character within the world community of the corpus mysticum Christi’ [the spiritual body of Christ], it was the implication of ‘the Lord’s two bodies’ that would inform the emergent doctrine of the k/King’s two bodies, to such an extent that Kantorowicz considered it to mold ‘most significantly and decisively the political thinking in the high and late Middle Ages’ (KTB, 194-206):
To summarize, the notion of corpus mysticum, designating originally the Sacrament of the Altar, served after the twelfth century to describe the body politic, or corpus iuridicum, of the Church, which does not exclude the lingering on of some of the earlier connotations. Moreover, the classical christological distinction of the Two Natures in Christ… has been replaced by the corporational, non-christological concept of the Two Bodies of Christ.
It was in the wake of this theoretical shift that the secular powers, competing with the Church for supremacy, were able to adopt the language of the state as a body, with such phrases as corpus Reipublicae mysticum, which allowed the jurists to arrive ‘like the theologians, at a distinction between corpus verum – the tangible body of an individual person – and corpus fictum, the corporate collective which was intangible and existed only as a fiction of jurisprudence (KTB: 207-209). It is important to note here that the unique transformation brought about by the turn to the Christological terminology is specifically the idea of the body politic as a mystical body, not merely a body coterminous with the physical individuals that composed a political community. With this theoretical and theological background informing both the emergence of the doctrine of the k/King’s two bodies, and the internal relationship between them, this creates much of the intellectual condition for the emergence of ‘the people’ as a mystical body abstracted from its component parts.
Focusing, however, on the k/King’s two bodies, the synecdochical relationship between the King and the people was a fiction well-theorised in medieval theology. In the mid-fifteenth century, it was generally acknowledged that ‘an attack against the king’s natural [physical] person was, at the same time, an attack against the body corporate of the realm’, with a qualifying difference of ‘“one [body] descending from nature, the other from the polity”’ (KTB: 15, 46). Drawing on Anthony Black’s comments that legality relied on a certain conception of a people as both a trans-temporal entity that those laws applied to, as well as the source of the authority of laws, the relevance of a people’s corporality makes sense when we observe that ‘“Laws, and not the person, make the king”… a statement well known to Canonists; and according to the lex Digna itself the emperors confess: “On authority of the Law our authority depends”’ (KTB: 150).
If the King is a part committed to the whole of ‘the people’ as a single entity, then it must be remembered the authority of the King is derived from – whilst also being somewhat concurrent with – that entity’s will. After all, as one French jurist claimed, ‘the French king, like the Roman emperor, “had all the rights, especially the right pertaining to his kingdom, shut in his breast”’ (KTB: 153). Of course, this manifested differently across peoples: famously, in England, ‘the people’ was present in specifically in the King in Parliament; just as ‘the comitatus or county took visible form in the comitatus or county court, so the realm took visible form in a parliament’ (Maitland, 1901: 133). This held, however, for the English jurist Henry de Bracton (1210-1268) a paradox: ‘either the king is sovereign or no; if he be sovereign then he is not legally below the law, his obligation to obey the law is at most a moral obligation; on the other hand if he is below the law, then he is not sovereign, he is below some man or some body of men’ (cited in Maitland, 2015: 101). Although this was mostly resolved by the juridical separation between king-as-person and King-as-office, as noted above, it did eventually lead to the question of where sovereignty lay.
Of course, all of this relies on the recognition that there is an entity of ‘the people’ that is physically separate from the king, but ‘the king’s body politic could be the realm as a body politic – with the king as the head and the subjects as the members – or it could be the office of kingship – the dignity’ (Fortin, 2021: 5), . Joseph Canning has also noted the rise in medieval political thought of the distinction between the king and the people over whom he ruled: ‘notions according the kingdom an existence distinct from that of its king, organological views of society organised into a corporate body, and views of rulership as public office’ created the capacity to think that ‘the concept of a royal office, whose purpose was to serve the common good, involved the notion that the regnum or populus had a separate existence from that of its monarch’ (Canning, 2009: 64-65). This especially became emphasised in the later Middle Ages when (KTB: 193):
the centre of gravity shifted, as it were, from the ruling personages to the ruled collectivities, the new national monarchies, and the other political aggregates of human society. In other words, the exchanges between Church and State continued; but in the field of mutual influence, expanding from individual dignitaries to compact communities, henceforth was determined by legal and constitutional problems concerning the structure and interpretation of the bodies politic.
