While We Were Sleeping
The Globo-Marxist elite depict rising populism in the West as a sinister revolution, but they started the revolution first.
It’s the nineties. The Cold War has recently ended. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall is swiftly followed by a war in Iraq, this conflict is over in barely six weeks.
Teenagers and twenty-somethings are feeling the joy of youth and the joy of living in a world that is not under imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. In this world the West can declare war against an aggressive middle-eastern dictator, and win in a couple of months.
The UK recession of 1990-92 is receding in the rearview mirror and there is real optimism in the air. Not the ‘greed is good’ frenzy of the booming eighties, but a sense that we can throw it back to the sixties and seventies, put on our Harrington jackets and bucket hats, our burgundy velvet flares and shiny ties, and still make something good and successful from our lives. The arrival of Brit Pop is announced by Stuart Marconie in April 1993’s Select magazine with its famous cover of Brett Anderson photographed against a Union Jack.
Oasis, Pulp, Blur, and Suede conquer the world. They are not frivolous. They sing in their own regionally-accented voices, about stuff that is uniquely British: woodchip on the wall, having a cup of tea, cleaning the car on a pebbledash driveway. Whether Brit Pop is manufactured by Stuart Maconie in that Select article (which apparently Brett Anderson later denounced as too nationalist) it is real. It is a burst of energy and talent in tens of bands from the Bluetones to Supergrass, Echobelly to The Divine Comedy. We dance in dingy basement clubs. So do they. We get lairy in the town centre on Saturday night. So do they. It is ‘lad culture’ embraced by the ‘ladettes’, Sara Cox, Zoe Ball, Denise van Outen, loud, beery, sometimes obnoxious, always ‘up for a laugh’.
It is a million miles away from Capital City (ITV 1989-90). This movement in pop music and in wider culture is about place, the regions of Britain, people, and creativity, not just Bloomberg tickers, red braces, and clouds of coke. Tousled, cool (Britannia), not polished, not grunge, this is something only Brits can produce.
Then something weird happens. These talented, productive, irreverent twenty-somethings are suddenly drinking G and Ts with a smarmy, forty-something, Oxford-educated barrister, who also happens to be leader of the Labour Party.
They tell us Tony Blair wants to ‘modernise’ Labour. After years in the wilderness it is time to move away from devotion to the idea of nationalising, or re-nationalising everything (the foundational Clause IV) and to show an interest in the middle class, rather than pinning hopes on a shrinking working-class vote.
After the massive PR disasters that were Neil Kinnock (old, ginger, falls into the sea), John Major (old, squeaky-voiced, tucks shirt into grey Y-fronts) Tony Blair, young and almost handsome, if you squint and look sideways, appeals to some. Still it is astonishing to see rebellious, laddish Oasis chatting to square Blair in Number Ten.
Just two years later Noel expresses regret, telling The Observer, “Nothing really changes does it? Same shit, different day. What was it: "We're all middle-class now". I find that really insulting. Being middle-class is just one step closer to topping yourself, if you ask me. It's just the most boring thing I could ever imagine.” Well, quite.
On the wave of optimism in the nineties it is hard to imagine that anything could go badly wrong. At a university in ‘The North’ I know actual young people who are not conservative, but are Conservatives, like me. We can’t remember a time before Maggie. The Conservative election campaign poster of Tony Blair with demon eyes speaks to us. We have an uncomfortable feeling that beneath the broad smile and open-necked shirts there lurks a threat.
The demon-eyed ad is banned. John Major dithers over campaign strategy. Spin doctors (a title we had never heard before) Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, weave a campaign that depicts a ‘New Labour’ that is “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”. This Labour Party accepts capitalism as the sensible economic system but will marry it with social responsibility, sharing and caring.
Post-recession, even capitalists are open to the idea of eradicating ‘boom and bust’, Gordon Brown’s pet fantasy. The children of Maggie cannot imagine anybody would want to go down the path of radical redistribution of wealth, shooting the kulaks.
Labour win with a landslide. Newspapers opine on New Labour’s Third Way, on Public Private Partnerships. Nobody notices that when you combine the state (that’s the socialism part) with private companies (that’s the capitalism part) you get fascism.
