Having never experienced food rationing myself I cannot say what it is like, but I am assuming the experience is not as bad as images suggest. My reasoning is straightforward and can be put in the form of an argument as follows: (1) The National Health Service (NHS) is good; (2) Food is more important than health; therefore, (3) A National Food Service (NFS) would be good. Is there anything wrong with this argument?
Let’s look briefly at the truth or falsity of the premises, before elaborating. A supporter of an NFS, along with many millions of others, would affirm with confidence that the NHS is a ‘good thing’. That is, it is a desirable if not indispensable institution, at the beating heart of our national life, a support and a lifeline for all of us, relatively free at the point of use, providing the full panoply of basic medical services, from care for minor ailments to treatment for serious illnesses and conditions such as cancer, heart disease, broken limbs, disfigurement, deadly infections, and so on. Yes, it is currently in the worst shape it has been in for decades, to the point that in the current election campaign the major parties do not even pretend to mouth slogans such as ‘Twenty-for hours to save the NHS’, so far gone is the patient.
That does not mean the NHS is undesirable, though, does it? Anyway, just suppose it is a good thing for the sake of argument and let’s revisit the premise later. Premise (2) says that food is more important than health, and the truth or falsity of this depends on what we mean by ‘important’. Think of it this way. Although both food and health are quite basic human goods, there is an asymmetry. Without food – by which I mean adequate nutrition, not simply fasting for a bit or going on a diet – you are guaranteed to be unhealthy. But if you are unhealthy, it is not guaranteed you will lack adequate nutrition. Some illnesses make it hard to keep food down. Some illnesses deprive a person of their appetite. But these are exceptions. You can be seriously unhealthy, headed for the grave, and yet still not be suffering from malnutrition. If you are malnourished, however, you will be unhealthy there and then, with no further steps required, no exceptions to be made.
Ask yourself this admittedly remotely hypothetical question: faced with the choice between inadequate food and inadequate health (short of death!), which would you choose? I’d go for inadequate health, thinking that with inadequate food I’ll be unhealthy anyway, so why not just have ill health but at least plenty of food, hoping that I can maintain my strength and give myself a fighting chance against my illness? Again, as a general rule if you have zero food you are dead in a few months. You’d have to have a pretty rare condition – pancreatic cancer, say – to be dead in a few months. If you add not having water to not having food – and I do want to add that since I am classing food and water together when I hypothesise about a National Food Service – you are dead in a few days. Very few illnesses or combinations of conditions kill you in a few days – maybe bacterial meningitis or necrotizing fasciitis.
So yes, of course health is important, but food is just that bit more important. That said, by ‘important’ in premise (2) I am packing a little more into it than the asymmetry just outlined. I also mean that if there is such an asymmetry, then however society is structured so as to make health care readily available should be similar in key respects to how society should be structured so as to make food readily available. This is how the conceptual connection between ‘good’ in (1) and ‘important’ in (2) should be interpreted. (I could split the argument into sub-arguments to make this crystal clear, but it’s not necessary).
Now, does our conclusion (3) – ‘A National Food Service (NFS) would be good’ – follow from the premises? If so we have a valid argument, and if the premises are true then we have our ultimate goal, a sound argument – to lapse into philosophy-speak. Well, I’ve gestured at the truth of (1) but also said we should just assume it for the fun of the argument. A full defence of (1) would come from the endless literature doing just that – defending the goodness of the NHS. I’ve argued at greater length for the truth of (2) and its connection to (1). Suppose I’ve done the job. Then how could the conclusion not follow? It must, of logical necessity. There is no escape. We need a National Food Service.
Er, do we? The title of this article refers to ‘rationing’. Actually, food rationing is really not something you’d want to experience. Nobody in their right mind wants food rationing, except the crooks who make money off it and are not subject to the rationing themselves. I think I’d rather emigrate than have food rationing – at least as a way of life. So what I really think – and I’m sure you agree – is that food rationing is not something we’d want brought back. And so the prospect of a National Food Service should fill me – and you – with utter dread. If that is the case, then we must do what we philosophers call a modus tollens: I give you an argument pointing inexorably to a certain conclusion. But that conclusion is on its face absurd. You and I won’t accept it. So we are forced by logic to deny at least one of premises (1) and (2). Having already made a pretty good case for (2), we have to deny (1) after all, contrary to the initial ‘for the sake of argument’ assumption. The NHS is not good – not in concept any more than in current execution.
