June 4th 1989

Remember June 4th 1989.

Remember the students, workers, intellectuals and citizens slaughtered not only in Tiananmen Square, but in the homes and streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities on that night of carnage, and in the hunts of the years that followed.

Remember not only those unnumbered casualties, but those still to follow. The future of humankind was murdered that night.

Consider. The story of human modernity has been written in white-supremacist horror. European conquerors and colonisers raised a vision of the human future rooted in unspeakable violence: the violence of genocide, slavery, human disposability, relentless and systemic otherisation, exploitation and abuse of power at all levels of society, and neverending cycles of conflict between and within populations soaked in trauma, and at last, the plunder of the planet itself to breaking point.

That corrupt modernity is now dragged to its reckoning. First to rise to global power from beyond it have been the Chinese.

The People’s Republic of China had the first true chance to challenge that order at a comprehensive level. The opportunity, and responsibility, were huge: to offer the world a real alternative to the cruelty of white modernity. A better vision. A better conception of power than that the Chinese themselves knew so well for the century of torments it visited upon them.

Instead, it is now beyond doubt that they have chosen merely to emulate it in their own image.

To look on the behaviour of the China of Xi Jinping – the Uyghur genocide, the thoroughly colonial repression of Hong Kong, the totalitarian surveillance, the erasure of crimes like the Tiananmen massacre from historical memory, the hypocrisy, platitudes and relentless butchery of the truth by organised trolls and “wolf warrior” diplomats – is to see them doing exactly the same thing all over again. Unleashing it on the world once more – only now in a time of interconnected global peril when the stakes could not be higher.

Was the 1989 massacre the threshold, the signal, the event horizon?

It took generations for the Chinese to emerge from a hundred years of horrific pain: colonial humiliation, total war, revolutionary upheaval. The catastrophic atrocities of the Maoist period can arguably be seen as the spasms and meltdowns of an utterly traumatised society. 1989 was different. It was the conscious choice of a leadership which claimed to be steering their country out of post-revolutionary turmoil. To be re-entering the world as they set about building a stable, confident and respectable Chinese future.

And at the crossroads of 4th June 1989, they baptised that future in blood.

After the initial shock, the rest of the world decided it was okay with it. And so the endless nightmare of the white supremacy is set to play out again in a new format. Further centuries of the same abuse of dissidents and people seen as different, the same contempts, the same authoritarian bloodthirst, the same towers of lies dressed up as timeless truths, the same mountains of corpses, nameless, forgotten  – all of it, all over again. They, too, in their millions, will be victims of the choices taken on 4th June 1989.

Remember Tiananmen. We are all stood in it now.

THAMES: 6) Curse of the Magna Carta

Once upon a time two reptiles sat by the river. One was a lizard which could open great frills around its head to appear much larger than it was. The other was a chameleon, constantly changing its colours to match its surroundings.

So might have opened Rudyard Kipling, the poet of empire, who had quite a fondness for animal fables. Instead, when he made his contribution to the legend of the riverbanks ahead in 1922, his preferred imagery was less animal, more animist:

And still when Mob or Monarch lays

Too rude a hand on English ways

The whisper wakes, the shudder plays

Across the reeds at Runnymede.

To which we might reply: well go on then?

Runnymede. Lots of mud, but no shudder. Was Kipling’s idea of English ways the same as the Thames’s?

Seventy-five years later, in 1997, I arrived to find an England rapt in triumphalist swagger. The Soviet Union had fallen. A fresh-faced Tony Blair had just swept to power. They had won. Their stories had won. They had won history.

To any suggestion that this country had serious problems, let alone that it was not as free and democratic as it claimed to be, the standard response was mocking hostility. The scorn for dissent and difference here alienated me even before its deeper structural cruelties, especially of gender, made that alienation catastrophic over the years to follow.

And then that history burst from the grave and clamped its bloodied hands round their necks on 9/11. Real history had kept going, indifferent to their myths, and in their reverie it totally blindsided them. It then unleased two of the most distressing episodes in England’s modern history, and these, at last, have shaken the general population’s confidence to its roots.

