Who cares if Downing Street staff held a Christmas Party? They hold one every year don’t they? Why should they stop because bad things are happening, when they always are?
Let’s reflect, most young people go through a stage of reacting against the outlooks and values they inherited from their parents. This is often described as “rebellion”, but in fact it is nothing of the sort – people are working out for themselves which of the things they have always had to accept, without question, are actually correct, or relevant or useful to them, just as their parents once did.
The process follows a familiar pattern. Young people set themselves against this or that which they no longer believe in. Eventually they either return to it, having discovered the meaning of it, or replace it with something else they feel is better, or at least more convenient, after many false starts.
In time, these behaviours become simple acts of living they no longer think too much about, like walking or breathing. They become part of who the person is, for good or ill, and are passed on to the next generation, often without their bearers even thinking about it.
One of the earliest stages in this developmental process is to adopt a form of anarchism. How often do we hear about “freedom fighters”, which are breaking the rules of social, moral or political conduct to “liberate” people from the shackles of what they know?
However the way they liberate people is always the same – to impose, or slavishly follow, even stricter rules. Often these become an addiction – people cannot survive without proving their loyalty to the teaching, because they don’t have the internal resources to rely on their own judgments, learning and developing as they are.
This is the cross people in a secularised society, full of competing ideologies, must bear. It is also a cross most countries have had to bear from time to time. Why do we accept monarchy, and not become a republic? Now we’re independent, why do we do this or that we did in colonial times? If we have new friends, do we have to have the same old enemies?
Such periods of any country’s history are seen as transitional – when it was trying to find its way from a failed past to a more successful future. But if any place is going through that now, it is one of the oldest, most prestigious and most successful democracies on earth – the United Kingdom.
In many ways this is long overdue. The UK’s sense of self still derives from the days of empire – the UK is the standard, everything which differs from that standard has something wrong with it. It also shares one of the symptoms of post-empire syndrome with many other countries – it is very difficult for it to distinguish between what is good because it has intrinsic value, and what is good because it is British, or understand that these are two different things.
But the UK is going through a teenage rebellion of the most extreme kind. A significant chunk of its population has accepted the idea that the rules they have inherited have no value, because they are foreign impositions made by a foreign generation. In disgusting numbers, even though only a minority, they voted for Brexit to kick out foreign influence, and for Boris Johnson to kick out the civilized world, with the mantra of “if someone is telling you what to do, whatever they are saying must be bad”.
It is taking the UK a very long time to realise what is really going on. As in every other case, the rules are being replaced by even stricter rules which benefit no one but those who make them. The freedom fighters are there to oppress you to line their pockets, and get away with it by saying they are one of you, and making you feel you are one of them.
Maybe, just maybe, the latest BoJo regime nonsense will persuade more people that they’ve been had. As yet, they haven’t found the resources to escape, as they can’t trust themselves to develop, or vote for, anything better. But when they do, the latest revelations will go down in history as amongst the alarm bells which belatedly started ringing.
Party of the First Part
On 18th December 2020 the UK was in the middle of a severe lockdown. People weren’t allowed to gather in groups, or travel, or keep their jobs or businesses. In many cases they saw relatives die of Covid, and were unable to attend funerals or take care of those they left behind, because these measures were necessary to combat the pandemic.
The Prime Minister made these regulations, and also made his chosen friends a lot of profit by giving them Covid-related contracts without tender or oversight. So obviously his staff at Downing Street would be the first to abide by these regulations, to set a good example to the rest of the country and encourage compliance.
Apparently not
When no one else was allowed to have one, Downing Street staff held a party, in defiance of the rules. To begin with, the Prime Minister’s office acknowledged that some sort of event had taken place, although apparently without BoJo. This party had “followed the social distancing requirements”, even though the mere fact it had been held was a breach of them.
Then, when no one believed this story, the same office insisted the party hadn’t taken place at all. However it was so keen to prove this point that it said that the party which hadn’t taken place had still been socially distanced. Why, one might ask?
As ever, BoJo and his clowns had two explanations. Firstly, BoJo had delivered Brexit, and that made him the greatest figure in human history, whose integrity could never be questioned by people who had imposed rules – meaning other rules – on a disgruntled population.
Second, if BoJo said it, despite his track record, it must be true. If people claim he is lying, they are expecting him to follow those foreign rules. He doesn’t have to do this because he makes the rules now. Truth and untruth no longer exist, only following or being punished by BoJo.
Then the UK discovered truth did exist after all. First a video emerged of BoJo’s press spokesperson laughing about this party and how to lie to the public about it. Then a letter from BoJo’s parliamentary private secretary appeared, which cleared dogs for evacuation from Afghanistan ahead of humans, and even soldiers who had fought there at BoJo’s bidding – which proved an allegation BoJo had declared to be “absolute nonsense” a few days earlier.