Wait a minute, you might object: I’m comparing apples and oranges. There is no rationing in the NHS! But there is, I insist. True, we don’t all walk around with health care ration books with quotas of medicines or treatments printed on each ticket. But health care is rationed nonetheless, as any fule kno. You get a precious ten minutes with your GP, then you are politely expected to leave (unless things are serious as judged by that GP alone). You cannot get any treatment you want, no matter how effective or promising; it all depends on cost and the voluminous guidance of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). Ultimately, who gets what is for the government of the day, acting on the advice of – sorry, I can’t resist – Twenty-First Century Science.™ The details of NHS rationing are there for all to see. This leads to very bad consequences for patients in a multitude of cases, with the example of breast cancer drug Kadcyla being instructive.
A critic of my argument might insist that food and health are dissimilar in important ways that undermine premise (2), the claim that food is more important than health. Recall that my argument is not just that food is prior to health in terms of human well-being, but that because of this its allocation in whatever way society allows should be the same as the way health care is allocated in that society. All things being equal, perhaps that is true. But all things are not equal, says the critic. There is a whole side to food provision that has no health care parallel. There are restaurants, gourmet dining, eating for pleasure, eating as a cultural pastime. Whereas health care is about meeting needs, there is more to food provision than simply meeting needs.
It is not clear to me that there is a disanalogy. Health care also has its niche, exotic, cultural, aspirational side. Think of purely aesthetic surgery – nose jobs, teeth whitening, skin lightening, Botox, hair removal, hair transplants, body modification, and so on. These are all far more about satisfying desires than meeting real needs. They are generally not necessary for health. The critic retorts: ‘then they are not about health care, so why are you bringing them into the discussion?’ My reply: ‘then neither is fine dining or wine tasting part of food provision, so why are you bringing them into the discussion?’ In other words, cheek filler and fine dining stand or fall together. Either both are on the table or neither are. I think it’s more plausible to say they are both on the table as quite remote parts of health care and food provision, respectively. Now, cosmetic surgery is not routinely available on the NHS, except for mental health reasons or if the cosmetic aspect is accompanied by a real functional need (e.g. to breathe clearly). This is well and good. Similarly, in my National Food Service regime, oysters and crab-flavoured ice cream would also not routinely be available (except perhaps if they were essential to nutrition!). These would have to be purchased on the private market.
The critic might try this gambit: health care, the kind of care that doesn’t just maintain health but that keeps you alive, can be astronomically expensive. People can’t generally afford it. Adequate nutrition can be had very cheaply. So people need help from the state with the former but can pay for the latter themselves. My reply is that if this point is a good one, it only favours restricting the NHS to the really expensive treatments, not retaining the kind of all-encompassing, womb-to-tomb NHS we have now. So the critic’s point undercuts their own idea that an NFS is not desirable but the NHS is. Moreover, some staple foods, which millions require for nutrition, are particularly expensive to produce, e.g. rice; these rely heavily on government subsidies, loans, and other price support mechanisms. So why not go the whole hog with food, so to speak, and bundle it into an NFS? Anyhow, the overall cheapness of food argues in favour of an NFS because it is really, truly, hard to believe that an NFS would cost more than the NHS – which is pushing £200 billion in annual cost, that is to say, about £3000 annually for every human being in England. I am having to stretch my credulity beyond breaking point to suppose that universal food rationing would cost anywhere near that much. But I have no method of estimating it. (The last I looked, by the way, £3000 would buy every human being in England a helluvalot of health insurance. Just saying.)
OK, how about the ‘black market’ objection? This says that just as we saw a lot of illegality during wartime food rationing, we would see the same the minute an NFS came into existence. And we don’t want that. In reply, this presupposes we do not see illegality as a result of having the NHS. I’m not talking about dodgy tattoo and piercing parlours or lunchtime liposuctions. I’m referring to ‘medical tourism’, where thousands upon thousands of UK citizens go abroad for medical treatment (234,000 in 2021, with 34,000 foreigners coming to the UK for treatments, stats here; gets the noggin joggin’ doesn’t it?). That in itself is legal, of course, but it is surely the case – data are hard to come by – that at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people are injured by negligent doctors, in dodgy or uncertified clinics, or by illegal procedures abroad. I am not thinking of cosmetic surgery (which is the number one reason for medical tourism) since that is not available on the NHS anyway, but rather of things like orthopaedic surgery and dental procedures (it being notoriously hard to get on the books of an NHS dentist).