One was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No-one who lived through that here will have forgotten the ugliness it brought down on the English social atmosphere (which nevertheless pales before what it did to Iraqis). The other is the unfinished Brexit-austerity-racism nightmare of the 2010s, whose most potent symbol is the blistering eruption of Grenfell Tower, a funeral pyre of something which, for its absence, the English psyche now unravels. The least that can be said coming out of these bloodbaths is that the gulf between England’s self-congratulatory myth of democracy and human rights on the one hand, and its inveterate tendencies to casual and mean-spirited violence on the other, appears to trouble far more of its people than it did at the turn of the millennium.

North from Staines Bridge to a land of legends. How much has this view changed in those twenty years? How much in eight hundred?

I didn’t have to wait twenty years for that. In 1997 my instruction in the gap between myth and reality was immediate, traumatic, and lasting. Entering an English boys’ school brought me in contact not with accountable leaders but a bristling-moustached, foam-at-the-mouth adult authoritarianism the likes of whose bellowing arrogance I had never encountered, even in a far less likely bastion of democracy, colonial Hong Kong. And the pupils, far from being a courteous and enlightened citizenry that knew its way round a social contract, exhibited instead a barbarism that was hysterical, violent and sometimes plain racist, eagerly following their scripts in that divine-right-of-adults diorama. If it was all to meld into a single message, it would have been this: We are a democracy, so STFU.

In that shock and turmoil one image has never left my memory. The back wall of the history classroom, packed floor to ceiling with parchments. Each was brown with a red wax seal, and though the handwriting varied, each’s text began, in huge capital letters, with the words: ‘JOHN, BY THE GRACE OF GOD, KING OF ENGLAND…’ before the text size diminished to illegibility.

English history was a morass to me. I had had next to no exposure to it and its contents were totally foreign. Kings with weird numbers after their names instead of Chris Patten; cryptic symbols everywhere like lions (but they don’t have any?) and fleur-de-lis (but they don’t like France?); important people named after places they had nothing to do with and weren’t pronounced how they were spelt, and endless random wars for no sensible reason. I went by the English name John then – were those suspicious documents directed at me? What would I want with the grace of their god? My history teacher’s name was also John. Was this about plastering his authority all over the wall, revering him as no less than their king?

That wall of charters, unexplained and ever-present, loomed over two years of English history lessons which, for lack of foundation and context, left me lost at sea. It was only much later that I pieced together what it was about. It was what they had studied the previous year, which I had missed on the other side of the world. It was the foundation. And the foundation revolved around a single document, one they deemed so important that they got each boy to re-create his own, dunk it in some yellowy-brown chemical to make it look historic, then hoist it high with the others so as to dominate the visual experience of the history classroom through all the centuries of material that followed.

Eventually I managed to put a name to it. Magna Carta. In English imagination, possibly the greatest story of all – the key word, of course, being imagination.

The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede.

There are facts, and there is myth. Both matter in history. In this particular history, the myth has mattered a hundred times more.

But charters are made of paper, and paper, real or mythic, has two sides. The English’s claims to democracy and rule of law are writ on the sunlit side. How often do they look on the shadowed side? They do not – because it screams. It screams a racial exceptionalism which wetted the chops of undying English authoritarianism and drove it on a genocidal rampage across the Earth. They do not look, because it still burns their eyes.

Oh yes. Today’s journey through the meadows where Magna Carta was verbally agreed (not signed – signatures as a binding instrument came much later) shall not be the same pilgrimage made by a neverending crocodile of approved storytellers, excited lawyers and awestruck schoolchildren. My path is the dark path and here it leads through the underworld. Come, if you dare face a reckoning with the Runnymede Horror.

Staines Bridge in the light of an especially cold winter morning. Staines’s significance as a ford town as explored in the previous section will be of continued importance.

Oh, and there is also a great big fortress called Windsor Castle. That might be important.

Start: Staines Bridge (nearest station: Staines)

End: Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and Eton Central)

Length: 12km/7.5 miles

Location: Surrey – Borough of Runnymede; Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead

Topics: The Magna Carta – history and mythology in Runnymede and Dark Runnymede; Old Windsor, Datchet, Windsor Castle, the Charter of the Forest

My Hong Kong Story

Hong Kong is probably the one place in the world where I felt closest to a sense of home.

That was more than twenty years ago. It was the mid-1990s, just as the curtain was coming down on more than a hundred and fifty years of British colonial rule. It was a time of tension, uncertainty, and fears for the future – which two decades on have surged back to the surface, raw and unresolved.