This is a significant development, as it coincided ‘with that moment in the history of Western thought when the doctrines of corporational and organic structure of society began to pervade anew the political theories of the West and to mold most significantly and decisively the political thinking in the high and late Middle Ages’, a change capitalised on by Baldus de Ubaldis in his definition of a ‘populus, the people, as a mystical body. He held that a populus was not simply the sum of individuals of a community, but “men assembled into one mystical body” … a body or corporation to be grasped only intellectually, since it was not a real or material body’ (KTB: 199-210). Despite the emergence, however, of the body politic as an ‘intellectual body’, the k/King remained the physical representation of that body politic in the world, as ‘the polity itself, or the mystical body of the realm, could not exist without its head’ (KTB: 227); hence, whilst the trend developing was to admit that ‘a people’ was a real entity separate from the physical body of the king, it was not thought to be capable of existing or, importantly, acting without something or someone through which it can be embodied.
Interestingly, Marie-France Fortin has recently shown that Kantorowicz’s analysis reveals that, whilst the power of dignity, dignitas, conferred upon the prince by an ‘immortal polity’ (KTB: 397), was concurrent with the office of kingship, it was ‘the Crown, on the other hand, [that] connoted a more general, public and communal sphere’ and was ‘incomplete without the other members of society’ (Fortin, 2021: 2). We can turn here to the second theme of Kantorowicz’s analysis, that of continuity and the problem that the physicality of ‘the king’s two bodies’ created; as Kantorowicz noted, ‘the concept of the “king’s two bodies” camouflaged a problem of continuity’ and it would be a ‘mistake to assume that the new philosophic tenet produced, caused or created a new belief in the perpetual continuity of political bodies’ (KTB: 273) – this was a perennial issue in political thought, and the continuity of the king’s two bodies is more of a product, than a cause, of such an issue.
Indeed, ‘the practical needs of kingdoms and communities led to the fiction of a quasi-infinite continuity of public institutions’ and that ‘practical needs produced institutional changes presupposing, as it were, the fiction of an endless continuity of the bodies politic’ (KTB: 284, 291). This is not to say the k/King was the only source of continuity: as with above, the law was seen a particularly reliable mechanism by which ‘every plurality of men collected in one body’ could be treated as a ‘juristic person, of distinguishing that juristic person clearly from every natural person endowed with body and soul, and yet of treating a plurality of individuals juristically as one person’ (KTB: 306).
On the topic of the relationship between law and custom as methods of continuity for a body politic, St. Thomas Aquinas’ writings are particularly revealing. He claims, for instance, that ‘when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgement of reason. Accordingly, custom has the force of law, abolishes the law, and is the interpreter of law’ (1988: 80). As conservatives, I think we ought to be particularly sensitive to St. Thomas’ writings on this topic, especially as our modern world often forces us to see the law and tradition in conflict. Nonetheless, in the medieval era, the law increasingly became the source of legitimacy for public actions, be they of the King or any other public office.
