Gerald Warner: First skirmishes in battle to reassert our nation's freedoms

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

AS REVOLUTIONS go, it was all rather Third Division. The invasion by students of Millbank Tower last Wednesday did not quite equate with the taking of the Bastille: no heads were displayed on pikes and the invaders did not cannibalise their victims, so its anniversary is unlikely to be commemorated by a public holiday, as the glorious event that enthroned violence as the supreme constitutional arbiter in France is celebrated to this day.

To write off this adolescent damp-squib protest as insignificant, however, would be a mistake. Revolutionary events depend upon unique conjunctions of circumstances. In that respect, revolutions resemble the process leading to a nuclear explosion. The modest scale of last week's outbreak was self-evident. Of the 54 arrests, it transpired that ten of those detained were school pupils under 18 years of age. The claim that anarchists infiltrated the protest is credible. Yet the video footage shot on the roof of Millbank seemed to show bona fide students; unlike professional anarchist militants they had not troubled to conceal their faces - an oversight for which they may pay dearly when arraigned before Mr Justice Cocklecarrot.

The Met - the most discredited police force in Western Europe - emerged from the fracas with generous amounts of egg on its face. The Keystone Konstabulary had a bad outing last Wednesday. If you want a Brazilian electrician executed on the Tube, a news vendor fatally felled or middle-class women conducting an orderly pro-hunting protest in Parliament Square battered on the face with metal truncheons, the Met's finest will be up for it. But do not ask them to contain violent demonstrations, since that requires courage, intelligence and professionalism, besides diverting them from their priority tasks of harassing motorists and enforcing the PC Terror.

That was the view of bystanders and Londoners in general. Ten years ago, students behaving badly would have provoked almost universal censure; today, both politicians and the police have forfeited the support of Middle Britain, on which the authority of government and consensual policing depend. The police do not have a friend in the world: their traditional adversaries in the criminal community and on sink housing estates continue to hate them, but they have now been joined in hostility by the middle class, against whom the gendarmerie has waged a war of relentless harassment since the advent of the Blair regime and the politicisation of the police. That is one of the potentially combustible elements exposed by the Millbank episode. It is not a radical attitude: opinion polls show the public overwhelmingly in favour of such once unthinkable developments as forcing the unemployed to work for their benefits. The mood is, if anything, Thatcherite.

Yet it is also bitterly contemptuous of the Tory-led government that is introducing reforms of which it approves, as well as of the opposition. More sleaze last week and the Phil Woolas affair confirmed business as usual in the wake of the expenses scandal. All politicians are regarded, openly and outspokenly, as parasitic scum. That is how our rulers are routinely described in conversation in the proverbial pubs and clubs of Britain.

So, when a Cabinet of millionaires starts to implement policies that lead to people losing their livelihoods and homes, against a descant of bankers' bonuses swelling to ever more fabulous proportions, expect trouble. The plans are to reduce Britain's 143,000 full-time police officers by 28,000. As for the Army, as ultimate back-up, it is overstretched to breaking point and the Northern Irish situation (as forecast by this column, to the outrage of Utopian commentators, at the time of the so-called decommissioning of terrorist arms) is ominously deteriorating.The most serious problem, however, is that the House of Commons has irretrievably lost the support of the populace it governs. Parliamentary government in this country is not fit for purpose. It never has been. Over centuries, MPs have battened on the public, removing the original safety net for the poor by destroying the monasteries, enclosing common land, exploiting every avenue of profit. Since the cross-party conspiracy to abolish hanging in 1965 they have not even pretended to represent the public interest or opinion.

This is dangerous. In melodramatic terms it might be described as a classic pre-revolutionary situation. The irony is that all three main parties have embraced the socially Marxist policies of the Frankfurt School. Middle Britain is not capable of diagnosing this phenomenon, but it knows something is wrong, that freedom of speech is no more and that government is in its face all day, every day. The departure of Obama is the likely trigger for a reaction here. There will have to be a far-reaching reconfiguration of the system of governance: freedom is too important to be sacrificed to parliamentary democracy.