The Death of British Patriotism
In a few days Britain goes to the polls, again, and there is a very real chance that Boris Johnson will gain a majority, on the votes of a minority of the voting public. Why? What is it that he has done, or said, or promised, that makes so many of us share his dream for the country? We are told he is a man who paints an exciting picture of our future, that his charm, his eloquent public speaking, his persona, his confidence will win us through. But where do you see it?
Is it in the Conservative manifesto? What is the vision there you find exciting? Where’s the philosophy, the ideology, the motivation that gets you so fired up for the future of the United Kingdom and the shape it will take? Where’s the hope for a better country? The main policy proposals are Brexit, £2Bn for fixing potholes — a fifth of what is needed for an exhilarating proposal to fix roads — and half that for childcare. Is that why you’re voting for them?
Perhaps, indeed, you enjoy being told that the NHS is not for sale, over and over, to your face — and the Prime Minister does sound so confident, and truthful, and straightforward when he says it. Did it still feel like honest straight-shooting when you learned that privatisation escalates year after year, eating into billions of pounds of taxpayer money, costing the NHS an additional £4.5Bn every year in extra waste? Did it feel honest when you learned that in fact the NHS was not off the table in negotiations with the US? Did it feel honest when you learned that the Conservative Government has already sold your personal data, from your very own GP’s surgery, to American pharmaceutical companies without telling you? This data is absurdly valuable, and the amount paid a pittance, and you did not get a choice in the matter or receive a penny of it anyway. Perhaps that makes you feel like a rugged, independent individual, and in control of your personal sovereignty. Perhaps it makes you feel Britain is strong, and Boris’ vision is for us to go our own way, free of shackles.
Does it make you feel self-sufficient and mighty to see your most personal healthcare data given away — not even sold — to Amazon? Are you going to vote for Boris Johnson believing that your children’s most intimate information should have been forever compromised in a deal that was supposed to be about Alexa, of all things? We cannot now vote to take that information back, to hide it away again. It’s out there, now; we’re told it’s anonymised, laughably. But perhaps you are proud your most intimate information and that of your family is up for grabs to any company willing to buy it for pennies, and perhaps you can explain to your family why you are so proud of what are definitely crack negotiations by very clever, patriotic people.
Did it fill your breast with patriotic pride to see a child with pneumonia on a hospital floor, covered in coats, in one of our now perpetually at-crisis NHS hospitals?
We boast we are the fifth richest country. Does this make us look rich to you? Does it make you feel like all of that money in the nation is improving the country in any way? Do you think it makes us look powerful?
Do you think the German people see this, or the pictures of dozens of trolleys in corridors, or ambulances sat waiting with languishing patients, and then fear our strength and bombast? Do you think the public of Spain, or Portugal, or France would tolerate their healthcare systems being so deliberately underfunded for so long? Would they be content with the devastating effect it is having on so many of us, on our grandparents, our parents, our kids? Do you think it’s a good advert for British culture and British values that it is now quite normal for us to wait for four hours — four hours! — to see anyone in A&E? The people of other nations can and do read our newspapers, you know. Are our neighbours, or allies, or competitors, impressed or cowed to discover that we allowed 5000 additional people to die wallowing in filth, waiting for treatment in A&E? Do you think the stratagem of pretending migrants are to blame for this underfunding is going to convince nations with much higher rates of immigration, nations which choose to use the extra money migration brings to just fund their health service, while we divert the extra cash to foreign multinational companies and soaring national debt?
Do you think Austrians see this and tremble at the thought of British exceptionalism? Do you think America, or New Zealand, or Japan, or Canada will be so intimidated by such a demonstration of our raw majesty that they will offer a trade deal of equals, out of sheer respect, rather than band together as they already have, to exploit our weakness and impose the deals they choose? Look how sovereign we are already becoming. Look how in control. Is humiliation after humiliation what you voted for?
Is Boris Johnson making you sing Rule, Britannia yet? Are Britons uniquely undeserving of decent, well-funded healthcare, out of the constellation of rich nations — America excepted — which just decide to have it? Are we going to pretend all of these other nations don’t exist, and that it is impossible to have a well-run, well-funded, modern healthcare system? Are you so apathetic about Britain that you will accept this nonsense that it is a country with no money, that it must have dreadful trains, declining healthcare, crumbling roads, schools that are literally collapsing, soaring poverty, soaring homelessness, rising crime?
What is it, exactly, about Britain that you love? What do you think it means to vote to tear Britain’s heart out from it and then fly its flag and then loudly pretend that makes you a patriot? What is it that makes you proud? Is it the fact that for the first time in post-war British history working no longer cures poverty, and most people using food banks work? Perhaps you feel we’ve effectively countered the cultural hegemony of America by outnumbering McDonald’s franchises with food banks? Is it the fact that austerity has been about forcing ordinary Brits to make enormous sacrifices, while the very richest in our society make even more money, with no improvement for our country or her people?
