The resignation of Savid Javid yesterday as Chancellor without even presenting a budget mirrors the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father – and in so doing says something extraordinary about lack of social progress in the UK in the intervening 130 years.

Chancellor Randolph Churchill disagreed with then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury over his first budget, and resigned. The whole spat was carried out in a splenetic and emotional fashion which was almost certainly influenced by Churchill’s mental deterioration from syphilis – which the Eton and Oxford educated Randolph had caught as a result of a Bullingdon Club jaunt.

(There is no evidence a pig was involved. There is also no evidence Winston had congenital syphilis, or that Jennie Churchill caught it from Randolph, the latter being slightly surprising).

It is to me quite incredible that the UK is still at the mercy of the whims and foibles of degenerates from not only the same class, but from within the same tiny social institutions which still confer a hereditary ability to govern a state of 60 million people now, in 2020. It makes a mockery of the UK’s claim to be a functional social polity and it makes a mockery of the very notion that “democracy” has any real existence in British society.

Johnson’s drive to centralise power is not especially different to that of Thatcher or Blair; there is a slight qualitative difference in the degree of Cummings’ policy influence, but to date I regard the claims that there is a real discontinuity in the form of UK government as overblown. Westminster has always been the seat of a massive, centralised abuse of power; perhaps it is a little bit more visible at the moment. What has enabled the continuation of oligarchic hegemony in the UK has been the destruction of the power to resist of organised labour. Thatcher quite deliberately undertook that as a massive project of social engineering, involving the deliberate destruction of all the UK’s major productive industries and replacement by a service based economy.

Blair continued the Thatcher revolution, in particular in removing government services to private providers where organised labour was weak or non-existent. The massive concentration of wealth into the hands of the rich and removal of wealth from ordinary people that ensued from the Thatcher/New Labour right wing revolution led to the reaction of Corbynism, but the roots of organised labour having been ruthlessly cut away, Corbyn found there was no longer a sufficient well of social solidarity which could support a counter narrative to the massively concentrated media propaganda.

Wealth inequality is fast heading back to levels Randolph Churchill would have recognised as he and his Bullingdon boys went whoring working class girls in Oxford. The gap between the top 1% and the 99% is shifting apart radically and is the key measure- not the gap between the 10% and 90% which the government points to disingenuously as not changing much.

Notions of social solidarity which made so much progress from 1800-1980 have gone backwards and their survival in isolated areas as a majority view is primarily as expression of national or cultural identity, notably of course in Scotland but also among immigrant groups and in cities with a strong sense of identity and civic pride. Outwith that, the UK has been engineered by unscrupulous politicians to revert to a society which delights in licking the shoes of the man from the Bullingdon Club.

Remind me, which century is this?

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