In the immediate post War constitutions were drafted and put into effect for much of continental Europe. Our lawyers and academic advisers contributed a great deal to analysing and formulating institutional and binding responses to various expressions of authoritarianism; they ensured many rights and freedoms were enshrined in these constitutions so that the decade long slide into dictatorship, war and the Holocaust could not happen again.
It did not cross any minds that our own constitution might need reinforcement and safeguarding for democracy. After all, we, with our Commonwealth and American allies had just defeated the Axis authoritarian states.
And until the New Labour Project, with its over riding goal of permanence in power, preferably by vote (however manipulated), but if needed by alteration of the relationships within the state itself, and then force, our constitution served us as it always had.
The New Labour Project has assumed the authority of the monarch almost wholly into the Executive and persistently marginalised the functions of the Head of State; it has destroyed the Parliament as a force against the Executive by downgrading the House of Lords to party appointees, and purchasers of seats in the legislature, and by excluding the Law Lords; the Commons has been emasculated by a Party discipline that replaces any notion of constituency representation of all by the member of parliament; administratively the country has been dismembered, then re-divided with the specific intention of breaking economic, sociocultural/historic links, and non-elected bodies provided with powers and funding that belong in elected local government; a vicious policy masquerading as tolerance of diversity has set sectors of the population, and particularly the poorer sectors, one against the other; education has been down graded into qualification and conformity as a means of accessing low level state jobs; a client state of complacent voters has been bought both with tax-funded work and tax-funded benefits; the entire life records of whole populations have been uploaded onto insecure, regime data bases under the pretence of providing identity cards; means to prevent freedom of movement are already in place; 'security' measures that apply to most do not apply to regime nomenklatura; an external 'terrorist' threat has been manufactured by illegal war and unwise 'multiculturalism' to reinforce regime arbitrary action; tax-raised resources have been used wholesale to redistribute allegiance and purchase acquiescence.
We are now at the codification stage in all this as the regime produces the written constitution that would better have come at a time when all the world, even as much of it lay in ruins, understood the nature of democracy, responsibility for wrong, freedom under the law, and the right to go about life's business without reference to anything else, least of all the state.
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I can just imagine what my old Grammar School English teacher would have said about a sentence as long as your second paragraph. Your ears should be burning.
Dron finds much to agree with in this beautifully written philippic.
May I offer a small contribution to your thesis. It is this:
You say that "an external 'terrorist' threat has been manufactured by illegal war" It is important for a totalitarian society to coalesce. It must do so in order to believe in the faulty logic that supports it. For example, "The War on Terror" Is a rallying cry for what is deemed to be the logical, morally correct position, underpinned with the idea that "you are either for us or against us" Criticism is marginalised as treason. It is very clean cut.
When Thatcher supposedly said there is no such thing as society, she was to some extent right. We do not behave as a cohesive whole, we merely live side by side. In a sense the word is redundant.
"Society" only sufaces as a viable construct in times of crisis, such as war, when all (or many) can supposedly agree on a mass plan. In doing so, it can then be manipulated much more easily. As Brecht said,"Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions" To stand that on its head it can therefore equally apply that if debate and opposition is stifled, control, of communication, of thought, can be easily gained because detractors become marginalized.
This British Government has effected a crisis on two major fronts; security and economy. Either one would be sufficient to justify the curtailment of freedom but two is a whammy. Add the third front of social engineering (such as "multiculturalism")Where the introduction of totalitarian precepts is justified by "social action" and perhaps a fourth of "global warming" and you have created a society that is not only at war with other cultures, it is at war with itself and the planet.
It has, in effect created the basis of its grip on the people, by declaring a perpetual state of war.
(Orwell knew this all to well)
"It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.” says Murray Rothbard, a libertarian.
As long as society coalesces against "wars" on poverty, drugs, terrorism, global warming,etc the politicians have done their clever semantic trick and Newspeak stays alive and well and control becomes complete.
Good stuff HG, but I just wonder how many of these beautifully drafted post-war Constitutions have now been sidelined by the ever avaricious EU.... and whether any Europeans have yet noticed? It daily look like we shall soon be seeking a new Cromwell or Robespierre.
PS: I think the trains are still running!
The photographs of hundreds of riot-geared paramilitary style police in a London street that were in todays' papers bear close thought, Nomad. They may have been on their way to arrest people suspected of theft and falsification of papers (did I just type that? For England? Falsification of papers offences?) but they must have terrified the local people, who were 'excluded from the area'.
Looking from here (the trains were, as you said, still running) felt safer than looking in London.
On the constitutions, the Italian one has held up well, through various assaults on the state from the P2 and the Red Brigades to Berlusconi and the Mafia. The transience of govenment administrations is not an indication of governmental instability, more a national amusement. Germany seems to stick to its rules too and, in its arrangements with the unions and labour relations in general, is a model of how to get a sound economy. Not being familiar with others, which ones are suffering deviation and warping?
'We do not behave as a cohesive whole, we merely live side by side. In a sense the word [society] is redundant.'
Wish I'd written that, E of D. We are many societies, formed by kinship, culture, economic interdependence, faith, geography, history etc.
Nation states, or perhaps wider organisations, have to be driven into cohesion by external threat, again as you say, but nation states can be united by the common interest of the diverse societies bound together by commitment to agreed rules and common ground.
New Labour has no intention of accepting common ground or societal groupings within our nation state - hence the atomisation and destructiveness towards social institutions and economic individualism and independence. They have imposed model authoritarianism, the constant references to the GDR by many observers are correct.
I hope to look more at your other remarks, I'm bad on Brecht and will look.
21.04. My ears are shell-like and rather pretty. I cannot speak for those of true masters of rhetorical device, but you do a disservice to your grammar school teacher.
HG: I agree with you - my English teacher would also have approved.
However, for the benefit of the younger readers of these pages may I suggest that in future instead of semi-colons you use the modern equivalent - bullet points? As English grammar has not been taught in our schools since about 1965, these puntuation marks may not be understood by the current generation, but they might understand what you are trying to convey in a mini-list format.
[rant over]
Thanks you also for your response to my earlier comment. Living in the back of beyond as I do, I do not have access to the UK papers until several days after publication, so I was unaware of the riot police incident to which you refer. Needless to say it was not on the BBC World TV news which was taken up by Mrs Sarkozy, global warming and the (dare I say it, not unexpected) chaos at LHR.
Not sure what my old maths teacher would have made of me confusing the second and fourth paragraphs. Well I am pretty sure, but it wouldn't be repeatable.
I was told that a sentence is difficult to define but it should have a unity of thought. While, the offending sentence definitely has a unity of purpose; there is far too much going on for it to have unity of purpose. As for the suggestion about bullet points, I am sufficiently old enough to know that you should never resort to such gimmicks; even for Physics homework, never mind English.
While on the subject of sentence length. It is worth looking at the written speeches of modern British politicians and making a comparision with those of old. It is very noticeable how the sentence length has reduced considerably - which is surely a reflection of their ability to keep unity of thought going for more than a very short period. This isn't a party political point either. Cameron probably uses shorter sentences than anyone, even Blair, while Brown tends to use quite long sentences. Of course much of this may be a reaction to Kinnock, who often gave up on punctuation all together.
I probably need to go back and re-read Orwell on the language used by politicians.
BTW - I am sure I've missed lots of commas and used dashes rather than semi-colons (although the latter is quite a helpful modern innovation)
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