It is tough to see a significant disanalogy between health care and food provision when it comes to the idea of a nationalised service – socialism, effectively. If there is none, then either we should go with food rationing or we should dismantle and privatise the NHS. As I said, I’m not a fan of food rationing and I doubt you are. I like my private supermarkets, the abundance of choice, the full range of pricing, the efficient delivery, and the reasonably pleasant shopping experience. (Things are going downhill, to be sure; thanks a bunch, America.) But that’s only the supermarkets. I live near an award-winning cheese shop, an award-winning butcher, an overpriced organic shop, and can get pretty much any food online that I can’t find locally. All in all, I can’t complain. Do I want all this to be turned into a bunch of Stalinist showrooms with tasteful lighting illuminating a few mouldy potatoes? All right already, I’m exaggerating. But you can bet that an NFS would be a sodding awful experience without end (unlike post-World War 2 food rationing, which ended in 1954).
And a privatised health service? I admit, my own experience with the NHS has been pretty positive. Our local surgery is clean, neat and friendly, the local hospital likewise, so again I can’t complain. But that’s my area. Stories abound of shoddy service: paint peeling off the walls, DNRs on anyone over 70 (at least during COVID), old people lying on trolleys in corridors for hours and days on end, people sleeping on the floor, half a day to get seen by accident and emergency, botched maternity care, murderous nurses, sepsis here and sepsis there, often woeful food, radical discontinuity of care, hospitals rated inadequate, a culture of cover-up, bullying, endless negligence payouts, bloated bureaucrats on golden pensions, and so on and on. The word on the street these days about the NHS is not exactly positive.
There is no room to rehash the endless debate over privatised health care. That said, I am not advocating for a fully privatised system anyway. Not even our private food system is without government supplementation, for example free school meals and financial assistance to food charities, not to mention government subsidies for agriculture. In a private medical system, there would be similar government assistance, safety nets, and the like. In addition, just as private food is heavily regulated so as to reduce the risk of contamination, food poisoning, and waste, so a private medical system would also be heavily regulated to ensure basic standards from top to bottom.
The worry that is perhaps most often raised is that whereas food products are commodities and hence subject to commodity pricing, many life-saving medicines and treatments are the result of decades of high-cost research and development, require intellectual property protection, and need to have their costs recouped through high pricing. The hope that I and many others have is that as long as technology progresses, prices will trend downwards and affordability will increase. This is particularly so with the mass production of generic medicines. A hundred years ago, hardly anyone ate steak. And hardly anyone had access to antibiotics. Still, there is a long way to go in light of the Big Pharma quasi-cartel, corrupt regulators and legislators (the old ‘revolving door’), and the artificial stimulation of demand due in large part to a woeful lack of government or private interest in preventive health care – the best health care of all.
No, I don’t want to stand in a queue outside a state-run food dispensary. And I want more than ten minutes with my GP. The logic of not bothering about the latter leads to not being fussed about the former, at least if my reasoning is correct. I think we should reject rationing altogether, outside of war and national calamity. If I want a National Food Service, I’ll head over to North Korea. Thanks but no thanks; I’m off to Tesco for a sirloin.
David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading; [email protected]; www.davidsoderberg.co.uk; davidsoderberg.substack.com. All opinions expressed are personal and not associated in any way with my employer.
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The Importance of Brexit
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” – William Pitt (speech to House of Commons, 18 November 1783).
In light of the recent immigration figures, many are starting to question if Brexit was really worth it. The revised figures from ONS show an unprecedented and almost comical increase in the number of arrivals after Brexit, with net migration jumping from less than 300,000 to over 600,000 between our departure from the EU in 2020 and 2023.
So-called “Bregret” (portmanteau of Brexit and Regret) afflicts both Leave and Remain voters. Even Nigel Farage, the embodiment of British euroscepticism, has been quoted as saying: “Brexit has failed.” Of course, the full comment was along the lines of “Brexit has failed under the Conservatives” but this hasn’t dissuaded journalists and Remainers from circulating the quote as a form of anti-Brexit propaganda; particularly useful when all your senile prophecies of Brexit-induced calamity fail to manifest.