Devolution begins. Scotland and Wales get their own parliaments. It is sold to us as more democracy. It guarantees there will almost always be a left-leaning parliament somewhere in the British Isles. New Labour is dismantling Britain.
The Human Rights Act is passed in 1998. Modelled on the European Convention of Human Rights. The collapse of the Soviet Union means that western nations are more amenable to social and economic aspects of ‘human rights’ being incorporated into western notions of ‘human rights’. Article 8 ‘Right to respect for private and family life’ states “There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.[my emphasis]”. That's a lot of caveats.
In 1998 Blair’s government supports US Operation Infinite Reach. America bombs a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, in retaliation for US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. Later it is acknowledged the pharmaceutical factory, producing over half of Sudan’s medicines, was not connected to Al-Qaeda. Perhaps the Sudanese did not have a human right to medicines.
The Bank of England Act 1998 supposedly makes the Bank of England independent of the government and therefore immune to government manipulation. This independence is intended to reassure global markets that might be anxious about the first Labour government in the UK in eighteen years and how it will handle the UK economy. In reality the Bank of England continues to be under the close control of the Treasury, the intention is to diminish blame directed at the government when the economy hits the skids. As it most probably will.
We keep dancing. Pulp lose their mojo. Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit split in 2000. Noel and Meg Matthews split the following year. Sleeper, Bluetones, Supergrass are all still there but they’ve sunk out of sight. We’re listening to Moloko ‘Sing it Back’ and ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)’. Everything’s suddenly got a lot more synthetic. The show is Sex and the City (1998-2004). We’re almost back in the arms of the ‘greed is good’ eighties. No-strings sex, wardrobes full of Manolo Blahniks, but clearly nothing in the fridge to eat. Thin, glamorous, cosmopolitan, drinking a cosmopolitan, reading Cosmopolitan.
Or perhaps Sex and the City is an acknowledgement of our new limitations. We can’t afford to eat and buy Manolos. We need to ‘marry rich’ if we want security, or work ourselves into a nervous-breakdown as a hot-shot lawyer. We have to accept a life of permanent renting, or give up on marriage, children, family altogether.
Just like that, Britishness disappears in a confected metropolitan, polished, glitterball. No British Prime Minister has jetted around the world as much as Blair (enjoy this hissy, 2004 article from The Independent ‘Around the world with Tony Blair’).
International heavy-weight Blair in Kosovo, 1999, frowning down a telephone, blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The attacks of September 11, 2001 result in the 2003 Iraq war. Tony Blair claims poverty, environmental damage, and disease can not be tackled while terrorism remains a threat. He is bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice. Blair meets with troops in Iraq, 2003, with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up.
When did we wake up? Have we woken up?
Blair believes globalisation can work for everyone, he is a liberal imperialist, he believes in ‘progress’. He is a sleeper agent. How right those banned posters were.
Behind the carefully tailored suits, the neatly coiffed hair, the designer glasses of liberal leaders lie the demon eyes of the globo-Marxist elite. They used to think they could command-and-control nations, now they think they can command-and-control the whole world.
By the time Blair has finished with us he has broken apart our country, although many of us do not realise it yet. He hands the reins of the UK over to Gordon Brown in June 2007. Does he know the financial crash is brewing? A recession is already beginning in America that will cause the subprime mortgage crisis and the European recession and ensuing debt crisis.
That crisis will mean all of us will struggle to achieve pre-recession wages. Promotions and bonuses are thin-on-the-ground too. We will all of us be spinning our wheels faster and faster to stay still. GDP in the Eurozone and the UK will stagnate. Many of us will not know it, because it is hidden from us by the media.
I am not qualified to recreate this history for other European countries, I suspect it may be similar: some see Angela Merkel as a socialist infiltrating and changing a hitherto conservative party, the CDU. The state we find ourselves in is at least three, maybe four, decades in the making. Our leaders told us the greatest threats to our safety and freedom were the nuclear power behind the Iron Curtain, and the terrorists in distant lands.
It turns out the greatest threat to our security and our freedom was them.