Did it make you proud of who you were voting for to hear one of the women raped by Joseph McCann, released by a probation error in our overtaxed prison system, had to pay for her own therapy because the alternative was to wait for 8 months to see a therapist on the NHS?
Does it make you feel smart when the Prime Minister tells you, and it’s you he’s telling, that he intends to build 40 new hospitals, despite you and him knowing it is untrue? Do you feel noble and dignified to be so ridiculed to your face? Do you think you’re as stupid as he believes you are? When you watch a video clip of Boris Johnson refusing to discuss Jack Williment-Barr, when you see him refuse to look at the photograph of him lying under coats on the floor, when you see him angrily take and hide a phone from a reporter who is asking what kind of government could allow a child to be forced onto the floor because it has spent a decade refusing to fund basic healthcare needs, do you see a brave, principled man who cares for you, your kids, Britain or the NHS? Do you think the political party which chucked Jack and many tens of thousands of people on the floor, or the Prime Minister who is too cowardly to even look at his face, is going to help him?
Are the Conservatives going to help you or your family out? Is Boris on your side?
Do you think it’s someone else he’s intending to trick, that he’s a cunning guy getting one over the media?
Or do you think, perhaps, it’s you he’s tricking?
Oh, but of course it’s not you being conned, is it? You haven’t fallen for his games because you’re too bright and see right through Boris. He’s basically a mate doing and saying what you want to do and say anyway, he’s just bamboozling the lying media and left wing drones. Although you’re still voting for him. Indeed, you enjoy the spectacle of Boris running away from difficult interviews, of hiding from scrutiny, of him confidently lying to journalists and getting away with it, and you’re duped — persuaded — into voting for him because you’re in on the con. And you are in on the con, aren’t you? You’re voting for him because you’re in on it, unlike those poor useful idiots who don’t fall for his lies and then don’t vote for him. Sure you don’t know what a confidence trick is, but you trust him to get Brexit done, he’s told you he will, a lot, like he’s told you several times before, and those times were lies but this one isn’t. It’s everyone else he’s fooling. You always wanted a border down the Irish Sea. And the social care, quality of public services, expectation of home ownership and NHS that you grew up with are impossible for your kids, for economic arguments that economists universally disagree with but a politician told you were true. Trust the politician, instead. It takes a bright person to trust a politician. Whose con you’re aware of.
Does his lying to your face and making you look absurd make you feel intelligent? Does it make you feel that as Johnson wins, you’re winning?
When Boris Johnson, or Priti Patel, or any of the other Ministers — except for the specific scandals each one has caused, they’re interchangeable— describe how cruelly they are going to treat prisoners, does it make you feel safer? When they tell you they’re going to cut costs by electronically tagging prisoners, and slash funds to courts and police and legal aid and lawyers, does it make you think they are clever, and to be taken seriously, and seem prudent?
At least Boris and the Conservatives are tough on crime. You know this is true because they tell you, and they use really bad words for inmates, which is the same as reducing crime, or fighting it competently. The Conservatives promised you they would create a rough new bail regime, one which robbed prisoners of their rights, and you felt it served them right. Perhaps it made you feel more secure, that you were being ruthless and manful and sensible by cracking down on criminals, because punishment is what justice is.
Did it make you feel safer when you learned that, as a result, at least 93,000 violent criminals have been released over the past few years without any kind of scrutiny? Because the new bail regime was so expensive, and the cuts to police resources caused by austerity were so severe, that this bail regime was completely nonviable: it was just words. So police have had to let such people go under RUIs. And such people have raped and beaten and killed while released. Perhaps you voted to give up and just release tens of thousands of sex offenders and thugs to save a few quid. After all, we don’t want to bankrupt the country.
Perhaps this makes you feel tough and pragmatic?
Or perhaps imposing tough new laws is meaningless when you’ve no interest in providing money or resources to make them work, and they’re shit ideas anyway.
Boris Johnson has vowed to replace 20,000 of the 23,500 police that he supported scrapping. He perversely declares this is an increase in numbers; do you think it’s someone other than you he’s fooling? He has made no proposals to dramatically increase funding for our already far beyond-capacity court and prison system, meaning the fundamental problem that there is nowhere to put suspects and inmates persists, and the idea of a fair trial is an anachronism. The Conservatives have, on the plus side, already started to scrap their own privatisation of the once-incredibly efficient and effective probation service, privatisation which cost £500m, failed, saw victims at risk, recidivism soar and mass staff shortages.