Hoping to capitalise on this growing sentiment, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, after making a long-winded joke feinging ignorance of Britain’s existence, said the UK had “goofed it up” by voting for Brexit and said it should reconsider its decision to leave. Von der Leyen added that it was the job of the young to reverse Brexit and that re-unification was “the direction of travel” for the UK.
Why exactly Von der Leyen believes reversing Brexit is top priority for Britain’s youth, I’m not so sure. Indeed, you’d be hard pushed to find something more lame than bustling about a European bureaucracy, tasked with placating the asinine prejudices of some overpromoted schoolmarm. I must say, I was hoping for greater clarity from the so-called grown-ups. One moment they’re saying good riddance, the next they’re asking us to come back. Truly, a terrible, terrible break-up.
In any case, before we wallow in self-pity about our desire to be an independent country – and it must be said: the British right does love to wallow – let us remember several very important facts about our relationship with the European Union.
First, immigration wasn’t “better” prior to Brexit. Circumstances have worsened, but net migration still increased each year of Britain’s membership. During that time, white British people were projected to become a minority in Britain within just a few generations, a trasnformation which people are slowly beginning to realise would be a disaster for a variety of intersecting reasons, from ethnocultural balkanization to a collapse in social cohesion and civic trust. The EU was more than happy to accommodate these arrivals through direct and indirect means, from inviting migrants to enter the continent en masse to funding NGOs to import them in the name of European Values, a concept which (just like British Values) has nothing to do with being European.
Considering that we are navigating a new political relationship with the EU, our departure should’ve sparked greater interest in European politics. Alas, many politicians and commentators have chosen to overlook Europe in favour of America and the Third World. As such, many have forgotten (or just don’t care) about the state of EU governments and their ability – or rather, their inability – to grapple with mass immigration. Take the hint: our continental companions aren’t voting for nationalists in record numbers because they believe immigration is too low.
In the Netherlands, net migration spiked from less than 100,000 to over 200,000 between 2020 and 2022. Likewise, Germany and Spain experienced a sharp increase in arrivals around this period, whilst Sweden, Denmark, and Italy continue to experience mass immigration and its consequences, despite their ongoing efforts to reduce the number of asylum seekers.
Second, Britain’s membership of the EU didn’t just coincide with mass immigration, it deliberately made immigration far harder to control. Since Brexit, the government has used its powers to liberalise border restrictions, thereby dishonouring the spirit of the vote to Leave. This isn’t inconsequential abstraction. Our membership of the EU was officially discontinued via an act of Parliament, the European Union Act 2020. As Montesquieu tells us, for a law to be interpreted correctly, one must give credence to its unwritten aspects; the reasons behind why it exists at all. As such, it is more than legitimate to factor in the motivations behind the Leave vote, it is required.
Minus a few liberal commentators on the SW1 circuit, the vote to leave the EU was motivated by a desire to see immigration reduced, giving rise to inquiries about the condition of our national sovereignty. In the field of electoral politics, this fundamental concern motivated support for a referendum, coinciding with the rise of the BNP in the early noughties, UKIP’s historic success in 2015, and the Brexit Party’s equally historic victory in 2019.
The failure of the Rwanda scheme was an unfortunate setback for immigration restriction, but the Supreme Court didn’t strike down the Rwanda Scheme because of Brexit, the judges struck it down due to our commitments to the ECHR via the Human Rights Act (1998) and our status as signatories of the UN Refugee Convention (1951) and Protocol (1968). Indeed, realising our circumstance for what it is, it’s clear the solution isn’t less Brexit, but more Brexit.
The EU’s cornerstone commitment to the free movement of people within its borders, alongside various liberal and humanitarian dogmas imposed at the supranational level via the European Court of Justice, doesn’t override such commitments, it compounds them. As such, EU countries trying to get a grip on migration have had to square off against the EU, ECHR and the UN simultaneously. Denmark’s own Rwanda scheme hasn’t borne fruit precisely because of its run-ins with EU law.
Rejoining the EU, throwing away our potential to regulate migration because the current government is doing the opposite, wouldn’t be tactical, it would be stupid. It is like a freeman reapplying his shackles to avoid sticking his hands in a hot furnace.
Third, if we re-enter the EU, we won’t have any bargaining power whatsoever. It’s evident that the EU is moving in the direction of more federalisation, not less. At the end of last month, the European Parliament approved a major treaty reform proposal, spearheaded by everyone’s favourite Belgian liberal europhile: Guy Verhofstadt.
