19A045 Government vs. People by Jim Davies, 11/5/2019    

October 31st - last Thursday - was the quit-or-bust, final, definite date for the UK to secede from the EU, according to its new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, aka BoJo, which his adversaries slur to "bozo." The date was 40 months after the 2016 Referendum clearly showed that the people wanted out. Forty months of prevaracation and procedural delays by the large Parliamentary majority that doesn't want to leave the EU at all.

It didn't happen.

Members of Parliament (MPs) including a majority of his own Conservative Party, had voted to forbid him to "crash" the country out on that day without either negotiating a deal with the EU of which they approved, or else requesting a delay to the deadline. He did get a deal, but MPs didn't like it, and the EU graciously allowed a further extension; fancy that. Delay and delay, hence deny. Bojo tried his best, but was hog-tied.

Last week, MPs did agree to hold an election, on December 12th. Whether that will change anything with regard to Brexit I don't know; I do hear that voters are fed to the teeth with all the delay and want it over and done with, so it could be that they will elect many more candidates who favor leaving the EU. A new Party is in play (the Brexit Party) but with few resources; we shall know in a few weeks. But if the result still produces a House opposed to Brexit, nothing will have been gained. The people will still want to quit, while the ruling class will still want to stay; the deadlock will remain.

For now at least and quite possibly then, government opposes the people.

This presents a remarkable opportunity for anarcho-libertarians in the UK to shout to the rafters that "democracy" is a fraud, that the people do not rule at all - that the rulers rule. Such is always the case, but in this "democratic" era the fact has been cleverly disguised with that fiction; and right now in the UK, the fiction stands completely exposed. Democracy is bogus; the mask has slipped.

Trouble is, in the UK the Libertarian Party has attracted even fewer votes than in the US; less than 0.5%. There are good people there, but they opted until 2008 to work within other parties, like UKIP and the Conservatives, a bit like the Lib-Rep caucus here. They did have a useful influence in the Thatcher governments. Apart from the LPUK, I know of no forthright anarchist influence that could take advantage of the extraordinary circumstances now prevailing.

A couple of things do puzzle me about this tiresome saga. One: why does the ruling class - the MPs - so strongly favor remaining in the EU? All politics is about power, and if Britain remains in the Union power will inevitably shift from London to Brussels and Strasbourg, so they will have less of it. So it makes no sense... unless something else is going on under the surface, not visible to the public and not reported in the media. Now, wouldn't that be a surprise?

And two: why would EU members be so ready to let the UK leave the Union, as they have apparently been until this recent extension of the deadline? That too seems to make no sense, for when the UK has left it seems very likely to me that other members too will follow it out of the EU because popular dissatisfaction with central rule is spread quite wide. So might it be that EU spokesmen are only pretending indifference to the UK's departure?  Oh, say it ain't so!

For now, those remain unanswered and what matters most is to take as much advantage of this opportunity as possible, and once again it has been made very clear indeed that such can be done not by political action but by one-to-one re-education. For example TOLFA is available worldwide, and it's in English so can be used readily in the UK. If you know people there, please tell them its URL.