2023-05-19
London is a world city. It is both England's and the UK's capital city.
It hosts the world's financial institutions, the City of London (whatever that means to you), and the political institutions of state, as well as historic buildings such as Westminster Abbey (wherein our monarchs are crowned), St Paul's Cathedral (rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666), and many other historic buildings ancient (the Tower of London) and modern (the Barbican). Let's not forget London's railways, both underground and national - great railway stations such as St Pancras and Waterloo may still inspire, whilst others (Euston!) depress.
Samuel Johnson put it succinctly: "Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford" - make of that what you will, but I'd bet that 'twas ever thus.
But all is not well in London Town these days, and in particular with the body politic.
Whereas it is reputed that the Empire was run with but a handful of civil servants, today the Cabinet Office alone runs to many thousands, and then we have the various ministries on top. All hedged about with the many rules regulations and guidance deemed necessary to ensure fairness impartiality and probity. Of course, those rules need to be policed and enforced to the highest standards as befits the "mother of parliaments", yet somehow the scandals keep breaking cover, nobody can deliver a real Brexit, and few can keep track any longer of the ever-changing circus of cabinet ministers.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the whole edifice of governance is in terminal decline, afflicted by a bureaucratic obesity for which no palatable correction can be devised. A cancerous overgrowth that defies excision has sprouted an overabundance of regulators, NGOs, think tanks, even "charities" that seek to modulate our activities to their liking beyond the reach of any effective democratic accountability. It has become so complex that one fears that if charted, it would dwarf the map of London's railways.
Laura Dodsworth reviews the struggle to maintain the physical structures of Parliament.
"The deterioration of Parliament serves as the perfect metaphor for the decay of the democracy it houses"
"These buildings are not just visitor attractions, or places to do the business of politics, they are extensions of the nation’s soul"
Whether or not they used to be such, today if they reflect any soul at all, they reflect only the soul of the nation's mostly self-appointed body politic. A soul now ever more disconnected from its body populous.
Whether the body politic was ever properly connected with the body populous is arguable, but I would suggest that there is little evidence to support such an assertion in recent centuries. However, whereas the two used to rub along together despite the inequalities, wars, and economic and social challenges, the body populous (largely through the recent assaults on our freedoms "due to Covid" "due to Russia" and now "due to the climate emergency") is becoming sufficiently disenchanted to seriously question the status quo.
The last straw may well be the push to inflict inappropriate sex education on primary schoolkids at the behest of the WHO, in an apparent attempt to normalise paedophilia.
It just isn't working in our interests. In fact, it continues to work - outrageously in open lockstep with global corporate interests embodied in the WEF-UN "partnership" - to restrict our freedoms and impoverish our society on the now quite apparently spurious grounds of ever more pandemics and an unprovable and ever-lasting man-made climate emergency.
Something will have to give, and reform of political institutions which are riddled with WEF-trained appointees doesn't seem likely any time soon.