The proposal intends to transform the European Commission from an over-glorified think-tank, one comprised of representatives from every member state to a fully empowered executive cabinet, one comprised of individuals selected by the President of the Commission with less-than-reassuring guarantees of equal representation.
The European Council and the European Parliament would be transformed into upper and lower houses respectively. In possession of equal power, the former would be headed by the President of the EU Commission (thereafter, the EU President) whilst the latter would be allowed to propose laws, remove commissioners, and nominate the President. National states would surrender control over policy pertaining to public health, law and order, industry and energy, education, foreign policy, defence, and border control, whilst giving up environmental policy in its entirety, entrenching a division of devolved, shared, and centralised competencies.
However, the most consequential reform in the proposal would see an end to the EU’s principle of unanimity (all states must agree to a proposed reform) to QMV (Qualified Majority Voting) on a variety of areas, in which just over half (ranging from 55% to 65%) of all member states can initiate EU-wide reform. Touted as a means of making the EU more efficient and decisive, it would effectively allow countries to impose reforms one each other, without regard for democratic consent or national interest.
Even if this proposal doesn’t produce something ‘radical’, federalisation remains a significant threat to national sovereignty across Europe. Keep in mind, the Lisbon Treaty took roughly eight years to materialise. Throughout those eight years, many compromises were made, but the end goal was fulfilled: it moved Europe towards unification with a Soviet disregard for democracy. At the time of our departure, the EU was already on the brink of federalising, possessing all the essential characteristics of a federal union minus central powers of tax-and-spend, something which could change in the near future.
Despite our departure, it’s been business as usual, the EU’s transition from a trade confederacy to a political union hasn’t slowed down. If anything, it has sped up, spurred on by current events and heightening pre-existing political tensions within the union.
As it stands, two blocs dominate European politics: a centre-left bloc lenient to federalisation and a centre-right bloc hoping to dilute and/or reverse certain aspects of federalisation. Many of the right-wing populist parties the British press enjoys construing as hardline fascists have little-to-no intention of leaving the EU. They belong to the aforementioned centre-right bloc, hoping to leverage fiscal handouts from the EU by using the principle of unanimity (hence why many are so keen on getting rid of it) whilst pursuing a more conservative approach on specific issues, such as immigration and judicial matters.
As the three main net contributors to the European project (at least, since Britain left), the establishments of France, Germany and the Netherlands have become increasingly hostile to the perceived impertinence of their Eastern neighbours as well as eurosceptics within their own borders, eager to suppress the political influence of both to make their investments feel like a worthwhile endeavour.
President Macron has waxed lyrical about “Strategic Autonomy” – that is, unifying Europe in response to the threat from Russia and ensure Europe can defend its interests in a world dominated by United States and China – whilst Chancellor Scholz has continuously voiced support for a federal Europe, classing it as politically inevitable and a top priority of his centre-left coalition government. As for the Netherlands, despite the triumph of Wilders, whose government is bound to face legal trouble with the EU over its immigration policies, the country has merged the last of its combat troops with Germany, further raising concerns about the possibility of an EU defence union, shifting the allegiance and direction of militaries away from their respective countrymen and towards a supranational authority.
Erstwhile, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy softened its position on EU membership prior to its electoral victory, partially out of practical considerations (e.g. the failure of Salvini’s hard Eurosceptic approach, Italy’s relatively integrated relationship with the EU, and to maintain access to certain economic packages) and partially out of ideological hangovers, such as trying to pursue a diluted form of the European New Right’s “Right to Difference” at the continental level, coinciding with her party’s historical association with the Italian Social Movement.
Orban’s Hungary also falls into this bloc but is a net beneficiary, meaning the desire to leave is far less potent. However, despite its generalistic support for EU integration, Hungary is decried as a subverise contrarian state, protected from having its voting rights revoked due to an informal alliance with Poland, another major net beneficiary. That said, since Donald Tusk’s victory in the recent general election, this alliance has basically broken down, making the Polish state’s position antithetical to what it was only a few years ago – that is, when it was decrying the EU as Germany’s Fourth Reich. There’s been talk about Hungary forming an alliance with Slovakia’s newly elected left-wing populist and eurosceptic government, but this seems more hearsay than fact.