The British and Chinese governments had negotiated the Joint Declaration – an international treaty to return Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while guaranteeing it a high degree of autonomy. Its political, economic and legal systems and way of life were to remain unchanged for at least fifty years – ‘one country, two systems’, as proposed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The Hong Kong Basic Law would come into effect as its new constitution at the moment of the Handover on 1st July 1997. I arrived with four years left to go, just as the last British governor, Chris Patten, was shovelling in dramatic last-minute reforms aimed at making the electoral system more democratic – antagonising the Chinese and earning a battery of vicious epithets of which the politest was ‘sinner condemned for a thousand generations’ (千古罪人).

At seven years old it would be some time yet before I absorbed all this. That may be why Hong Kong retains so special a place in my memory. It is the last place where I remember an existence at least partly free of the alienation and conflicts with human society that have defined my journeys since. After the handover I would arrive in England as a teenager and it would all go horribly wrong. Hong Kong – the last place the world seemed to make some sense.

The Hong Kong handover ceremony, 30th June - 1st July 1997 (from South China Morning Post).

An innocence? Of sorts. Though it was beyond my consciousness at the time, I lived in an extremely privileged position in Hong Kong’s colonially-defined social geography. I was the son of a British diplomat installed in a comfortable apartment in Mid-Levels, halfway up the slopes of the Peak on Hong Kong Island and largely the preserve of white people with means or in government service. The windows that made up all of the north-facing wall commanded a panoramic view across iconic Victoria Harbour – the skyscrapers of Central, the museums of Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of Kowloon, and of course, at the centre of the view with its fluttering Blue Ensign, the white palatial Government House where my dad’s boss Chris lived.

Of Hong Kong’s history, socio-economic problems and broader international context I gleaned little. I had a basic awareness of course that Britain had got the territory off the Chinese a long time ago in dodgy circumstances and was now due to give it back. On a certain level this felt like justice, but it also gave people real anxieties in the wake of the 1989 Tiananamen massacre. My dad’s work occasionally brought me in contact with Chinese political dissidents and survivors of the crackdown, major characters in the struggle for a freer and more humane PRC who would leave on me a deep and lasting personal impression. Beyond that, most of it passed over my head – and in colonial bourgeois surroundings, attending an English-speaking international school in Pok Fu Lam (regularly butchered upon English tongues into ‘Pok Fulham’), it was not as though I would receive an impartial assessment of Hong Kong’s complex story, least of all the more notorious British behaviours therein.

On the Lamentable Condition of Public Toilets in London

During recent walks in various parts of London, it has come to my notice that this city suffers from a distinct shortage of public toilets. On top of that, where these essential facilities happen to be present, such as in the central parks and major train stations, they almost always charge a significant entry fee. Many also lack stair-free access, while others still are dilapidated or closed altogether from obvious lack of maintenance.

Perhaps my attention is all the more drawn to this problem after five years in Tokyo, a city which for all its flaws is quite respectable on the question of free and accessible public latrines. Almost every station on the city’s rail and metro network has one in at least decent condition, as do the public parks, or if all else fails there is usually a department store or konbini nearby whose facilities you can use without fear or shame. The train station toilets are usually inside the ticket barrier, but even that is preferable to the situation in London where most stations have none at all, and thus the possibility that you will be able to pee after a long London Underground journey is a matter of hit and miss (usually miss).

Typical condition of a public toilet in a major London train station: locked behind a toll gate, wheelchair-inaccessible, and out of order so no-one can use it anyway.

The Politics of the Disappearance of Public Toilets

On further investigation this deficiency is not a coincidence. Last year (2016) the BBC reported that over 1,782 public toilets had been closed across the UK over the preceding decade. With no legal requirement for local authorities to provide them, they have apparently been one of the first things to go as the austerity movement eats into councils’ budgets.

It is an easy issue to joke about or trivialize – from a place of privilege, say if you travel by car or have private access to toilets in your place of work, and thus take regular relief of your bodily fluids for granted. But as with much of austerity, the greater your level of vulnerability or distance from mainstream norms and expectations, the less of a position you are in to treat this as a laughing matter. Consider for example women, who in general use the facilities to deal with more complex sanitary needs; people with bowel or bladder problems or other physical or mental health concerns which require more frequent recourse to the loo; people in wheelchairs or with otherwise limited mobility, who are often forgotten in the design of the facilities’ spaces; small children and elderly people; transgender people, who face discrimination concerning toilets that recent events in the US have made internationally notorious; and unemployed or homeless people, for whom 50p per use might not be an insignificant blow.