However, the law could not resolve the issue of action and decision in and of itself, especially as there were increasing attempts to incorporate the ‘ruler’s will’ in the legal system, to the extent that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tussled with this will when compared to the ‘rights of the community’, with the kingship as an office ‘established with the specific purpose of securing the preservation and well-being of the communities which the ruler served’ (Canning, 2009: 162-166). Whilst I turn to the normative relationship between ruler and ruled shortly, here we can focus on Kantorowicz’s important observation that, as a product of the belief in the continuity of the people ‘as an universitas “which never dies”’ (KTB: 314), there arose the significant question of whether the corporate realm existed between the death of one king and the coronation of another. Whilst the earlier Middle Ages imagined that, due to the intertwining between Church and State, ‘the continuity of a realm during an interregnum had been sometimes preserved by a fiction: Christ stepped into the gap as interrex and secured, through his own eternity, the continuity of kingship’, the increasing tendency of Popes to claim authority as interrex made the fiction politically dangerous. Instead, the fiction arose of the sempiternity of the Crown (KTB: 334-335, 341-342):
In the phrase “head and Crown” the word Crown served to add something to the purely physical body of the king and to emphasise that more than the king’s “body natural” was meant; and in the phrase “realm and Crown” the word Crown served to eliminate the purely geographic-territorial aspect of regnum and to emphasise unambiguously the political character of regnum… briefly, as opposed to pure physis of the king and the pure physis of the territory, the word “Crown,” when added, indicated the political metaphysis in which both rex and regnum shared, or the body politic (to which both belonged) in its sovereign rights.
As Fortin observes, the melding of the two symbols of King and Crown allowed elements of that perpetual community that the King ought to have embodied – the people – to pass into the Crown, such as the eternity of the office, and the corporate realm of the body politic (2021: 8). As a result, ‘in the later Middle Ages the idea was current that in the Crown the whole body politic was present… in this respect indeed the Crown and the “mystical body of the realm” were comparable entities. Neither one nor the other existed all by itself “in the abstract” and separate from the constituents’ (KTB: 363). We see here, then, a similarity to the Aristotelian notion of the polis as an embodied corporeal people, as well as a comparison to John Ma’s analogy of the polis as ‘social memory’; a reliance on a physical presence, be it king, king-in-parliament, or so on, meant the continuity of a people’s acting body had to be reflected in an equally continuous physical presence. In this respect, this was part of the conflation of Crown and King that Fortin analyses, in that each symbol acted complementary to the other: whilst the Crown was the eternal symbol, the King could be embodied in the king. This theoretical move was reflected most clearly in the emergence of the phrase ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ which, whilst deceptively simple, ‘powerfully demonstrated the perpetuity of kingship’ by suggesting an unbroken embodiment of the King that did not ‘end’ with one king’s death (or, ‘demise’) and another king’s accession (KTB: 412). Regardless, ‘the Crown… could hardly be severed from the king as King…. It remained possible, for example, to personify the Crown which, representing something that touched all, stood in many respects for the whole body politic’ (KTB: 372, 383).
This brings us to the third theme of Kantorowicz’s work, that of the normative relationship between ruler and ruled. We can see clearly the synecdochical relationship that arose out of the organological, ‘corporate realm’ thought, as well as the use of the office of kingship to reflect a theorisation of the ruled people as a continuous entity, but this has not really answered the question of why an embodiment of that people is necessary. Whereas Aristotle’s theory of the polis as necessary for the bios and therefore the highest expression of the common good, the concomitant principle to the theorisation of a continuous people was one in which ‘the idea of a state existing only for its own sake was foreign… the very belief in a divine Law of Nature as opposed to Positive Law, a belief then shared by every thinker, almost necessitated the ruler’s position both above and below the Law’ (Kantorowicz, 2016: 144). Though the concept of popular sovereignty was historically distant, the awareness of the separability between the ruler and the ruled, at least on a practical level, had to be balanced with the necessity of the people’s capability to act as a political body. The Divine Right of Kings was certainly one answer, as ‘the king acts for the people which has been committed to his care by God and which cannot act for itself’ (Canning, 2009: 21). Just as the idea of Christ as the interrex declined, so too did the religious foundation for kingship, but the organological concept still posited that the King was the head of the body of the people. To justify the capacity for the King to act, not on behalf of the people, but as the people, there arose a particular conception of the universitas, the body corporate, as a legal minor. Largely a product of rediscovered Roman law, the conflation of ‘madmen, children and cities’ under an edict meant that (KTB: 374):
when, in the course of the thirteenth century, the corporational doctrines were developed, the notion of “city”, civitas, was logically transferred to any universitas or any body corporate, and it became a stock-in-trade expression to say that the universitas was ever an infant and under age because it needed a curator.