If Britain were to rejoin the EU, it wouldn’t matter if we aligned with the centre-left or the centre-right, as the outcome is very much the same: should we rejoin, we’re destined to be less free than ever before. A unified continent has never been in Britain’s interests. It wasn’t in our interests in the 1800s and it isn’t in our interests now, and there should be absolutely no excuse for empowering an organisation which does not respect our interests, regardless of our membership status.
The Conservative Party is going to lose the next election because of its reactionary liberal tendencies, having betrayed the trust it was bestowed to act as custodian of the Brexit revolution. Consequently, a neo-Blairite Labour Party is going to take up the reins of government, not because of popular support but because disaffection with Britain’s increasingly unresponsive political institutions.
Ever since the referendum, the entire political establishment has been scrambling to find a different route to the end of history, but these are largely short-term fixes. If the UK can be pushed back into the EU, the centrist anti-political demagogues of British civic life will be more than happy to oblige, and it is this reality which the Conservatives must face.
If the Conservative Party wishes to survive the impending electoral winter. It must undergo a metapolitical transformation, the likes of which it hasn’t experienced since Disraeli carried the party across the threshold of the democratic age. It must realise the historical significance of Brexit, as a genuine and outright rejection of a depoliticised consensus, one which has moved democratically sovereign nations in the direction of becoming technocratically managed open societies.
Given this, British politics should be bursting with excitement, overflowing with zeal about how best to navigate these unchartered waters, yet the political mainstream is utterly stagnant. It’s aware of its own imaginative poverty, yet does nothing to remedy it, opting to regurgitate the last ten years in whatever way it can. To spectate British politics is like watching a perpetually vomiting ouroboros, gagging on its own tail and drenching its body in sick, yet persists on its quest of self-consumption.
This peculiarity is compounded by the fact Britain’s next steps are obvious. At home, we must undertake a great, national effort to ensure Britain can stand on its own two feet, building up social and economic capital in whatever way it can and without hesitatation. We must adopt a survivalist mindset, comparable to Singapore in the aftermath of its ejection from Malaysia. Abroad, we must realise that we have a hostile empire on our doorstep, headed by a vanguard of vandals dedicated to plucking the jewels from Charlemagne’s crown, eradicating any trace of its eclectic ruggedness and vitality, and melting it down for gold in the name of inoffensive minimalism and utilitarian ease.
Downstream of their inability to let Brexit go, these vampires will stop at nothing to collectively punish the British people for voting against their influence. They’ve said so themselves and the people of Europe understand this. We should be funnelling money to hardline eurosceptic parties to undermine the EU from within. Instead, the British government is trying to out-regulate the Germans.
At this moment, Britain is more than a nation, it is a political experiment, one which the entire world is watching. Having rejected the embodiment of the end of history, of the end of politics itself, we must consider ourselves the last hope of democratic sovereignty, the final chance for the nation-state to prove its worth in a world of empires. Should we rejoin the EU after only a few years of independence, the entire world shall bear witness to something far worse than the end of British freedom: the end of alternatives in an age of necessity.
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Bureaucracy and Fate
Among those who detest bureaucracy, there is a common criticism. Theodore Dalrymple indicts the British bureaucratic machine with these words:
“… Anthony Blair, with the cunning of the natural born swindler, seized his chance and created a loyal, corrupt, self-seeking nomenklatura class that remains extremely influential and easily able to outwit the blancmange-like David Cameron, who in any case so easily moulds himself to any shape going.”
The idea is simple enough. Bureaucracies represent the interests of the class from which they are drawn. Over time they ossify into a lobby for that class, at the expense of society at large. In Britain’s case, there’s a caste of people most attracted to Blairite ideology, who form the core of the public service. Their predominance explains why Britain is incapable of moving beyond a collection of stale centre-left notions, regardless of the stance of the government in power.
The analysis is a classic one. Aristotle (Politics, 4.1294a; 6.6.1320b18; 6.1.1316bb39-1317a10) and Polybius (Histories, 6.10.4-11; 6.12.4) both see the balancing of different social groups as vital for social justice. It’s not just that there are executive, judiciary and legislative branches of government. These must be staffed with the right combination of groups in order to properly represent the interests of society. If a single class monopolises an institution, the results are bad, regardless of other separations of powers.
But there’s a further perception which, I think, has escaped Dalrymple. Implicit in his criticism is the idea, conscious to him or not, that were British bureaucrats something other than a Blairite nomenklatura caste, that things would be better. That a bureaucracy can be balanced between social groups, just like a parliament, and all will be well.
