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| Justice, forced to take on tree surgery on a zero-hours contract because it has become too expensive to live in London |
I shall
set out here to make a simple case: that democracy, freedom, tolerance, the
rule of law and respect for human rights are not British values. That is, there
is nothing about them in any way present in, or exclusive to, Britain’s
national essence.
As
far as democracy is concerned, let us be clear. What this country did have, emerging
from Anglo-Saxon practices then formalized in its beloved Magna Carta of 1215, was one thing:
the idea and norm that power had to be accountable. In other words, that the
person in charge of the country was obligated in some sense to do right by his or her people, and could be challenged, held to task, or even rightfully kicked out,
if he or she failed in this duty. Many societies have had their own variants
of this basic political principle, of course.
In
Britain this idea was contested right from the beginning by practically every
new generation of monarchs. Kings roared one after
another that their power was absolute, flipping over the table of documents designed
to constrain them, and provoking wars and coups and foreign interventions to drag
their noses and signatures back to it. Not even the monstrous civil war of the
seventeenth century sufficed to settle this matter, despite reducing much of
the British Isles to ruins and mutilated corpses in the attempt. On top of
that, the “people” to which the rulers were so obliged only ever referred,
until more recent times, to an extreme minority of privileged elites, from the
medieval barons to the early-modern parliamentary plutocrats whose conflicts
with the crown tended to be more about protecting their own interests than any
concern for some general principle of liberty.
To
the extent that Britain is free, inclusive and tolerant, it is because such basic humanity had to be pried piece by piece from the tentacles of an establishment
that kicked, screamed, hanged, beheaded and fired from all cylinders all the
way. Those British who dared to think, fight and suffer in this struggle faced
tyranny and bigotry towards women, foreigners, children, poor people, disabled
people, people of unsanctioned religious beliefs or sexualities or ways of
thinking and goodness knows what else – oppressive hierarchies and
us-versus-them tribalisms, that is, that many and perhaps most people in
British society would have considered normal. Many still do.
For
those so left behind, taking back recognition as human beings
has taken literally centuries. Every real victory in the struggle to win that
recognition, and the rights that come with it, has had its corresponding price in
blood and anguish. Peasants’ revolts, workers’ marches, slave rebellions,
dissident literature, conscientious objectors, secret religious meetings,
colonial independence struggles, hunger strikes in prison – a great deal of
those who won the British their liberty – or won their liberty from the British
– did not make it out alive, and the enemy that trampled their carcasses into this country’s cemeteries was entirely native.
Most
of their victories, such as of women, are relatively
recent in this story and are not yet complete. Many more, as of people of marginalized sexualities or family structures, have
barely begun or have yet to come at all. All are under perpetual threat of
rollback if not for the constant vigilance of British civil society. That such
a civil society has emerged is to Britain’s credit, formidably so, but the
reason it has been so needed in the first place is the historical fact that
British values, in practice, have most often meant violence, exclusion, and utterly shameless dehumanization.
What
we recognize today as Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the country’s
politics are argued over by competing factions without resort to violence,
began to take shape following the revolution of 1688. Yet another king had been
thrown out (for appearing tolerant of Catholics, which to most people meant
tyrannical – the way all this was framed is fascinatingly instructive on the almighty
mess that Britishness has always been, but it is too involved a chapter to go
into here). A new bill
of rights officially gave parliament more power than it had ever held
before – even insisting these rights were ancient and fundamental, from before
the monarchy existed – and effectively bound the monarch’s own power to
parliament’s will.
But
within that parliament, there had emerged a faction which disliked this
intensely. They wanted a supreme king or queen with whom final authority lay,
even if they were gradually distancing themselves from the old idea, still
popular on the continent, that the monarch was the representative of God and
every right or freedom was granted by the monarch as
an entirely optional favour, not by any natural entitlement on one's own part. This
faction was ridiculed by its opponents, who called them tóraidhe, a term for Irish bandits (notice again the
use of foreignness as a scorn factor).
Tóraidhe. Tory. These were the ancestors of today’s
Conservative Party.
And they have been through all kinds of
transformations since, those Tories. In a diverse and balanced British politics
they very much had their place, and it may be fairly argued that valuable
intellectual and political contributions to the shaping of this country emerged
on account of them. But in our day, through a process begun under Margaret
Thatcher and now consummated by its present and recent leadership, the
Conservative Party has arisen as the prime inheritors of those coercive, exclusionary,
prejudice-driven and physically and structurally violent British values whose
proponents have considered the country their own arbitrary property for as long
as Britain, indeed England, has existed.
