Time For a General Election

The unelected Leader is required to face his first election and is blown away in the expressions of loathing for his government and his vision. It is not just Brown who is unacceptable. Because there is much less distinction between the state and governance in the United Kingdom than in other advanced countries, the state itself is suffering unacceptable blows to its authority and cohesion as a result of New Labour policies and their failure.

Every devolved part of the United Kingdom has rejected New Labour. Worse, the Westminster prime minister is singularly ill-favoured and ill-adapted to dealing with countries and regions that are run by other administrations, even within the United Kingdom, never mind his appalling foreign relations blunders and ineptitudes.

The Scottish government has enjoyed the highest esteem and satisfaction from its electors in the year it has been in office, delivering much of the political and social policies people want on health, education, care of the elderly and very young, ecological issues and cutting back the quango nomenklatura. Wales has just voted widely against New Labour and its enormous, centralising state. Elected representatives at various levels of local governance in Wales can expect the same kind of obstructive, childish response from the New Labour Executive as the Scots have been suffering and coping with.

Now London, the third devolved realm, is facing these recalcitrant, deluded, ideological control freaks, led by a man without intellectual capacity or empathy, whose emotions move from rage to fawning acceptance with no intervening stage of concerned comprehension.

The absence of a properly constituted state, with a head of state, and constitutional courts to defend it, exacerbates the situation. Italy has elected Berlusconi, Fini and Bossi, but Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, or Sicily, or the Veneto will all remain in a wholly stable relationship with the state of Italy and its President and its constitution; they will be on affable and politically balanced terms with the central government and with one another too.

Demonstrably this is not true of the United Kingdom. The British Constitution has been too damaged by the New Labour Project perverting the spirit, even more than the letter of the law, of an organic structure and uncodified practice. The visceral commitment of its ideologues, expressed through the BBC and other supported media, tax-diverted funded think tanks, and academia of the Left, will not permit reasonable dealings with parts of the country that have voted to get out from under their patronizing, interfering, social and political experimentation, and tax and imposts to pay for it all, including their elevated living standards. In Italy there is a sanction to overstepping the line into the people's lives, families, and culture paid by politicians and busybodies. And there is the film and the photographs and the writings of the horror to show, if needed.

That, thanks to the bravery of many and our good fortune, has not been the experience in England, and so a horrible regime has installed itself. The people are looking about for means to defend themselves. This vote has done a great deal. There should be another one, a general election, before those films and photographs become part of our heritage too.