Importantly, as this idea matured, it was transferred to the symbolic entity of the Crown, to the effect that ‘as a perpetual minor, the Crown itself had corporational character – with the king as its guardian, though again not with the king alone, but with that composite body of king and magnates’ (KTB: 381).
What matters here is the relationship given between ruler and ruled that allows for the concentration of political action in the king; the corporeal embodiment of a people in the political world in a single person in such a way that allowed the people to act was due to that people’s inability to act for itself, owing to its legal immaturity as a single corporate body, and not merely because of its physical disaggregation as a multitude of individuals. As a result, ‘the king appeared as the animate instrument of a fictitious, and therefore immortal, person called Dignity’, meaning ‘the dogma of a political Incarnation, a noetic incarnation of the Dignitas or of the Body politic’ (KTB: 445). To compare this to the polis, then, whereas the people could act as a political community through a deliberation with consideration for the common good, under kingship the people were incapable of doing so, under the prevailing legal fiction, resulting in a concentration of decisionist power in the office of King. This was developed into the sleeping sovereign thesis by early theorists of popular sovereignty, but prior to the emergence of popular sovereignty as a concept, the necessity of an acting person required the existence of the office of King and the concept of Crown.
The King, as the office, was the embodiment of the entire body politic; embodied, of course, in the physcal body of the king himself (or queen herself). This is why the political community of the people lived and died with the monarchy – not the specific monarch, because to do so would risk admitting that the people could die. This was the inspiration behind Thomas Hobbes’ famous Leviathan frontispiece, in which an enormous person was composed of the very individuals over whom he governed; Hobbes was not writing and imagining the grand body of the body politic in a vacuum, and did not create the idea from the abstract, but was speaking to a long and fruitful tradition of treating the people as a single entity with a will that would allow that people to actualise its desires.
This tradition is, as I hope to have shown, the legal fiction that the body of the king, as a temporary and temporally-bound entity, is merely the physical embodiment of the King, which is the eternal and spiritual office of the entire body politic over which a monarch reigns. Our modern ideas of popular sovereignty would never have arisen without this fiction, of the original meaning of the phrase, Rex Est Populus: The King is the People.
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In Conversation with Curtis Yarvin II (American Gorbachev and The Duke of Croydon)
Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.
Yarvin’s words are in light.
Well, to be honest, I’m an American, and I write for Americans, and, you know, my view is that revolution only comes from the top. The collapse of the Soviet bloc did not start in Poland, it did not start in Czechoslovakia, it did not start in East Germany, although those countries were in a way culturally ahead of the Soviet Union, but the collapse had to come from the top down. And, so, you know, realistically, I think was that means is that if you saw a dissolution of the American Empire – you’d need a president to do it in the United States, you have a similar situation because the executive branch is technically under the command of the president, but in fact the wires have been completely cut – almost completely cut – and so those wires would have to be restored with more conflict but, again, you have the fact that opinion in the security forces is still – except at the very top levels – is still basically patriotic. There still is this patriotic backbone, there’s still soldiers who know how to fight, there’s still, you know, there’s still something there, of course, as you know.
And, then, you know, how does that get from there to England? If you have an American Gorbachev Doctrine, what you’re basically seeing is Washington saying to basically every capital around the world “Hey, guess what? You used to have pretend independence but now you have real independence”.
