I HAVE long written in these pages of the descent of British government, particularly under the Tories, into authoritarianism and eventually totalitarianism. Such trends are now undeniable with the evidence of the Tories’ anti-strike and anti-protest proposals. Add to this their contempt for the ordinary norms of democracy as witnessed by their reaction to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in their determination to suppress all forms of independent expression by the Scottish Parliament and people, and you have a nation and a political elite that can no longer pretend to respect democracy or any will other than their own.
The Tories don’t care about the GRR legislation, what they care about is that the Scottish Parliament did something without their permission and had the audacity to assert a right that the Westminster elite refuses to recognise, regardless of whether it exists in law or not – and if this Tory party has demonstrated anything, it is that they refuse to recognise legal restraints on their activities. The law is for other people. That is where we are in this union of equals and if there is one thing certain, it is going to get worse.
Such trends are the direct result of the cultish obsession with free-market economics. A core fundamental of the free market is the determination to deregulate all economic activity. Regulations are a cost, and costs must be eliminated. Strikes and protests are costs and therefore must also be eliminated. Thus, economic freedom necessarily entails political and social suppression; political and social freedoms must never be allowed to impact on the economic. As a result, the freedom of the market necessarily requires political centralisation and control to suppress, wherever necessary, any and all attempts at political and social expression that just might disrupt economic activity and profit maximisation. That was the defining motivation of Brexit and is again evidenced by the Tories’ determination to eliminate all vestiges of EU legislation and regulation.
In this they are aided and abetted by Labour. This centralisation and obsession with control produces a mentality in government whereby the only permissible activities are those the economic and political elite agree with, there can be no opposition. Thus, the perceived economic imperatives shape and determine the political and social imperatives and political and social freedoms are determined by the needs of the market, and if your freedom impacts on the freedoms claimed by the economic elite, then the political elite will remove your freedoms as they are barriers and costs to profit maximisation and wealth accumulation.
Such trends also necessitate the militarisation of the police to enforce their control and the complete acceptance by the police of the need to protect the dominant economic elite and their activities, and of that we again have irrefutable evidence. What should ring alarm bells in Scotland is the enthusiasm of the police for, and the indifference of the general electorate in England to, such developments. Make no mistake, all protest will soon be designated terrorism, and a major target for both Westminster parties is the Scottish independence movement. Our window of freedom to determine our own future is getting narrower, and if we don’t act soon, it may well disappear. The Tories have become drunk on power and their ability to do what they want and get away with it.
The Westminster parliament is a failed institution whose fundamental purpose of holding the executive to account has been abandoned and it no longer serves any useful purpose whatever. There is no better together, there is only subjection to a hostile adversary.
Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock
THAT Church of England bishops are once again refusing to allow their priests to marry same-sex couples redefines the ridiculous anachronism that is its established status with associated privileges.
The choice is simple: as a private religious group, the Church of England is absolutely entitled to hold its own esoteric dogma and drive its own obsolescence, but with unelected seats in government, control over one quarter of primary schools in England and the power to solemnise legal marriages, it must recognise state equality legislation.
Neil Barber
Edinburgh Secular Society
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