For once, Brave BoJo, the Defender of Good People from Rules, was shown as what he is – a consummate liar whose own rules are worse than the ones he wants to replace. He knew the party and putting dogs before humans were wrong, but just lied about them, when no one else can get away with doing the same.
So BoJo is now trying to wriggle out of it by blatantly lying even more. The offending press spokesperson has been forced to resign. There will also be an investigation into the party, because BoJo knows nothing about it and needs to establish the facts. However the man who knows nothing about it is still adamant that the party never took place.
He has also given this investigation clear terms, and will only look at specific questions concerning one specific party, the 18th December one. No others which might have been held, which he himself might have attended. Or rather did, because others were there, they happened, and he knows it.
The UK is discovering that some of the values it inherited from previous generations do exist, and you can’t just destroy them and replace them with something worse. The new creed isn’t worth following if you can’t be honest about it. Many people want to think they are like BoJo, but increasingly fewer want to behave like him.
Tower of Babble
Tearing down rules, and getting away with it, makes people feel more important and more intelligent than they were yesterday. It is a major driver of phenomena like drug abuse – deep down, everyone knows it is wrong, but if they can rationalise it to themselves and get away with it, and do it without damaging their lives or health in the short term, they think they are better than the next person, and one thing leads to another.
The problem BoJo now has is that he ascended to power by making a lot of people feel they were more important than they were before, and tapping into enough discontent to make this work. But if he and his friends are the only ones allowed to break rules now, that makes those who followed him feel stupid.
BoJo’s mob have led an assault on the Rule of Law – branding judges who upheld statutes as “enemies of the people”, illegally proroguing parliament, breaking electoral laws in the Brexit referendum, trying to destroy human rights laws and the Law of the Sea to bash immigrants. The assault on these laws has not been made in the legislature, by trying to change them, but by appealing to the people over the heads of those who uphold the rules, saying that the fact these people are upholding the laws means there is something wrong with them.
Yet the same people who go along with this want the Rule of Law to protect them from legal judgments they don’t like, from those same immigrants they believe to be criminals and from politicians thieving. It can’t do that if it is undermined by wilful law-breaking by those in power. People may not like certain laws, but they still rely on Rule of Law itself to protect them from the laws they don’t like.
The clowns have assaulted democracy, by trying to silence everyone who disagrees with them by branding them not an opponent, but a public menace. Just as the answer to “what good has Boris Johnson ever done?” is always, and exclusively, “Brexit”, the answer to any criticism of BoJo is “you’re a Remainer, therefore you are evil, and not allowed to speak”.
Johnson’s proven serial lying is part of his appeal; he doesn’t try and deny it. So people have every right to talk about it. However Conservative MP Nickie Aiken is trying to stop this, protesting that calling MPs liars “filters down to the public” and is an “attack on democracy”, even when true.
Mark Francois, an MP absent from parliament for a long period due to his arrest on charges no one is allowed to talk about (rape and sexual assault, multiple, charges now being dropped through lack of evidence the police are allowed to see has apparently spent his time writing a book on the “triumph of Brexit”. Considering how many people voted for this, you would imagine this would be a best seller, if it was any good.
However Francois is publishing it himself, on the grounds that “Remainer publishers won’t touch it”. In other words, the whole of the publishing industry is corrupt because it doesn’t like something a Brexiteer did. If the British publishing industry hoped for any support from this government, it has now gone up in smoke.
There is no democracy when whole swathes of eligible voters are condemned as bad people, not allowed a voice, because they call government MPs liars and don’t think their writing is any good. If enough people go along with these happenings, you have a Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But British voters don’t ultimately want that, and when the thought police come for them, they will do anything they can to avoid facing the shame of having brought them into existence.
What You See Is What You Will Always Get
No one has ever really supported Boris Johnson. They don’t want to destroy Rule of Law, democracy and every civilized value, however much Boris makes them laugh, and feel important, in the process.
They want these things to work better for them, by responding to their concerns and meeting their needs. There are many reasons why people began to believe they weren’t working anymore, and one of the big ones was that new principles were imposed upon people by unelected figures, and taken forward by those who didn’t believe in them.
This too was an evil dictatorship in practice, rather than the product of decency and humanity it was at heart, so it was going to produce a reaction. But no one would have tried to break all the rules, at the bidding of BoJo the Clown, if only he and his friends were allowed to keep doing so, at the expense of everyone else.
The rebellious teenager can identify others the same because ultimately they don’t want to be eternal rebels. They want the world of their parents, but on terms they can relate to and influence.
It is all about the excluded wanting to be included. Boris’s gang include no one but themselves.
They wanted power to commit crimes, and legitimised this by making rule breaking a virtue, using Brexit as an excuse. They made decent millions accessories by making them feel they were clever, and doing a good thing.
Now those millions are waking up, because Boris will always be Boris. There’s no way of making this work. Everyone always knew he was a conman, but so many wanted to believe that he was making them too clever to be conned themselves.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
