Trade war can only make us less prosperous. Class war can make us less civilised, and prosperity is much easier to recover.
For all the pseudo-conservative noises Starmer makes, his is a Marxist government that only ever contains its carnivorous instincts for fear of electoral reprisal. And Marxists don’t rationally weigh the pros and cons of class war any more than a dog considers the advisability of chasing a cat.
Both breeds follow the imperatives coded into their DNA, and in doing so they act without a choice. Dogs dislike cats, Marxists hate everything to do with Western tradition.
It’s only in this context that one can properly evaluate the Labour bill to do away with the 88 remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords. “Hereditary peers are indefensible,” said the Labour manifesto in the latest election, presumably because they’ve been neither elected nor appointed by Labour governments.
Such illiterate idiocy strikes a chord in untutored hearts, which alas constitute an overwhelming cardiac majority in today’s Britain. We are a democratic country, aren’t we? We are. Then those who govern us must be elected or, at a pinch, appointed by those who have been. End of story.
Many of those who mouth such bilge don’t seem to have any problem with having an unelected and hereditary head of state, but that problem will arise sooner or later. The God of Democracy is athirst, demanding more and more sacrifices.
Yet the very existence of a king should have tipped off those people that, a democracy though Britain may be, it’s also a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one. That fact alone points to the essence of Britain’s polity, the oldest and most consistent realisation of the most sound political idea, that of mixed government.
Having analysed the three principal methods of government known at the time, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy, both Plato and Aristotle found each of them wanting. No political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. That’s why the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus in Sparta lasted longer than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens.
Following the Greeks, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. A division of power, in which none of the estates feels the need to usurp the total power, is thus a proven guarantor of social longevity.
That idea lies at the foundation of most Western democracies, but especially of England and all the countries directly influenced by her. The constitution of England combines the monarchy of the king, the democracy of the Commons, and the unelected fulcrum between the two, the House of Lords, ensuring that neither end of the seesaw shoots up too vigorously.
This system goes back centuries. It was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved, and the post-Hellenic system of representation has ancient roots as well.
For example, in England before the Norman conquest it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, that would convene after a king’s death to select a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.
So yes, Britain is a democracy, but she can’t be a democracy run riot. If she becomes that, she won’t be Britain in any other than the geographical sense. For Britain is defined by her ancient constitution more than any other European country (the US is equally dependent on her own constitution, but it’s just a modification of the English antecedent).
Since the 1789 Revolution, France has had 14 different constitutions, the current one established in 1958. Replace it with a fifteenth, and France will remain France, to paraphrase Maurice Chevalier’s song (Paris sera toujours Paris). Take Britain’s constitution away, and we might as well become an American state – I’m sure Trump would welcome such a development.
I don’t know if Starmer and his merry men understand such ABC things. They may or may not, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Visceral hatred of the upper classes has been encoded into their DNA by Marx, and that overrides any rational considerations.
Class war, as far as they are concerned, can have only one end, that articulated by the proto-Marxist Denis Diderot: “We’ll hang the last priest on the entrails of the last aristocrat”. I’m not sure the Starmer gang see that end in similarly sanguinary terms, but that’s a difference of form, not content.
They are fighting their class war on all fronts, by driving wealth producers out of the country, suffocating the middle classes with extortionate taxes, and doing their level best to destroy public schools that alone can be expected to provide a semblance of education.
None of this makes any sense on any level, except one: the Marxist craving for the politics of envy and hatred. But I’ve got news for this lot: class war and trade war have one thing in common. Neither ever produces any winners. Only losers.
I suppose it is some derivative of Hobbes’s war of all against all, but it never is really all. It is usually the middle class against some of the upper class. It seems to be fostered in college classrooms, as one rarely hears this dreck from someone without some level of higher education. The man selling oranges at the highway off ramp does not hold a sign exhorting us to “Eat the rich!” There are some funny videos where the host interviews students on college campuses. He first gets them to establish their socialist credentials, then asks if they would be willing to share grades with students whose grades are lower. Their facial expressions give them away as they stammer through a response. Most end with “No! I worked hard for my grades.” It is funny from one perspective but sad, and maybe scary, that they cannot see their way to apply that to income.
Except to their own, natch. Many people who are in favour of higher taxes hire tax lawyers for themselves.