Thus it seems difficult to summarily dismiss the cynical view: that the collapse in public toilet provision in London, and in the UK more widely, is but one more component of the established belief system and political agenda of the day: that society should not exist, that the public sphere should be ruined for private profit, and that life should be made as miserable as possible for those who are vulnerable or seen as different.

Can we imagine a strike directed more perfectly (and literally) below the belt? Perhaps there is no topic on which the distance between privilege and oppression more starkly divides between reflexive, comfortable amusement on the part of those least affected by this problem, and the distress and utter collapse of dignity suffered by those it impacts the most.

Public Toilets as a Human Right and Public Interest

Who could dispute the case for free, accessible and clean public toilets? In the first instance, because our nature as human beings carries with it the frequent imperative to relieve both the greater and lesser calls of nature, the safe and hygienic means to do so should be considered a basic human right, and was as much as recognized as such by the UN General Assembly in 2010.

But even supposing we come at this issue from perspectives that for whatever reason reject human rights, we would be hard-pressed to deny that having this means available is much in the public interest. The thing about the aforementioned imperative to release our waste products is that it is ultimately going to happen anyway whether there is a safe and hygienic place to do it or not, and certain cities around the world whose embarrassment we shall spare here are well familiar with the consequences of failing to cater for it.

However, the prospect of monied, international London joining their ranks might be quite shocking to some. Many of its most overcrowded tourist destinations lack any toilets at all, including Underground stations such as Tower Hill, serving the single most popular attraction in the country, where one account has it that ‘visitors to the Tower brave a filthy concrete tunnel that reeks of urine at night’. Not only does this suggest how we all pay the cost of inadequate latrines in the form of a deeply unhealthy and unpleasant common environment (excepting perhaps those individuals who take a rare prurient interest in the substances in question), but it also perhaps ought to lead Londoners to wonder how many thousands of those visitors later return to, say, Paris or Beijing, to regale friends and families with stories of their experiences whose effect is that the very mention of London is from then on linked in their minds with the stains and odours of human excreta.

To avoid conflicts about whose responsibility it is to resolve this, perhaps we should all take on a share of it. On the surface it appears simple. On the one hand, a legal requirement should be introduced for local authorities to provide a bare minimum of free, accessible and hygienic public toilets, and the necessary resources be allocated them to do so. On the other, there should also be some manner of legal obligation on businesses and private organizations – restaurants, cafés, pubs, department stores – to offer the facilities, and these should be usable without shame or cost by anyone, regardless of whether or not they be paying customers.

As ever, the real challenge is the politics of this: it is hard to imagine responsibility being accepted either by a government which disdains human rights and the public interest in principle and is ideologically committed to their destruction, or by those businesses which operate to the same belief systems and insist that as businesses they have no obligations whatsoever other than to their own profit. We might predict then that the international image of London will become ever more drenched in urine until a substantial shift away from free-market capitalist culture is achieved, towards more socially responsible paradigms of what it means to be either a government or a business.

In the meantime there seem numerous efforts emerging as frustrated citizens go out of their way to pick up the burdens of these structural failings. Among them, the British Toilet Association has been campaigning for more and better public loos for almost twenty years, while researchers at the Royal College of Art have published both a design guide for publicly accessible toilets (very clear and illustrated, well worth a look) and a ‘Great British Public Toilet Map’, an open-data project which attempts to chart locations and information about public toilets in the UK. Also commendable are those local authorities and businesses which really have been making an effort: certain train stations which used to charge a fee for using the toilet, such as Victoria and Fenchurch Street, have now scrapped it and allow free access for anyone, while councils and businesses in some areas together operate Community Toilet Schemes by which the public can use the toilets on the premises of any of their participants.

This still falls short of the standard expectable of a global centre like London of course, but perhaps not all is lost. Once the more general free-market abolition of society has been reversed, these existing civic movements could become a valuable launchpad for the restoration of a public toilet network worthy of a respectable city.

On "British Values", the Conservative Party and Crimes Against Humanity

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.