Tarquin O’Flaherty.
Tarquin’s Democratic view.

Tarquinius Maximus

Something astonishing happened in England after the Hitler War. Prior to this conflict, serious people had been in charge. Serious adult people with serious moustaches and extremely serious waistcoats. They were representatives of the latest greatest Empire, an Empire encompassing seriously big chunks of the world, and which, by way of bowler hats, rolled umbrellas and railways, gave certainty to its citizens and to the world.

When Neville Chamberlain, in 1939, spoke of ‘Peace in Our Time…’  he was dressed like a refugee from a much earlier era, from one of Thomas Hardy’s novels.  How he was dressed, and how his appearance was accepted reflects perfectly how people in 1939 viewed the world.  They thought, absolutely, that when the war was over, England would somehow revert to its Edwardian, cap-doffing past.  What was left of it’s cannon- fodder citizenry (still babes-in-arms) was about to disabuse them of this notion.

The rise of the new middle class in Industrial Revolution England created an astonishing level of wealth.  This new money, this ‘middle’ level of society, somewhere between the peasants and the aristocracy, had never existed before and overwhelmingly needed legitimacy.  Having nowhere else to turn it asked direction of itself which resulted in the well documented Victorian virtues of religion, respectability and rapacious exploitation.  This Victorian ‘morality’ was based, not on honour or decency, but notions so despicable that modern society has been forced to legislate against them.

The rapacity of the Victorian world should have been brought into question when it was discovered that huge numbers of young Englishmen were unfit for service in the Great War due to malnutrition.  Instead everything was put on hold whilst we enjoyed the First World War, the Depression, and the Hitler War, fifty years of non-stop butchery where a more overt breed of ‘morality’ was practiced, one which involved, on a massive scale, the Murder of the Innocents.

In 1945, the year the Hitler War ended, the world began to pick up the pieces. For a time the old order, the old Victorian order tried to re-establish its paternalism, its old ‘born to rule’ patterns of control.  But it was much too late. The best of Edwardian manhood was blood and bone in Flanders fields.  Within about ten years of this horror the West would be bankrupt.  And within a few years more, by 1945, we’d be mourning the deaths of tens of millions more.

Ten years later, in the mid 1950’s, suddenly, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley.  This changed the world so markedly that the dreams of a return to an Edwardian England disappeared forever.  Out went the guiltily erotic gentility of ballroom dancing, to be replaced by the appalling chaos of rock and roll.  The old order was outraged.  Singers were banned, bands were banned, Elvis’s pelvis was banned, and bands of banners banded together bearing banners emblazoned with bans against the bands of banned bands.  All to no avail.

This exciting movement amongst young people grew til it swept away the old order.  There was a belief that good could replace horror, a sense, reaffirmed or re-discovered, that people were basically, good, decent and honourable.  There was also a very strong sense that ‘…too many people had died…’ that the cynical manipulation by the old waistcoats and bowlers had to stop.  There were massive protests against ‘the bomb’, against nuclear proliferation, against the draft, against the Vietnam War.  The ragged regiments of the old order became afraid.  They felt, not only were their political beliefs being threatened, but that everything they understood might collapse.  Something must be done.

A rapacious Victorian to her fingertips, Margaret Thatcher came to power in the late Seventies, and set about reclaiming the ascendancy of the ‘ruling class’.  In the wake of Edward Heath, who had already quadrupled the price of oil, she threw Keynes out of the window and, on the advice of the Chicago School of Economics, in the person of Prof. Milton Friedman, set in place a system of economic management which almost guaranteed today’s international bankruptcy.  Calculatedly, the  idealism of the sixties was driven to the wall and replaced with a campaign of bare-faced rapacity, coldly designed to demonstrate who was really in charge.

Over thirty years later, the revenge of rapacity over idealism is all around us.

Oh, and it’s our fault; we didn’t work hard enough.  If only we’d worked harder this collapse would never have happened.  We’ve only ourselves to blame.

If ours were a real democracy, the people who brought about our present economic collapse should be in jail.  It’s not, and they’re not.