What real independence – let’s say you’re talking to the government of France. You’re like…
“Hey France, guess what? You have real independence now, we’re selling the American embassy, we’re sending everyone home. They can stay if they want and in future we’re going to follow – actually the text in the original Monroe Doctrine address – in regard to your country, and what that says is that we will take no interest in any conflicts among it, we will buy your wine, we do not care what your form of government is, we will buy your wine nonetheless, whether you’re ruled by, you know, Louis XX or the French Communist Party, or French Hitler, or, you know, we don’t care. We will buy your wine. You’ll watch our movies. Everything will be fine and if there’s some kind of need for international relations – sometimes issues come up – you know, for example, birds, when they migrate, they typically go north, south, north, south, they go up and down. Sometimes there’s a storm, the birds get lost, right? And a bird that should be in the Americas will get blown and it will wind up in France, and someone will catch the bird and they’ll be like [*flawless French accent*] ‘oh, this bird, it does not belong here’, and they’ll put it through some kind of AI recognition programme and they’ll say [*flawless French accent again*] ‘oh, this is the American bird’, and then you have international relations because basically the bird, [*French accent*] ‘the bird, of course, where do we send the bird? How do we feed the bird in the package?’ You know um, these details need to be worked out, OK? And I would suggest that these details could be worked out either by email or maybe on a Zoom. You could Zoom, or you could do it in the metaverse. You could do it in the Metaverse. You could have a really big imposing embassy but in the metaverse. And, and, I think that’s really quite sufficient to deal with problems, like that, of the bird.”
Let’s say you say that to France, and you’re like…
“Hey France, you want your colonies back? You want Algeria back? It’s up to you. You want to take all the Algerians into France, up to you. You want to send all the Algerians back to Algeria? Up to you. You want to reconquer, you know, French West Africa? Up to you. You want to reconquer Mexico? Restore the dynasty of Maximilian. Up to you, because, you know, that’s not the United States, uh, and we have adopted the position that we’re going to respect classic international law and we’re abandoning the global Monroe Doctrine, we’re even abandoning the local Monroe Doctrine. Hey, Brazilian army, you want to rebuild your country? You want to get rid of the favelas? You want to, you know, go full dictator and send the Communists home? Not a problem. Hey, Brazilian Communists gangs, you want to seize the country and like, re-enact, you know, the Jacobins in Paris? Not our business.”
You know, and, and, and –
Fire up the helicopters! Sharpen the guillotines!
Yeah, right, right, and what you’d see in a country like Mexico, you’d see an almost instantaneous reassertion of order as the army realised it could just get rid of the drug gangs and govern the country. Bang. Nothing to stop them, no reason to stop. Bang, they do it, the place is cleaned up and Mexico City is as safe as Tokyo. I exaggerate slightly. I exaggerate slightly at four in the morning at the worst districts you might still want to be a little bit careful. You might see a little bit of trash somewhere occasionally. Someone might have thrown an orange. You know, should you eat off the street, I would probably not advise eating off the street. But, you know, yeah, you could restore the Porfiriato, you know, in Mexico. You could basically roll back all of these revolutions.
You know, England seeing that, basically realising that all around the world, every country in the world, was getting fixed up by kings…
You know, in Africa, Paul Kagame got like special dispensation to be a king. The like, international community felt so guilty about having, you know, abetted the genocide that they’re like “OK, you know, normally we’re against strongmen. We don’t have strongmen, your country needs to be run by weak men. No strongmen. No, you can’t have one strongman, you’ve got to have a lot of weak men. Your country is going to be a filthy, corrupt, vile, disgusting mess. Um, that’s just how it is, it’s called ‘freedom’. Freedom is very important and don’t worry, we’ll send lots of aid money and lots of aidocrats. Of course there are far more aidocrats than there ever were imperialists. We’ll send all these people, you know, to help you out, but you’re country has to be a mess. Rwanda…OK, fine, you can govern yourselves, you can have a big man. You can have a king in all but name. You can have Paul Kagame, and you can have streets…OK, I wouldn’t eat off the streets in Kigali either, but I would walk through any part of Kigali at four in the morning. [*Chuckles*] And you’re just like this one exception to the global extended super Monroe Doctrine”.
And, like, the worst Goddamn country in Africa, at a certain point, cleans itself up, and becomes the Japan of Africa. And, it’s just like so…so obvious when you think about it.
