I have not posted for a few days because I am watching my predictions of a descent into authoritarianism in both the US and Britain unfolding before my eyes. In the past week, both the British and American governments have graphically given us notice that they will not tolerate being challenged nor held accountable. In Britain we have parliamentary government, not executive government. We vote for a parliament, not for a government, and the government is then formed from the winning majority party. It is a convention that the Prime Minister is the leader of that majority party but the Queen can theoretically ask anyone elected to the parliament to become prime minister. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that parliament hold the executive to account, because it is the parliament we vote for, not the executive, and it is parliament that is so dismally failing to do what is has been elected to do.
The British government’s White Paper, very reluctantly produced by the government after a Supreme Court ruling, to allow the pigsty to at least have the semblance of an input into the process of leaving the EU quite astonishingly contained the phrase that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU” adding pathetically that “it has not always felt like that.” Thus, parliamentary sovereignty is admitted by this loathsome gang of Tory krypto-fascists, to have been in peril all this time, not by the EU, but by successive governments who have continuously lied through their teeth about our relationship with Europe to cover their own criminality and incompetence, and by utilising the party system to systematically reduce our elected representatives to a shower of craven underlings. Those underlings have shamefully submitted to a succession of governmental bullies by not challenging their assumed authority and it was left to a private citizen to attempt to restore some meaningful democracy by forcing these porcine replicas of real human beings to actually attempt to do the job they are paid to do and hold the criminals in the executive to account. However, even given this minor concession, the pigsty has again failed to stand up, for not only their own rights, but the rights of the British people as the negotiations and agreements that will be concluded to take us out of the EU will remain unscrutinised until the last minute. What all of this shambles tells us is that the British parliament has completely abdicated its responsibility and no longer understands its purpose, what it exists for and what its role is. Now you know why I call it a pigsty as these cretins demonstrate daily that they are only in it for what they can get. This is the end result of the party system, a set of craven individuals who, in order to enjoy the graft and corruption that comes with being an MP, have quite voluntarily given up the ability to think independently. The other stench that emanates from their White Paper is the admission that their Leave campaign rhetoric was a farrago of lies, as they persistently told us that we must regain a ‘control’ that we had never lost in the first place.
What is sinister in all of this is the rhetoric surrounding it with the Tory press and Tory politicians branding anyone who calls for a say in this process enemies of democracy and enemies of the people. The lady who took the government to court had to go into hiding because of the numerous death threats she received. We had the Daily Mail, the intellectual offspring of the Volkischer Beobachter, calling the judiciary enemies of the people because they dared to argue that the representatives of those same people must have an input into the process. We now have a similar spectacle in the US where the president has adopted the practice of labelling anyone who follows a profession ‘so-called’ as in labelling a federal judge a so-called judge and Meryl Streep a so-called actress etc. This is an attempt at humiliation and denigration and is very dangerous, because he is trying to belittle a federal judge’s character and professional ability because that judge had the temerity to disagree with him. When you do that you are in fact attempting to subvert the rule of law and replace it with your own demands. What is familiar in the US scenario is that the resistance to such authoritarian trends is coming from outside Congress and not from the elected representatives of the people. Official opposition in the US appears to be Saturday Night Live. I leave you with part of a speech to Congress by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1938
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
Not a lot has changed eh? You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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