The three greatest crises our country has faced since the Second World War has surely taught us two very valuable lessons. First the financial crisis of 2007-8 showed us the stark reality of the evils of unregulated economic freedom and then the Chilcot Report and the Brexit campaign has shown us the stark reality of unregulated political freedom. The great project, began by Margaret Thatcher, to remove all constraints on both economic and political decision-making, has finally borne fruit and is revealed for the disaster that some of us had always predicted it would be. All of my adult life I have listened in despair to the clarion calls for freedom from people who it was obvious had not the first idea of what freedom is. Freedom is most certainly not the right to do whatever you want, and we are now beginning to understand the extent to which Thatcher’s interpretation of freedom allowed the people in charge of the keys to the safe to treat the national wealth as their own personal pocket money to be utilised as funds for their addiction to the great casino that is the financial system. Now we are asking, where was the responsibility, the accountability that we were repeatedly told by the free market concept of freedom was an evil that was chaining the creation of wealth, and where is the paradise that was awaiting us from the never ending riches available if only we would put our faith in the market and the unrestrained decision-making of our masters? Now we have seen, in all its horror, the extent to which employers, when given their freedom, will go to sacrifice the well-being of their workforce to their rapacity in pursuit of their own gain. As a consequence we are only now beginning to learn the importance of requiring the rich to consider that they have duties and responsibilities as well as rights in both their individual and collective lives, where previously we only demanded that from workers and their representative organisations and demonised them when they sought to exercise their rights.
Our everyday experience has demonstrated the destructive capacity of, and the lie that is, the free market, a system that has been well and truly weighed in the balances and found wanting. Perhaps more importantly, the individualist philosophy that has underpinned it and provided its justification has been shown for the intellectual barbarism that is has always been. Now we can all see the dominant economic and philosophical ideology as they really are; a lie and a fraud, laid bare by experience and the reality of a United Kingdom that can no longer offer any excuses or blame anyone else. Now we are beginning to see the necessity of imposing meaningful restraints on free enterprise, accepting a temporary material loss for a greater and wider social and collective gain because we are a wealthy nation and can afford to redistribute resources to produce the type of equity that a just society demands.
Our political system is in the same state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy as the economic. Parliament is exposed as being completely useless, failing in every department of its duties and responsibility, completely out of touch and unrepresentative. Successive administrations have demonstrated that Parliament has completely failed to exercise either control or accountability over government, the civil service, the security services etc. Now we see the fruits of a Parliament that failed in its responsibilities for representation and accountability, allowing unrestrained governments to deregulate the financial system, business, economic activity and employment, developing the idea that it had the right to wage war and invade other nations irrespective of the wishes of the people who elect them. Now we see how Parliament, through its programmes of media training etc. taught our representatives how to lie and deceive and refuse to answer questions and how those same representatives eagerly lapped up such methods of mass deception that were so effective during the two referendum campaigns. The free market political and economic doctrines that have so dominated this nation for the past forty years have broken the nation. It will never be the same again. This gives us the opportunity to reform and reshape our political, economic and social institutions and structures and challenge the creeping racism and fascism that is the logical result of the Thatcherite experiment, but we cannot trust in our Westminster politicians because they simply cannot, or will not, see the reality that they are responsible for creating, and the biggest problem is that too many of them are wilfully blind. If we, the people, fail to grasp this challenge we face a grim future. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
No comments:
Post a Comment