At that point a royal restoration in the UK would be like peer pressure. Like Charles, Charles and Prince William, OK, they’re fashion followers. Guess what? Fashion changes, they’re going to follow a new fashion. They’re gonna be like “Wow! Louis XX has sure made Paris nice again. Wow! I can actually take the RER, you know, from the airport without putting my life at risk. Uh, wow, could we try something like that? You know, in the UK? And boy, sure we could, uh, wow, you know, all I know how to do is hand out the Big Issue and look imposing in the tabloids. I’d better hire a capable CEO to run…how about Demis Hassabis, OK?”
And call him the Duke of wherever the fuck he wants.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, “We’ll make Demis Hassabis the, you know, the Duke of Croydon or whatever and…” [*laughing*]
[*Laughing*] Croydon.
“And he’ll be the Strafford, you know, um, um, to my Charles I”.
Um, you know, Demis Hassabis will be like “OK, we’re going to take Strafford’s policy of ‘Thorough’ – what would a policy of ‘Thorough’ mean today? Dissolve parliament, of course, and govern by a decree, or executive order, or royal prerogative, or whatever you call it then, and um, you know, I am, you know, a weak womanish man, and so Demis Hassabis will be my, you know, Lord Cecil, and he’ll make a new England”.
I’m just randomly choosing a British CEO. I guess Hassabis is not an English name, but it’s fine, he’s a foreigner, you know, is he some kind of Cypriot or something?
It doesn’t matter at this point, does it?
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Absolutely. After Rishi Sunak it does not matter, right?
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The Riots: a working-class view
Back in the fourteenth century, England’s lowest class enjoyed the greatest piece of luck it has ever had: the arrival of the Black Death. True, most of us were wiped out, but life became so much better for those who survived. Anyone who wanted our labour now had to compete for it and offer more than their competitors did. These inducements (today we call them wages) went up and up because workers had become so scarce. Such was the plight of the working class in those days that it took a lethal disease that wiped out half of humanity to improve our lot; something which should teach us the importance of the size of the labour pool: how the amount of available labour can be balanced to give both sides a fair deal, or skewed one way or the other to cause economic and social disruption.
Since 1997, the year of the coming to power of New Labour, it has been the policy of every government to saturate the British economy with workers from foreign sources, thus greatly expanding the amount of available labour. This means every lower-skilled, less educated, less qualified worker’s bargaining position and job security were jeopardised. It should be obvious that in a free market – in fact in any endeavour where there is competition – there will be rivalry between the contenders. There will be resentment toward challengers who threaten one’s standard of living, or even one’s very capacity to earn a living. Recently this resentment boiled over and numerous riots occurred around the country. They happened because of what has taken place in Britain over decades: the reckless pursuit of profit by means of reducing labour costs at the expense of (and with no concern for) social cohesion. A ruthless, imported form of capitalism has taken over and sacrificed a section of what is supposed to be one nation in order to benefit another part of that nation. The Left of yesteryear called this class conflict, a term which our modern and very bourgeois Left do not care to use these days; they prefer cultural conflict to class conflict, possibly because so many modern Leftists are themselves millionaires and discussions about wealth inequalities would embarrass them. Populists describe the division of the classes as the elite versus the people, and the American Right has enjoyed success with this message, but whichever terminology one prefers, it is clear that here in Britain what was once arguably one nation has now unarguably been cleaved in two.
