“As civilization becomes more and more complex, individual freedom is more and more restricted.”

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Not a new quotation there but one from Benito Mussolini that Joel Kotkin cites in writing about what might be called the new authoritarianism. Joel makes one really telling observation about modern government:

When liberals abandon liberal principles, we lose one of the most important brakes on expanding central power. As we can see already in California and other places, decisions on virtually everything about how we live – from transportation, to housing and, most particularly, how we generate energy – are increasingly being made not by our elected representatives but through the administrative bureaucracy. The notion of “checks and balances,” of getting buy-in from the opposition and dissenters in your own party, means little to those who have found the “truth” and are determined to impose it on everyone else.

Here in Europe we are familiar with this process - I've called it the new fascism in the past, others call it technocracy but it is essentially taking us away from the idea of plural democracy and towards the world of Plato's guardians. I note also that Tim Worstall writes on the same point too:

There’s a reasonably common worldview out there, I think it would be fair to say this of Ezra Klein and the crew over at Vox, of the New York Times editorial board, that if we put all the bright people in government and then they told us what to do that the world would be a better place. 

As Kotkin put it, the liberals have abandoned liberal principles. They cannot countenance the idea that voters might reject their carefully crafted solutions to the perceived problems of modern civilization and create systems that remove democratic accountablity from government and replace it with the authority of the expert. This problem is not a problem just of the left - we see the same technocratic approaches from the British Home Office, in the creation of business-led local partnerships and in the exclusion of effective democratic oversight from important areas of public administration. There has always been a preference for the backroom fix in much of government but what we now see is that fix becoming institutionalised.

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To the new Corporate State - "Ave!"

In a fit of bizarre historical blindness some of my Conservative colleagues - led by a right Jesse -  down in the big city are proposing that members of the House of Lords be elected by institutions - corporations if you will:

The seven point plan includes a proposal to allow mass membership organisations – such as the CBI, TUC, General Medical Council or even the RSPB – to elect their own peers. 

Connoisseurs of fascism will note that this proposals echoes the very essence of Mussolini's 'Corporate State' - the spirit of Gabriele d'Annunzio's Charter of Carnaro:
 

Whatever be the kind of work a man does, whether of hand or brain, art or industry, design or execution, he must he a member of one of the ten Corporations who receive from the commune a general direction as to the scope of their activities, but are free to develop them in their own way and to decide among themselves as to their mutual duties and responsibilities.

What has possessed these politicians god alone knows. Invoking the idea of corporatism as superior to democracy is not just crass but a direct attack on the principles of personal autonomy - individual freedom - that us Conservatives cherish.

Reforming the Lords to give a bunch of national institutions - unions, guilds, special interest groups - the power to appoint legislators would hand to those organisations (not remotely to their members) a power not justified by the UK being a democracy.

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Whatever be the kind of work a man does, whether of hand or brain, art or industry, design or execution, he must he a member of one of the ten Corporations who receive from the commune a general direction as to the scope of their activities, hut are free to develop them in their own way and to decide among themselves as to their mutual duties and responsibilities.

 

"Everything is within the state, nothing without the state" - today's marcher motto

Back in the 1980s – that age evoked so charmingly by Ed Miliband recently – the word “alternative” was captured and held prisoner by the forces of the left. To be an ‘alternative’ comedian wasn’t to be funny (although some were this doesn’t include Ben Elton) but to be ‘left-wing’, ‘progressive’ and above all else against “The Tories”.

In the end the alternatives weren’t really alternatives at all – there was much talk of “defending”, “fighting”, “mobilising”, “organising” and, of course, “striking” but little of substance as to the alternative being proffered.

Now, we find the same voices crying out, a coalition of the self-interested and the prejudiced descend onto London disrupting the pleasure of tourists, the weekend of locals and the choices of visitors. To achieve what is unclear except that this is a march for the “alternative”.

 For some, such as the Unions the alternative is for ordinary people to pay more taxes and for government to cripple future generations with debt so their members can continue to consume what the nations earns (and remember, dear reader, that public servants – however valued – are solely consumers, they do not produce wealth or income) regardless of the interests of those who are producing that wealth.

For others – the spoiled children of UK Uncut in the forefront – the aim is to disrupt and annoy, to make a petty point and to adopt again that squadrista role of doing what the government refuses to do (not that they will succeed in this, of course) in “maintaining services”.

Behind all this lurks to prejudice, the hatred of business and enterprise. People clutch at a specious belief in the moral superiority of public service and wallow in ugly envy of others fortune. These people – who somehow believe, like Mussolini, that “everything is within the state, nothing is without the state” – are screaming for the good state, be it motherland, fatherland or the nanny, to care for them, coddle them, provide for their every whim and need. And to take the money for it off those “other” people.

This March for the Alternative is the political equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum.

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