Hated Blair and his chaotic government will come undone

POLITICIANS are trash. Even this column must occasionally voice a non-contentious opinion. For if there is one sentiment that commands nationwide consensus and is incapable of provoking controversy in the most argumentative public bar, it is the loathing and contempt for the political class that now pervades Britain. This universal alienation is unprecedented. It portends the next evolutionary change in our political history - the demise of the parliamentary system.

This is likely to be consummated in the course of the next decade, having been greatly accelerated by the advent of the poisonous phenomenon of New Labour. No man has done more to subvert British parliamentary democracy than Tony Blair: that is how he will be remembered in history. The long-term cause of the decline of our parliamentary institutions is the swamping of Westminster’s green benches with the moral detritus of the nation. The immediate occasion of Britain unshackling itself from the bonds of elected dictatorship is likely to be last week’s vote in the House of Commons to ban hunting.

Remember, you read it here first - two years ago - and the assertion is repeated today: hunting is Blairism’s poll tax. The Labour Party’s purblind ignorance of all rural matters and its aggressive, two-nation contempt for the culture of country people have lured it into a confrontation that will leave government and parliament bereft of authority.

In Scotland, the cack-handed legislation "banning" fox-hunting is still being tested in the courts, as a preliminary to an appeal in Europe. The 27 Scottish Labour MPs who voted against hunting in England, although this is a devolved matter over which English MPs have no say in Scotland, imposed precisely the kind of democratic deficit upon England’s rural electorate that was so vociferously denounced in Scotland during the debate on devolution. Here was the West Lothian Question rampant. In tandem with the appointment of John Reid as Health Secretary for England and Wales, it was a provocation that can only damage the Union by fuelling the animus against "Jocks" south of the Border and increasing hostility to the Barnett Formula.

Last week’s demented scenes in the Mother of Parliaments provided a potent case for its consignment to the dustbin of history. While the armed services were preparing to fly back the bodies of six of their comrades killed in Iraq, what were the moral bankrupts who had sent them to their deaths doing? They were howling like hyenas about "toffs" in red coats, venting their spleen against the most marginalised part of the nation, their fellow countrymen in rural areas. At times their ignorance degenerated into self-parody. "Remember the miners!" was one of the class-war slogans bawled from the Labour benches. In Wales, the most aggressive pro-hunting activists, who are preparing to defy a ban, by force if necessary, are ex-miners.

Yet the cretinous conduct of the Labour backbenchers paled into insignificance when compared with the behaviour of the government. The Prime Minister was too cowardly to visit the chamber while rebels wrecked his legislation. No fewer than 65 members of the Government, including the deputy chief whip and 12 of his colleagues, voted for the total ban they were supposed to prevent. What was going on? A typical exercise in futile, transparent deceit by the Great Charlatan, is the answer.

Pressured by Madame Ceausescu, with her Scouse chip against "toffs" - not to mention more than 1m in donations from the anti-hunting lobby - Blair wants a ban; but he does not want to take responsibility for it. Cowardice has been the leitmotif of his political career. The Westminster on dit is that the anarchy in the lobbies last week resulted from a last-minute deal done in exchange for backbenchers’ support of foundation hospitals. Thus are key issues of public interest bartered in the New Labour souk. It is a notorious characteristic of this dysfunctional government that, when in trouble, it conjures up red herrings, only to discover that the distraction created as an expedient is much more dangerous than the original problem.

Country people made one fatal mistake: on the day that Tony Martin was jailed, they should have marched on the prison where he was held, torn it down brick by brick and pledged that their response to the next provocation would be to treat 10 Downing Street in the same fashion. When rural Britain first encountered Anthony Lynton Blair, its reaction was that it had seen more pleasant objects littering the byre during an epidemic of bovine dysentery. Its second impression was less favourable. Blair is hated as no prime minister has been before, across so wide a constituency.

In England and Wales, hunts are numbered in hundreds, unlike Scotland’s isolated 10. They are the social and cultural core of rural life and their supporters run into seven figures. It is just conceivable that Blair might have managed to enforce a ban on hunting in England and Wales during the first 18 months of his rgime; but not now, when both his tainted character and government are repugnant to the nation. Rural resolve is rock solid. If the police are sent in force into rural areas to arrest hunt supporters, it will be the first time the diced-capped heroes have been seen in the countryside since the reign of George VI. Houses have been burgled, men assaulted and women raped while the forces of law and order were conspicuously AWOL.

The provocation even to urban opinion of police resources deployed, month after month, against a synthetically criminalised community would be intolerable. It would also coincide with the run-up to a general election. Led by the philosopher Roger Scruton, thousands have already signed a pledge to go to prison in defiance of any anti-hunting law. They are not bluffing. It is easier to provoke mayhem than to stop it. If the government goes ahead, it will end the consensus on which democracy depends.

Yet that might be no bad thing: it could accelerate a process that already looks inevitable - the British people turning their backs on the discredited talking shops at Westminster and elsewhere that have now betrayed all their legitimate expectations, not least of law and order. Subsidiarity could turn out to mean something very different from what MPs and Eurocrats intended - self-policing rural and even urban communities, for example.

There is more to constitutional change than the Great Charlatan scribbling on the back of an envelope. Parliamentary pseudo-government is doomed, just like feudalism and absolute monarchy before it. Charles I could not see it coming: neither can Blair. Yet come it will, even if its precise character cannot be predicted. As a former lefty, Blair should be familiar with the maxim of that other great charlatan, Herbert Marcuse: "Out of chaos, something will arise."