The slow death of British democracy is upon us. By Frederick Forsyth IT’S a strange brute, the British press and I should know; I have been in it or around it for more than 50 years. When I came down from the provinces as a cub looking for work the entire trade/industry/profession (call it as you will) was grouped in or around one single street that gave it its name – Fleet Street. That had a consequence. Journos old and young, cubs and veterans, young hopefuls and old sweats, those of Left and Right, papers “of record” and tabloids, all frequented the same bars and haunts – El Vino’s, the Golf Club, the Cheshire Cheese. So the cross-pollination of ideas and viewpoints was constant. Mood swings caught on like contagion. Today there is no proximity. The newspapers and thus the journalists are scattered all over London. So when do they ever meet and discuss current events over a pint? Very seldom, is the answer. The “special subject” correspondents see each other at the briefings, press conferences, Parliament and the Law Courts but that’s about it. And my point? That when just about all our papers start saying much the same thing, right across the spectrum of political thought, without prompting from their colleagues on other papers, there is something in the wind. There has to be. And the whole media seems to be saying this; our age-old democracy seems to be slowly dying. No crash, no revolution, just the sense of a slow, remorseless erosion of the freedoms we used to have, the relation between voter and tribune, between citizen and official-dom, between taxpayer and authority. Labour nostalgia tells us we used to have a ruling class and now we don’t. Yes we do. You can read it in every diktat from Town Hall, every instruction from one of a thousand quangos, every order from on high. Anonymous, uncontactable, never to take your call, but above you. So what about those we elect? That is my point. They have chickened out on us; sold the pass; weak, helpless smiles. Go away, leave me alone. And the timeline? I would say about the past 20 years and getting steadily worse. Any reason why? Of course it could be just coincidence but when two things happen completely simultaneously is it really just by chance? Twenty years is one hell of a long accident. So… the connection? The supplanting of the elected delegate by the bureaucrat is exactly simultaneous with the full effects of the Treaty of Maastricht which transformed the Common Market which we had been told was as far as it would ever go and which we endorsed in 1975, into the full-fledged European Union. And that meant the supremacy of the eurocrat/ bureaucrat over all our lives. We know the entire Brussels machine is not run by the elected but by behind-closed-doors Eurocrats, lavishly overpaid, massively powerful, wholly unchallengeable. Many millions of us British, not racist to the slightest degree, just want our country back. Not from Polish builders, not from the nice Czech waitress on the corner, not from Mr Patel at the newsagent. We want control, real control, of our country back from Brussels. Our politicians parade, prance, posture and pontificate but if they do not give us our country back they may within 12 months discover exactly the inside decor of a Jobcentre.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 20:29:03 +0000
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