What “British values” means to this
Conservative Party has been made plain by its record. It means scapegoating
Europeans, Muslims, migrants and people of darker skin pigmentation for problems of the
country’s own creation. It means traumatically tearing people from those they
love and summarily deporting them on various pretexts of foreignness, even if
they have lived in good standing in Britain for decades. It means cutting
support for the most vulnerable members of society, whether physically
disabled, economically devastated, mentally shattered or sexually violated: mocking
and reprimanding them like criminals or wayward infants, burying them in
meaningless paperwork, pronouncing them fit to work where they lie comatose, in
some cases tormenting them to the point of suicide. It means allowing refugees
– refugees! – to be called cockroaches, and treating them like cockroaches. It
means abuse and exploitation as core dynamics of the very concept of work. It
means free rein for a sadistic and predatory tabloid media that rampages
around the country in a storm of slavering prejudices, reshaping the public discourse
into a carnival of toxic ignorance and hysteria. And it means the willingness
to slaughter millions of foreigners with nuclear weapons, should it at any
point deem it necessary, as a reasonable price to “keep the country safe”,
while at the same time furnishing violent and oppressive regimes and fuelling
conflict and hatred around the world, as in the Saudi destruction of Yemen,
under the same pretext.
In other words, for today’s Conservative
Party, to be British is to be gloriously cruel and proud of it.
The point here is not that they are merely nasty.
It is that their nastiness is a British nastiness. Because none of this is new;
Britain has always had people like them. Each of their abuses is but another
strand in of a sprawling web of callousness and revelry in others’ pain that
clings to every page of the British story, extensions of a structure that
produced so many miserable slave ships, poorhouses, smokestacks, mental asylums
and scaffolds for dissidents and dreamers. Infused into every brick of this
structure are the same British values the Conservative Party has now taken it
on itself to stand for: the belief that society, defined as it is by
relationships of mutual care and support, should not exist; the attitude that
your fellow human beings are beneath you; and that conviction that the more you
can get away with wringing their hearts, minds and bodies dry for your own
benefit, the better.
It is the fact that millions of British are
satisfied with a country like that, and so eagerly prepared to vote for it,
that more than anything challenges the notion that liberty, tolerance, respect
and free thought are the real British values. There is very much a Britain of
compassion, righteous rebellion and support for the vulnerable too, but it is
there because exceptional people have fought to the death for it, maligned and
threatened and ridiculed all the way. But beneath that vision, or that façade
depending on who is talking, sits the same rump of nastiness that has occupied
this land for centuries, and replacing it will likely take centuries more.
I am a stranger in this land, and make these observations as an outsider who has experienced the worst of this country but also seen what it is capable of at its best. So it is at the level of a human being, no more and no less, that I make this condemnation of the Conservative Party, whose leaders and adherents have abused their power to inflict misery and hurt upon those who most needed – most *obliged* – their protection, and responded to their cries for help by manufacturing a culture of unrelenting mass hatred and contempt, a tide of bile to drown them in the insistence that they are inferior vermin whose suffering is their own fault.
The history makes clear that this barbarity
did not begin with the Conservative Party, and it certainly will not end with
it. But the party is terminally corrupted. A true conservative, including many
who have stood among the Tories in each generation, even today’s, is one who
seeks to preserve the best things from his or her people’s past. Such people have a vital
place in any society. But the party now belongs to impostors who would preserve
Britain’s worst. The torch they carry is the torch of authoritarianism, forced
conformity and submission, slavery, colonialism, heteronormative patriarchy,
the terrorization of the different, and a destruction of people’s lives for fun
and profit that will not stop till they have ground from our veins the final
impulses of love and care, and all submit to joining in their social cannibalism
and human sacrifice on the altar of the cult of the nasty world. That is not
conservatism. It is an unspeakable thing that has no legitimate place among
human beings – not now, not anywhere, not forever.
I will not call for the overthrow of the
Conservative Party in the coming election, although that would be a good start.
The response to what it has visited upon Britain, and to its choice of British
values, must go far deeper if the hope that these can mean good things is to be
safeguarded. The party in its present form should be considered a
constitutional threat and never be permitted near power again. Their atrocities
over the last seven years must be documented, exposed, memorialized and never forgotten.
Their true crime has been to normalize these deeds, to blend them into the mundanity
of everyday life, and only when the British de-normalize them will they awaken
as a nation to the true magnitude of what has been suffered in this country. Thus
a special tribunal should be set up to hold the party’s leaders and enforcers to
account, with the power to jail them if deemed appropriate, for their abuse of
the United Kingdom through violent austerity; the destruction of vital public
services and support systems; forced deportations and separation of families; collaboration
with the media to create a conducive environment for hate crimes and
dehumanization of the vulnerable and unpopular; and support for murderous
regimes which all together, as intended consequences of systematic policy,
constitute a failure in their responsibility as a government to protect their
people and could in sum amount to crimes against humanity.
Part of the importance of this is that other
peoples, too, could then learn from yet another case study of how easily the
disqualification of segments of the people from consideration as human beings,
especially the most unheard, unloved and invisible, leads to depravities of
indifference that damn a whole generation. But for the British, it is only
through such a reckoning that British values can stand up to the greatest
threat that faces them, which, as ever, comes not from foreigners but from the
depths of their own national soul. The greatest threat to British values is
British values.