The training of a bureaucrat necessarily excludes any political virtue. A bureaucrat is a cog in a political machine. His job is to maintain the state’s will despite any turmoil or emergency the country may face.
In this sense the bureaucrat isn’t dissimilar to a soldier. The conservative French philosopher Yves Simon analysed the nature of authority in 1962, sometimes using the army as a metaphor. Much of what he says can be translated over to bureaucracy. Any association of people has a common good and a common action which enables it. The common good of the army is defending the national interest against enemies, so its common action is armed campaign to defeat the enemy. To do this, it must have unanimity: every soldier must know what he’s supposed to do and how to do it.
Now, every soldier is a rational individual with his own opinions and ideas. In an ideal world, each soldier would immediately understand the why and wherefore of an order, and assent to it through reasoned argument. But the reality is that the circumstances of war are so confused, cloudy and ambiguous, that were the army to expect rational assent from every individual to every strategy, nothing would get done. There would always be a cause of doubt; always a valid motive for dissent from a plan. So, there must be a threshold where deliberation stops, and opinion becomes an order. At this point, the soldier substitutes the reasoning of a superior officer for his own. Not because he’s stupid or unable to reason, but because common action demands it.
In the military the stakes are very high: destruction, death, and annihilation. Therefore, the threshold where opinion becomes an order is low, in comparison to other organisations. In a government bureaucracy the stakes are high, if not quite so high: shortage of goods, mass hunger, economic paralysis. This is why, I contend, the bureaucrat isn’t that different from a soldier. The common action of bureaucracy is to keep the country running. Like with war, the task is loaded with ambiguity and unpredictability. So, the bureaucrat is required to frequently substitute the deliberations of superiors for his own.
But this means that an excess of bureaucracy in a country will have similar cultural effects to an excess of militarisation, but without any of the martial vigour. The training of a bureaucrat isn’t to think deeply; it’s to internalise the state’s ideology to keep the country running at all costs. A bureaucrat who thinks deeply is a liability because he’s someone who will constantly express doubts and interrupt the state’s ability to act or respond to problems. So, a society that’s dominated by bureaucrats at every level will be radically conformist, incapable of self-reflection, and unable to undertake serious reform.
The city of Sparta, because it was narrowly focused on warlike virtue, excluded all other virtues and went into decline (Aristotle, Politics, 2.1271b). Sparta made all citizens into soldiers, and so rendered them unable to act as independent rational agents in times of leisure. Once the battle was over, Spartans couldn’t think without orders to follow. Sparta stopped innovating and was outcompeted by her neighbours. Isn’t a bureaucratic state like Britain prey to a similar fate of death by ideological conformity? If the bureaucrat is the model citizen, and not the statesman, artist, philosopher, or craftsman, shall our society not also become a self-regulating idiocy?
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They’ll Hate You Regardless
Well, that’s that then. It definitely could’ve been better, but I was expecting much worse; I was expecting slam poetry about the Windrush Scandal from an NHS nurse, followed by a breakdance exhibition from Diversity, a ‘witty’ monologue about gay sex from Stephen Fry, topped off with a ‘modernised’ version of God Save the King.
The concert was thoroughly mediocre though – I’d be surprised if anyone under the age of 25 could name more than half of the line-up. When will the palace learn that glitzy American pop stars are not fit for royal celebrations?
In retrospect, it’s clear that the worst aspect of the coronation wasn’t the subversion of pomp and circumstance, but the commentary which overlaid it.
Once the more lavish aspects of the procession had subsided, along with the smattered allusions to Modern Britain, and the royals assembled on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, Bridgerton actress Adjoa Andoh, who had been graciously invited to commentate on the King’s coronation, said:
“We’ve gone from the rich diversity of the Abbey to a terribly white balcony. I was very struck by that.”
Anyone brushing this off as a stray comment from the WOKE (!!!) Liberal Metropolitan Elite clearly hasn’t been paying attention. As we saw with the death of Elizabeth, a vast chunk of the ‘criticism’ directed at the British monarchy is pure racial resentment. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.
The anti-white rhetoric of the monarchy’s critics isn’t some exceptional tendency or blip, it’s the logical conclusion of an inherently republican understandings of representation and legitimacy.
