Gerald Warner: Three-horse race to a supranational nightmare

CHOICE is a luxury that is no longer on offer to British voters. The identical programmes of the three main political parties have effectively created a one-party state. It is the great irony of this general election that the expansion of the traditional two-horse race into a three-horse contest has brought not the slightest philosophical broadening of the electoral landscape.

It would be more accurate to say that Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats share a homogenous culture. It is possible to detect slight differences in their respective agendas – the Liberal Democrats' dissent from the Iraq War would be one instance – but these are purely tactical variations in the implementation of a common political culture that Gordon Brown once described as "the Progressive Consensus". When the advent of David Cameron as Conservative leader absorbed even the Tory Party into that consensus, multi-party democracy became history.

This did not simply happen: it was engineered. Nor is it a British phenomenon; if anything, Britain is a latecomer to a post-democratic political system that is propagated by the European Union as well as, at global level, by the United Nations. It is a necessary precursor to world government, the ultimate objective of the Progressive Consensus. Before attempting to understand what is happening at national level, we need to recognise the bigger picture, the context in which our own helotry is being engineered.

That picture is darkly dystopian. The EU project is a distorted attempt to recreate the unity of Christendom, but in the interests of the most fanatically anti-Christian agenda of which one could conceive: that of the Frankfurt School of Marxism. Economic Marxism is now the province of historians; cultural Marxism is carrying all before it. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked only the collapse of a failed model of state socialism. The rise of the European Union signals the resurgence of cultural Marxism, untrammelled by the need for Five Year Plans and regarding plutocracy as perfectly congenial.

Let the capitalists create wealth, is the new philosophy, so long as the state, through punitive taxation, is the largest beneficiary and dictates the mores of corporations, communities and individuals. The characteristics of cultural Marxism are materialism, statism, militant atheism, sexual nihilism, cultural shallowness and the sedulously fostered illusion of popular autonomy within what is actually a totalitarian system.

Its enemies are religion, the family, authentic as distinct from synthetic communities, tradition, national identity and homogenous culture. In recent decades the forces of cultural Marxism, spearheaded by the EU, have launched a ferocious attack upon all those unsympathetic institutions, increasingly employing legal coercion.

When the baffled voter looks at the three mainstream political parties and wonders why he cannot identify with any of them, his choice has been removed by supranational forces. He is alarmed by immigration and, so widespread is that concern, the snake-oil salesmen have adopted a cosmetic pretence of responding. Dave is babbling about an unspecified "cap", Gordon pretends immigration is diminishing and Clegg wants to amnesty illegals.

None of that comes near meeting public concern. How is it that, in a cut-throat election contest, all three parties dare to defy the electorate? By consensus is the answer: so long as nobody breaks ranks, they can laugh at the mug punters, as they have done since the cross-party consensus was first formed in 1965 to abolish the death penalty against the will of the nation.

All three parties support the futile war in Afghanistan, which the public opposes; polls now show a majority of Britons wants to leave the EU, but none of the three parties would accord the promised referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, let alone an In/Out plebiscite. Every PC "hate law" and other oppressive measure enjoys tripartite support, since it is political and social death, within the bubble inhabited by the elite, to dissent from PC dogma.

It may not be possible to hold that line indefinitely. In this election the Liberal Democrats, who epitomise the PC consensus to the point of caricature, have irrationally become the conduit of electoral protest. That mistake will not be repeated. On Friday the BNP – the party that represents the antithesis of the PC consensus – published its manifesto. Its headline policies are: an end to immigration, withdrawal from Afghanistan and Britain's exit from the European Union. If the main parties cannot see the writing on the wall they will have only themselves to blame.