Although Labour has traditionally been the party of mass immigration, for the last fourteen years immigration ballooned while a Conservative party was in power. The drama of small boats ferrying illegal migrants across the channel was really just a footnote to (and perhaps a distraction from) a large amount of quite legal immigration rubber-stamped by the Tories. The simple truth about immigration is this: enormous numbers of foreign workers come and settle in this country because British politicians want them to. Mass immigration means there is no pressing need to innovate, no need to invest, no need to waste money training or educating British people, no need to worry about productivity: one can merely import cheap ready-mades, and then carry on importing them. It is the easy option and our politicians have been taking it for years. Any economic growth Britain has achieved has been a sham; merely a growth in population. The group which has suffered most is of course the working class, those who are most vulnerable to low-skilled immigration; a working class that these days has little to no political representation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg recently condemned the working-class rioters, saying that such behaviour might be justified in a dictatorship but not in a democracy like Britain, where peaceful protest is permitted. The problem is of course that protesting achieves nothing. In fact, in modern Britain, voting achieves basically nothing. In 2016, during the referendum on our membership of the European Union, the Leave campaign was only put on the path to victory when the focus was changed from important but philosophical arguments about sovereignty to the issue of immigration. After the vote was won, however, a strange thing happened. ‘I never claimed immigration would come down,’ said Daniel Hannan immediately after the electorate had voted to get immigration down. David Davis said that immigrants would be ‘needed for many years’ and Michael Gove praised how immigrants raised educational standards. If one examines the promises made by Brexiteers one sees that they were never promises. They were not even clear statements, merely hints that could be interpreted in different ways. None of the Brexiteers promised to stop immigration. None of them even promised to reduce it. They promised merely to control it. The word ‘control’ is loved by politicians because it means everything and nothing at the same time. Voters took it to mean that immigration would be reduced, but it could just as easily have meant that it would be left as it was. Perhaps, it could mean that it would be increased – which, incredibly, is what happened, despite a majority in the highest turnout for a UK-wide referendum in British electoral history.
With free movement from the EU interrupted, workers were now imported from the rest of the world. Migrants from very distant and very different cultures would come here in increasing numbers; and because these people were from such distant parts of the world they belonged to different races. This meant that unlike the Poles, the Hungarians, the Lithuanians etc., these foreign migrants would be instantly recognisable as such, from a distance, without them having to utter a single foreign-accented word. And so it is that riots which are economic in cause, which are the consequence of choices made by governments, can appear to be purely racist uprisings – and safely dismissed as such by sanctimonious politicians and their media. By these means a truth has been officially established: that the riots were a temporary madness caused by wicked fascists exploiting the gullibility of working-class people.
The truth however is that in this democracy which Jacob Rees-Mogg believes we live in; the working class are not allowed to vote in their economic interest. Their voice and their interests are repressed. In any general election in the UK there are only ever two parties that have a chance of being elected: the Labour Party, which enthusiastically believes in immigration, and the Conservative Party which believes in it with equal enthusiasm but pretends not to. There has been a convergence of self-interest. First, the greed of a Conservative Party that cares only about its enrichment and which despite its reputed belief in “faith, flag and family” is happy to see the British natural environment, British culture, British traditions, British family life, British history, British ownership, British democracy, British self-respect and the British working class all ruined, each of them being sacrificed in the scramble for quick profit at any cost. And then there is the greed of the Labour Party. This party is, in material terms, as rich and privileged as the Conservatives but is greedy too for moral glory. It wants to be loved by people who matter (educated, cultured people of taste) and so it haughtily condemns the primitive rage of the uneducated people with ugly lives and values who live below. By the magic of media, the material self-interest of the privileged becomes a noble cause. The expansion of the labour pool and the crippling of the bargaining position of British workers is shown as a moral crusade; the pursuit of diversity, the bringing about of a glossy-eyed, handholding, multi-coloured, multi-lingual paradise in which the elite are ‘enriched’ by other cultures while the ferocious competition for jobs pauperises the working class.
Democracy is more than just a word. It is the most efficient way of organising a society ever devised. It balances competing interests by making them visible and enabling them to negotiate. It vents the pressures that create conflict. What the people would have wanted, and would have accepted had anybody in our alleged democracy bothered to ask them, was a moderate level of immigration that would have benefited a moderated capitalism; a capitalist system in which those enjoying extreme levels of wealth and those suffering extreme levels of hardship were both pulled back toward a civilised mean; a more cohesive, moderately patriotic Britain in which all get a just share of everything; in which those who do more and achieve more rightly get more, but not an immoral amount more. In other words, a Britain that was one nation – not the theatre of tribal warfare it is today.
