It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can be whatever they want to be, the military should be abolished and everyone will be happy except for the Jews, who are to be hounded and vilified and attacked.
Zack Polanski’s Greens are the embodiment of what the American writer Rob K. Henderson called ‘luxury beliefs’, which are beliefs in the main based upon fictions – and they are soaring in the polls. This is an indication that while our polity might be sclerotic, ineffectual, utterly blind to realities, the electorate is even more so. The truth is we need to wake up, sharpish. But there is no evidence that either at the top or the bottom anybody is willing to do this. The alarm clock is put on perpetual snooze.
While our polity might be sclerotic, ineffectual, utterly blind to realities, the electorate is even more so
We have been here before. In 1930, the UK’s defence spending amounted to about 2.5 per cent of our GDP – only slightly above what it is now. The country was still recovering its breath from a hideously brutal world war and would rather pretend that another even worse one was not just around the corner. In 1935, Stanley Baldwin ramped up defence spending by almost double, having been a tad discomfited by what he saw emanating from Berlin. By 1938 our defence spending was almost 7 per cent, a goodly proportion of the new money having been invested in the RAF. It may well be that Winston Churchill would later castigate Baldwin for not having re-armed swiftly enough, but goodness, that he was able to re-arm at all was a miracle, given the mindset of the populace. In the 1935 Peace Ballot, some 80 per cent of voters suggested we should disband the RAF and put our faith in the League of Nations and countries being nice to each other. That’s what Baldwin was up against: institutionalised stupidity and wishful thinking. But luckily he came from a time when leaders actually led and he took scant notice of the Polanski-ish views of the majority.
The imperatives now are very similar. Globalisation has not quite worked out as its proponents envisaged – its proponents in the 1890s and indeed a century later. The first world war should have seen the myth of the pacific powers of globalisation dispensed with once and for all. The old 19th-century liberal belief that free trade would create mutual dependency and thus compel us all to cease our militarism got a little bit stuck in the mud at Verdun. Just as in the 1990s, pace Francis Fukuyama – the most wrong man of the past 50 years – and many others, developing technologies did not, as they all envisaged, engender a beneficial yearning for liberal democracy buttressed once again by free trade. It has brought us to where we are now instead. Anyone who believes that globalisation was ineluctably benign and ‘progressive’ needs a spell in a secure institution.
We have not woken up. Not the electorate, not the politicians. Defence is only the most obvious of those areas where we reside in a delusion which allows us to spaff our money on welfare payments for people who identify as ‘anxious’, rather than on defending the country. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves et al know that we need to invest in our woefully denuded armed forces, and yet the current spend is still a lamentable 2.3 per cent of GDP, despite all the rhetoric. Instead, luxuries remain at the top of the spending list.
Then there is energy. We have the highest energy prices in Europe for industry and the second highest (as a consequence of taxes) for domestic consumers. Donald Trump’s war against Iran has raised the prospect of our country running out of food, never mind oil, and yet our Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, is wholly averse to drilling for oil or indeed to any attempt to provide energy for Britain which is not based upon milking the supple breasts of transgender otters for their sweet-smelling carbon neutral nectar. This is an absurdity. Ed is not an idiot. He must know. And yet he is trapped in a luxurious ideological prison where the imperatives of 30 years ago are the only ones that matter.
Then there’s nuclear power – largely, given its start-up costs, the victim of the short-termism of our parliamentary system. Hinkley C was meant to come online last year. It didn’t. Those modular nuclear reactors will only start contributing towards the National Grid after 2030. Until then, with no oil and little nuclear power, we cling on and hope. We need to be self-sufficient in energy, or as close to it as possible. But a lack of will, an indifference to the problem and, in the case of the nukes, terrible production failures, keep us vulnerable.
Last week the government spent nearly £100 million re-opening a bioethanol plant on Teesside, which manufactures CO2 to preserve our foodstuffs, which might obviate the shortages we expect as a consequence of the war against Iran. It had been mothballed a year earlier as a consequence of tariff negotiations with the USA.
That earlier decision gives an indication of why we are in the trouble we are in. We need to be able to heat our homes and feed our people and defend our island without reliance on anybody else. Right now, we can depend upon nobody. We are as far from the uplands of globalisation as it is possible to be. We are pretty much alone. And yet this reality has not sunk in among our politicians, any more than it has the voters. There is no security in mutual dependency – only weakness. And yet neither in government nor among the hoi polloi do I see any recognition of this simple stark fact.
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