Does it make you proud that every single domestic Conservative policy you agree with is when they start to roll back their own considerable mistakes? Does it make you proud that you’re voting for a party that has so absurdly undermined the security of the nation for nine years, and is now promising to undo a portion of that damage? Johnson does not mention that the Conservative tagging programme has seen most people violate their curfew. He does not mention that austerity cuts have seen violent crime rise again, after a decade of successful community policing as championed by experts, the police, Lib Dems and Labour. He does not mention that he has lied to you that his promise to toughen sentences would have had any effect on released terrorist Usman Khan — in reality his manifesto and proposals have literally nothing to say on the matter, and he ignored warnings made personally to him about precisely this outcome before the attack, deciding austerity was more important than detaining dangerous terrorists. Is that security? Is that cracking down on crime? Is it someone else other than you he’s fooling?
The story of today’s justice system is of courts, prisons and police departments devastated by cuts, and desperate, myopic, tough-sounding, headline-grabbing changes to sentencing with devastating accidental consequences that were foreseen by experts, indeed were mistakes made 40 years ago, but which Conservative politicians repeated anyway. Austerity detains the innocent and releases the guilty. Perhaps such mass incompetence seems sensible to you. Perhaps responding to the difficulties of dealing with crime by bumbling around in the dark ignoring everyone who knows what they are talking about seems like common sense to you.
Why should suspects get access to legal aid, anyway? When you see headlines that tens of thousands of pounds are being spent defending suspects accused of serious violent or sexual crimes, doesn’t that just boil your blood? Of course they never receive a penny of that money personally — the lawyers defending them do, and it often works out that they are being paid below minimum wage — but how outrageous that such money is spent on such scumbags. Of course, legal aid and basic regulations have been cut for all of us, and that outrage may seem like little succour for your kid when they realise there’s literally nothing they can do to force a landlord to sort out our increasingly expensive, bedbug and rat-infested, mouldy, overcrowded homes, because a law that you can’t afford to enforce is meaningless. Like the laws which govern fireproof cladding, which, years after Grenfell revealed the scale at which they had been illegally installed, and the danger they pose to the life and property of ordinary Brits, destroyed the homes and properties of students in Bolton.
But perhaps you agree with the fundamental Conservative economic argument: your children should have been born to richer parents. Perhaps that would make them more proud of you and the country you’re voting for. Because they aren’t proud of you or the country now.
And you can’t give them a reason they should be.
You know you’re being lied to when Johnson declares that we will get Brexit done in January, so you’re definitely not voting for that — you know, already, that this merely begins the next, much more difficult stage of negotiations. Johnson has claimed that, having got Brexit done in October 2019, he will fulfil his promise to get Brexit done in January 2020, and then we will get Brexit done again, no ifs or buts, in December 2020. Do you believe any of these assurances? Is it someone else other than you he’s fooling?
In January we scrap 750 treaties with over 160 nations, and Brexit continues. Getting the next stage of Brexit negotiations done by December has been declared absurd, near-impossible by trade experts, and Johnson’s Government has quietly agreed, acknowledging that there simply aren’t the resources or the know-how to complete the next stage of Brexit within 11 months. And after that step is complete, if it is completed, begins the attempt to recreate the deals we already had with the rest of the world but which you’re voting to end this January. Then, that swashbuckling image of an unleashed potential can begin, although Johnson remains fundamentally incapable of describing what shape it could possibly take. This unknown point in the future is when Boris will get Brexit done, do or die. He promises. He would rather die in a ditch.
Perhaps that’s what you voted for — years more of Brexit negotiations, followed by years more of trying to recreate the trade deals we already have, then the trade negotiations that were apparently the entire point of Brexit and that not a single Brexiter has described or is capable of describing, because it’s a load of bollocks and we all know it. And the entire time we’re at our weakest point since World War 2. Does that fill you with pride, to know we will be at the nadir of our strategic relevance and economic strength in modern history? Does that make you excited, hopeful? Is that your vision for the country?
What else could you be voting for? What Brexit is getting done? When will it get done? Do you even still bother pretending that Brexit could possibly improve us in any way, will make us richer, will make your family richer, will make the UK more in control, more vibrant, more powerful? Boris Johnson doesn’t, he keeps telling you he just wants it out of the way because Brexit is holding us back, so it’s not even him fooling you anymore.
For three years the UK has skirted recession, our wages have plateaued lower than they were a decade ago; as most of the world has boomed, Britain has staggered with self-inflicted wounds, and austerity and Brexit combined have sent our national debt skyrocketing to 86% of GDP and collapsed our credit rating. It’s hard to see how the most profligate Labour Government — and Corbyn’s Labour isn’t even particularly ambitious — could bankrupt us more than 9 years of Tory rule already has. Is it the unearned reputation for business acumen or fiscal literacy, that you know is untrue but you like seeing in newspapers run by personal friends of Johnson, that you’re voting for?
