Equally revealing is the
information that Cameron blocked EU plans for greater transparency over
trusts. It brings into sharp relief
what’s at stake in the EU referendum because the issue presented as pro- or
anti-Brussels can in fact be reversed and presented as pro- or
anti-London. Brexit won’t deliver
regionalism but it could very easily produce a London regime on steroids. Johnson as Prime Minister, ousting the
fatally discredited thinking of the Cameron / Osborne axis, but even more in thrall
to City backers. Massive deregulation
paving the way for active promotion of the UK as the place for the globally
corrupt to do business. London
helping itself to still more of the national wealth while denying other parts
of the UK
still more of the powers needed to turn themselves around. Openly, the fight for Brexit is being fought
in the name of democracy, and on that score sound points can be made, but,
behind the scenes, kleptocracy would be the real winner.
A clear pointer to the
direction of travel appeared this week when Dominic Grieve highlighted that
tax-dodging is an industry that provides a great many much-needed jobs. In places like the British
Virgin Islands that matter so much to all of us, if we can just remember
where they are. It does indeed provide
jobs, socially useless ones, just as it destroys socially useful jobs by
denying the public purse the funds with which to sustain them. Such is the mentally sick, insecure society
that Thatcherism has spawned, ferreting around for whatever bits of work are on
offer from a parasite class to whom caps must forever be doffed. Dismantling the tax havens is technically a very
easy thing to do; it’s just politically impossible to pass the necessary legislation
because of a longstanding Wesm’ster consensus against it.
George Osborne’s plan to
nationalise all local authority schools, and then privatise them – a bit like
the Dissolution of the Monasteries – is another pointer to the direction of
travel. Academies don’t have to teach
the national curriculum, so it will presumably disappear, along with parent
governors and any other vestige of democracy that might give children the wrong
idea about how our society can be run.
Why would you need a national curriculum, written down and open to
challenge, when it can simply be ‘understood’ by the chief executives of the
big McSchool academy chains?
Understood, that is, to mean teaching that a fraudster is just a better
entrepreneur than the competition, that tax-dodging is wealth creation and that
the only thing the law-abiding individual need ever fear is the over-mighty
State? Dis-education and mis-education
are the new battleground because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, can it?
Englishness is many things
but one of the most cherished is a love of secrecy, or privacy as it’s
usually termed, a pathological distrust of the other that underpins the
rejection of any potential for collective action. It’s why we prefer houses, even in city
centres, to the flats that those on the mainland regard as a far more rational
use of land. Across most of Scandinavia, tax returns are public documents: folk don’t
have hang-ups about what they earn or the tax they pay on it. Perhaps they believe they really have earned
it: so many of our top ‘earners’ know deep down that their salaries are out of
all proportion to their real social value.
English society, obsessed with covering up the truth in order to protect
a ruling class who aren’t worth their privileges, is a society at war with
itself. The rulers keep winning by
setting each serf against all the rest and presenting themselves as the good
guys. It’s been like that for 950 years.
The system was imposed from
outside, from Normandy. Can it be overthrown from within, or will it
take some major help from Brussels
to achieve our liberation? The history
of those 950 years furnishes one very clear answer.
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