As Britain undergoes historic demographic change, primarily due to mass immigration (in other words, the result of government policy) an increasingly large subsection of the population, conscious of their distinctness to the heads of state, will likely pursue the dismantlement of what they perceive to be an arbitrarily (that is, oppressively) white Christian political structure, in order to better reflect (at the very least, better accommodate) Britain’s newly ‘diverse’ population.
If you’re scratching your head as to why the monarchy is unpopular with younger voters, I suggest you take a gander at the demographic composition of younger voters – and younger people generally.
Of course, institutions by their very nature cannot be diverse; people identify with them because they reflect a fundamental homogeneity which underpins the group from which they emerge, and by extension, seek to sustain.
Differences may very will exist within them, but none of these differences will constitute diversity in the contemporary sense, as they don’t aim to breach the underlying unity required to make them recognisable.
This is definitively true of monarchy – a role defined by a sole person, restricting any metric of difference from being, nevermind represented.
In any case, it would be simply unjustifiable, within the parameters of republicanism, for a state to have an unelected white Christian as its head, especially when the citizenry is both minority-white and minority-Christian.
Given this, the monarchy risks following the course of Parliament; a battle ground for fragmented groups with increasingly little sense of essential or collective being – antithetical to the monarchy’s imagined role as a constitutional lynchpin to counter-balance the enmity of domestic politics.
Even if the institution is defanged to the point of mere ceremonialism, as has been the case over recent decades, much to the delight of so-called “progressive patriots”, it has been maintained that even if Britain’s monarchy ceases to be politically problematic in a functional sense, it remains politically problematic in a representational sense.
The overarching point is that, as Britain’s monarch, it doesn’t matter if you permit politically motivated investigations into obvious questions or if you commit to protecting all faiths as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. It doesn’t matter if you declare your support for Our NHS or opt to include Black Gospel in your coronation ceremony.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion matter for zilch: your enemies will hate you regardless.
Just as Scottish and Welsh separatists are prepared to devolve the union out of existence, modernisers and republicans are prepared to reform the monarchy out of existence. No amount of capital-C Compromise is going to fundamentally change their defining position.
Moreover, just as Scottish and Welsh separatists evoke a sense of ethnocultural distinctness whilst pursuing policies to undermine Celtic culture, modernisers and republicans evoke Cromwell, Roundheads, and the English Civil War, even though Cromwell would’ve absolutely despised them, they possess the prudence and restraint of Cavaliers, and have nothing but contempt for Englishness – often proudly declaring they’re not English whatsoever.
“You will never be a real Roundhead. You have no God, you have no purity, you have no zeal. You are a narcissistic degenerate twisted by leftism and secularism into a crude mockery of English revolution.”
When the British republic comes, assuming it does, I doubt we’re going to get Cromwell 2 or Lord Protector Nigel. Indeed, Farage himself has suggested we’ll end up with some moth-bitten mandarin: “some duffer… Neil Kinnock, or somebody.” – a failed politician with the shameless desire to be remembered as a Bismarck-esque elder statesman.
Although, as circumstances present themselves, it’s completely plausible that we get a ‘respectable’ long-standing representative of the so-called anti-racist coalition… His Excellency, President David Lammy.
As far as we know, British republicanism is a team effort; a team disproportionally comprised of (exceptions accounted for) post-colonial grifters from BAME and non-Christian backgrounds, White leftists and liberals, many of whom lay claim to permanent victim credentials, with others are eager to affirm their ‘Otherness’, whether to worm their way out of discussions about colonialism or revitalise some feud the Anglo has long forgotten.
In which case, who supports the monarchy? Exactly who you’d expect. Again, accounting for notable exceptions, it’s White English conservatives, especially those living in rural areas and with Anglican heritage. In simpler terms: the sort of people that gave us Brexit, but I digress – the pivot away from memes about royal ethnic make-up to an unabashed proxy war for ethnic grievance won’t end well.
Given this, if Charles knows what’s good for him, he’ll reject any and all further attempts at ‘modernising’ the monarchy and reverse any that have been undertaken since the end of WW2, rather than counter-signalling policy that slightly, if barely, edges towards defending the interests of his realm, his post, and especially of his dwindling (in part, rather old) number of core supporters.
After all, given the transcendental nature of kingship, should a monarch violate the spirit of their post, no monarchist would feel conflicted about withdrawing their support, if not for the benefit of a hypothetical republic, but for the benefit of the institution itself.
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