Recessional

Consolidation is the watchword of political activity in 2008.

All the unholy work of the last decade has been completed: the rule of law has been uprooted from its centrality in Parliament, literally, physically uprooted to a tidied-up municipal office space off Parliament Square; the Constitution has been distanced as a present force for control of the Executive and enters the realm of political and institutional history, with the exclusion of the head of state in any role as defender of the nature of our consent to government, while the House of Lords sits polluted by a membership of placemen who have bought into the exercise of power, and the Commons is whipped, cowed into submission by self interest expressed either as dull-minded commitment to dead ideologies and tribal allegiances, or straightforward cash in hand.

The established Church has lost its way in the morass of Executive interference in what should have been its pastoral care, and is undermined by fundamentalist, incomparably inferior, belief systems, both Christian and non-Christian. At all levels of public life lying has become more acceptable than acceptance of responsibility or even admission of fallibility. The Seven Deadly sins hold sway throughout their realms in unthinkable ways - from the crossing of human genetic material with that of other species, to young people so lost to all self respect as they parade in drunkenness and undress in the public street, and children kill one another in complete unawareness of the finality of wielding death both for their victims and for themselves.

The instigation of a rejection of the importance of individual human worth, perpetrated by social atomisation - the denigration of status derived from family ties, community good-standing, achievement, self-sufficiency, credit worthiness, cooperation with others, and high value attached to cultural norms, is well advanced.

So high are tax culls that application for subvention, and resultant conformity, to Executive norms is extended to most of the working age group, and to all of those too young to escape it.

The young are the object of particular indoctrination and perversion by the Executive: their biometric data is already delivered, they are numbered, weighed, and will be divided when rule requires it.

The people are among the most highly surveilled on the planet and this is promised to grow worse. What is available to eat is provided for many by supermarket systems deeply integrated into this authoritarian governance; the health provision is, of itself, an enormous area of Executive planning and control within the ostensibly capitalist economic system, as is the state education system and other aspects of regional government removed from local elected authority control.

This year is to be wholly devoted to entrenching post democratic governance systems. Systems impervious to any window dressing votes taken whilst votes are still a civic tranquillizer that will disappear into a controlled irrelevance before 2010.

The division of our society into castes is almost complete. Different tax regimes, travel regimes, health and education regimes, opportunity regimes are open to elites. The pathways between the mass of the children and the children of the upper castes have been more or less closed, and are closely watched for inadmissible intrusions either in terms of numbers that might threaten privileged castes, or in terms of ideologies, or belief systems. The war on terror serves far more than merely containing economically and culturally instigated threats to all of us; its primary purpose is to contain threats from most of us to our power caste.

This year will be devoted to bedding-in, tidying up, beating down; to a new, written infinitely diminished portrayal of what we might be, and were, that will be foisted upon us as a substitute for our destroyed Constitution. Corruption and its occasional emergence doesn't matter, that can be contained primarily by denial, ignoring and, in the end, the unavailability any longer of any kind of redress. Our Parliament is disarmed, our state defeated and overrun from Lisbon of all places, our armies abandoned in far off countries dying for nothing or parked on long-abandoned battlefields.

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget—lest we forget!