The Real Threat to our Way of Life

Constant talk of global this, and grand agreement that, and now of continental solutions, flies in the face of our political settlement - the contract between a government and its electorate. Our democracy is, of its nature, protectionist and local. We accept that some of our actions will be limited, or required, in return for choosing government by free and fair election that reflects our wishes for the way the social aspects of our lives run.

Our state is defended by our government, our public affairs are run in the interests of its maintenance, and our beliefs about the proper relations we should have with one another are expressed through it. Refusal to accept this both flies in the face of reality and makes any refusenik regime illegitimate.

Which is precisely where we are with Brown's regime. The rejection of reality and its substitution with fantastical assertions on saving the world, and remaining in power by force, both the force of political inertia and propaganda, and the force of the clenched fist. The contract renewed at the 2005 general election has long since been broken both by circumstantial change in the United Kingdom and by Labour Party acts of wilful, degenerate manipulation.

Socialism and its organisations always try for internationalism because it breaks any link between a people and their governance. But it is precisely within the notion of a people and a country that any contract to be governed can be forged. When that sense of national self is dissipated by rogue rule pretending to answer to a higher necessary and even moral order of planetary interdependence and governance, people reject governance at all, or assert their existence as a people through defining the other that most closely threatens them, and making war.