Johnson’s administration is, slowly and inexorably, accepting what every trade expert was already telling us — this is a mammoth task; years, decades more of Brexit is left to go. Will you continue to loyally turn over the channel when the news comes on, because Brexit is going so horribly wrong, because Brexit keeps being blamed by experts for the horrible destruction it is wreaking on our economy, our jobs, our industries, and you don’t want to hear any more of our slow decline? Is ignoring the effects of what you voted for what patriotism is?
Will you continue to hope that once Brexit gets done you can get on to more important things, like schools and hospitals and police and keeping terrorism suspects in gaol? How long are you happy waiting to bother having a Government again? Perhaps you find Brexit news more exciting than I do. Perhaps your business profits from this uncertainty.
Perhaps it’s the deal that excites you. Theresa May’s deal wasn’t a real Brexit — a backstop that only ends when alternative arrangements to a customs border bisecting Northern and Southern Ireland are agreed? Disgraceful. Unacceptable. No, much better is Johnson’s deal — a permanent backstop that bisects Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. This is patriotic if you’re Irish and Republican, I suppose. Perhaps you enjoy seeing Brits get theirs, finally.
Do you think EU negotiators waited until Johnson left the room before laughing, or did they just laugh in Johnson’s face? Do you believe he felt any sadness whatsoever for this terrible betrayal of his nation, or do you think he looked forward to literally any new deal at all because of what it would mean for his career? Johnson’s Brexit deal has placed a united Ireland on the horizon, and with it the end of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
We’re so bored of Brexit and sick of how bad it’s proving to be we can barely even be bothered to talk about this enormous humiliation. We were lied to the entire time that there was an alternative to the backstop, that technology could solve the issue. We ended up just tossing a chunk of our country at the EU while crying about how powerful Southern Ireland is compared to Brexit Britain. Is the blood of those who died or were wounded fighting in Northern Ireland too dry for us to give a toss? Is the blood of the innocents killed or murdered in the Troubles too much of a distant memory for Northern Ireland to matter anymore? It was only a couple of weeks ago that we wore poppies commemorating those sacrifices, and that our newspapers shouted at those who did not wear them. You may have gone to a service where you were reminded why it was so important not to forget what was given up by so many, and the innate value in seeking alternatives to conflict. Then, when you went home, you may have listened to a few seconds of the news on the radio before switching it off again in disgust. Too much of this Brexit stuff.
Was it the phrase ‘Get Brexit done’ which helped you decide to betray the Union? Is that hollow slogan more important to you than the peace and security of the Good Friday Agreement, or the unity of the UK? What greater capitulation could stir you to care? Boris giving the Falklands and the NHS to America for our first post-Brexit trade deal? Because most — the overwhelmingly majority — of Brexit supporters are happy losing Scotland if that’s the price they must pay. It very much seems like it will be one of the many prices we pay for Brexit. Does it still elicit a twinge, or are you one of those who look forward to losing a large, vital, exciting and culturally rich part of the nation?
Nationalists are not patriots, and both Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and his Brexit are fundamentally nationalist, anti-British projects. The Conservative Party’s main successes are killing hundreds of thousands of British people with austerity, redistributing the money you earn away from you and turning us into an international laughing stock. They are now led by a man whose main talent is waddling around with his trousers around his ankles, throwing your money after women in the hope of a shag.
The fervour with which a large minority of the country fights for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson is not borne of love of country. To continue to fight for them is to be persuaded by the extraordinarily rich owners of our newspapers, who also spend ridiculous amounts of money creating weird, racist, conspiracy theory Facebook groups, that the colour of our rosette and a bit of cruelty is more a fundamental part of our identity than our values, beliefs, our country and our friends. It’s to give up any hope for a better UK, to abandon building the UK in any way, to shrug at the idea of creating a better life for the next generation. Is this country we have right now, where kids lie on the floor of hospitals, all the aspiration you have for us as a nation? Hand on heart, truly, have you accepted the demeaning lie that we must live like this? That we must watch people die in the street and in hospital corridors, that we must deport people to countries they have never known?
If you love racism, boasting and cruelty more than you love your country or your family there is not a great deal that can be done to rescue you bar some intervention by a concerned loved one. If you can continue to support Boris Johnson then you do not deserve to be forgiven by your country or by your children, and you will likely join the millions of people who will one day learn to lie about how you vote on Thursday, and three years ago, so ashamed will you be by what you unleashed. Why do that to yourself, or to your kids?
But whatever happens in a few days a large minority of this country does not care about the UK, and will vote accordingly. And it’s horrifying that only a slim majority of us do care, and it’s horrifying that the nation is set up in such a way that a slim majority may not be enough to stop 100% of political power being given to the worst 1% of us. But can you look at yourself, can you look your own children in the face, if you don’t try?
