While politics is - as we all know - show business for ugly people, some nuance has recently been introduced into this. The dramatis personae in Westminster are, increasingly, drafted in to provide the primary distraction from anything that the citizenry should be alarmed by - namely the momentum towards total authoritarian control as defined by the deep state. There is growing awareness that politicians are primarily distraction merchants: there to help perpetuate the illusion that we have a functioning democracy and that it’s working for the benefit of the citizens (or, more accurately, subjects in the case of the UK).
The test that this kind of thing is actually going on is the media’s active participation. So if a new leader is due to be anointed (typically these days without any requirement for any democratic mandate whatsoever) the media is all over it like a rash. This provides a tacit approval of the leader’s status, regardless of the said leader’s lack of any mandate or any obvious ability to even act.
But, more to the point, is the extent of media involvement in freshly painted dramatic projects designed to give the impression that the government is ‘out of touch’ or, for example, that Andy Burnham is planning to ‘take us back into the EU’. In effect, the Leading Boy is given his status because he is defining the main debates featured in the Sunday rags and Monday morning breakfast TV news shows (note the media optimised timings of the staged audience wow moments).
Cue an extended troop of players dragooned-in after said (staged) wow moment. So our Principal Boy (Andy Burnham) agrees to do an interview with Pantomime Dame (Alastair Campbell) and Comic Sidekick (Rory Stewart). During the interview Burnham drops a major clanger, with oohs and aahs from the audience, that the Russians (boo) influenced the Brexit vote.
Note, that the chosen topic - Brexit - is a well known source of heated debate, division and party-political rivalry. So this gives Principal Baddie (Nigel Farage) lots of scope to deride the Principal Boy for ignoring the biggest ever mandate delivered by the British people…yada, yada.
And, this morning, the cast of characters, including their understudies (i.e. junior ministers we’ve never heard of) appear on the various news bulletins to be ‘quizzed’ (politicians are always quizzed) about Burnham’s faux pas. Twitter is today flooded with car-crash interview footage featuring junior ministers blathering nonsense - largely because they weren’t even provided with any scripts. Ad-libbing without scripts is the primary role of the understudies.
I’m currently watching 100 Years of Solitude - the mini-series - having failed to read the book by Gabriel García Márquez (perhaps the English translations from Spanish don’t do it justice). The book tells the story of the Buendia family, founders of the fictional town of Macando. The town of Macando is peaceful and self-governed after being established in the middle of nowhere by the Buendias and their fellow travellers. The town’s patriarch is José Arcadio Buendía.
Macando manages to get by without any government. It even manages to survive a ‘plague’ of insomnia as a result of José Arcadio invoking the ghost of a dead gypsy healer. But, of course, its success and self-reliance doesn’t escape the notice of the government. It sends a magistrate to instil order and justice in the town, who then starts about imposing arbitrary rules - insisting, for example, that all the houses be painted blue.
José Arcadio Buendía confronts him and says: “In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper. And so that you know it once and for all, we don’t need any magistrate because there’s nothing here for him to judge.” He continues, “We have been through an insomnia plague and we don’t want a political plague.”
This is where we are now, here in the UK. Our politics is merely about the staging of a never ending charade designed to convince us that we’re part of something, that people are fighting our corner. But they aren’t. They are - and always have been - ugly actors in a shit play.
And how do I know this? Surely, I hear you cry, the active debates show that democracy functions?
Clearly that’s not the case. Typically the heated discussions focus on well-trodden turf that causes populist division. Brexit is almost hallowed ground as far as the pantomime producers are concerned because, clearly, Brexit has provided the bread and butter for the current uniparty discourse. The Reform Party emerged from Brexit and the Brexit Party. The Reform splinter groups (like Rupert Lowe’s other R party) argue about continued boat people ingress resulting in organised gang rape. The Labour Party is, apparently, divided on the rejoining issue. The Conservatives are, similarly, always trying to keep discipline between leavers and remainers. But all of this, of course, is contrived nonsense. No-one really cares any more. Just look at the actuality. Since leaving the EU the UK government is now mandating the ‘fortification’ of wheat flour with a known toxin (folic acid) while no such mandate exists in the EU. Rupert Lowe now argues against UK food standards imposed well after the Brexit vote by a newly independent United Kingdom.
Notably excluded from the carefully choreographed pantomime furores are any topics deemed unacceptable by the state and its poodle media. The Brexit vote was in 2016 - over ten years ago. The cost of the UK’s participation in the EU (i.e. the net contribution to the EU budget) amounted to around £10 billion a year. But in 2020 we had the ultimate political pantomime that gagged any media organisation even considering quizzing any political understudy actor about the efficacy of government policy relating to “COVID”. In 2020 alone the cost of dealing with the government’s own COVID pantomime was around £400 billion - or around 40 years worth of net EU contributions. And yet, no-one is allowed on mainstream television to express the view that COVID was a globally rehearsed farce - that resulted in a catastrophic loss of life from fake vaccines, end-of-life protocols and economic vandalism. The plague of politics.
And so it continues. None of the so-called mainstream political parties, or leading political actors, say anything about the Bard’s Play. There’s an unspoken rule, or Omerta, that cannot be broken. Instead, let’s rewrite a crap stage-play about Brexit, or anti-semitism, or climate change. These are the topics the political troop of actors do so well.
I may be naive. But I do suspect that the ticket sales aren’t going so well. And that is our potential salvation. I caught a few bits of BBC coverage of the party conference season - where various leader speech snippets were prepped for the schedules. But there was no real belief in the reports, no attempt to disguise the fact that politics is the stuff of desperation for relevance. That’s what tends to happen with perpetual lying - the stenographers of the lies tend to get bored with it.
Meanwhile we’re all bored rigid. BBC audiences are declining to such an extent that the organisation is in an existential crisis - claiming that its news content be carried on Netflix. But I presume even Netflix knows that would be a kiss of death.
The play is awful. Its actors are ugly. Its plot has no ending. Let’s be done with the farce.
And they are all part of a Faustian pact. Well articulated Jeff.