The Night of Blunt Knives

It only took 3 years, several rounds of negotiations with the European Union, a global pandemic and many spectacular scandals. But finally, many in the British government joined the Great Resignation and hollowed out the chambers of power, forcing our Dear Leader Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the Great to accept that his time as prime minister is coming to an end.

This must be difficult for wee Boris, after all he has crafted most of his life and political career around getting this top job. That this wannabe Churchill has fallen face-first into the mud, having failed to even outlast his predecessor’s time in office, has to be hard on him.

But we hold no sympathy for his broken dreams. Boris has led the destruction of the lives of millions of people. His policies have led to the deaths of almost 200,000 people from COVID-19, the starvation of millions as people are no longer able to buy basic essentials, the tearing apart of countless families with his vile approaches to borders and migration. He has overseen a war against his own country, of which the scars will run deep for decades to come.

The British people are rightfully fed up with this blond bastard and there will no-doubt be nationwide celebrations at his removal. But it’s as good a time as any to remember that the gaff-prone prime minister was not the centre of what was wrong with the Tory regime, he was just its face. Now that the head has been cut off, like the proverbial hydra, another will take his place. While we may be rid of the man with the mophead, we are still left with a government infested by scum from parasitical millionaires aiming to cut away any last semblance of social care to vicious fascists that are bringing our islands under the fist of a racist police state.

In many places, the damage has already been done, with a string of authoritarian bills having recently been enshrined into law. Freedom of assembly has been ripped up by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which has allowed the cops to intensify their attacks against protestors and the already over-policed people in BIPOC and GRT communities. The Elections Act has brought the previously independent electoral watchdog under government control and barred millions of people from voting, effectively handing the keys to democracy over to the Tories themselves. The Nationality and Borders Act has made it even easier to ignore the human rights of refugees and migrants, with the government’s new disgraceful policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda chugging on full steam ahead. And this isn’t to even mention the government’s recent designs on ripping up the Human Rights Act, which we can be sure the new Tory administration will have no desire to stop.

So while the Battle of Boristoun may have drawn to a close, the war against the Tory Party rages on.

The disease we have come to call “Toryism” has infected every layer of government. It would be naive to think, as so much of the British press is, that a “sensible” and “moderate” Tory can now come in and fix everything. None of the ministers that brought down the government did so out of the goodness of their heart, but out of their sick sense of self-interest. They want to maintain their own grips on power and can no longer countenance a boss that threatens that.

Can Keir Starmer’s New Old New New Labour^TM come to our rescue? We doubt it. They have made it clear, time and time again, that their disagreements with the Tories are not a matter of principles or morals, but are over respectability. Boris Johnson makes the British government look bad. That the British government is rotten to the core is not something anyone in the political establishment cares about. Starmer simply wants to look good while he does the same old bad things.

So whether we end up with a new, fresh-faced Tory government in power, an election brings in newer, fresher-faced Labour government to power, or Boris manages to somehow cling on through some arcane constitutional mechanism, nothing will change the very nature of power. It was the corrupting influence of power that turned Boris Johnson into that pathetic shell of a human that we know him as today. It was power that made the Tory rats flee the sinking ship at the very last possible moment. And it is power that will continue to make our lives worse, unless we do something about it.

Power is what has brought this country to ruin. Power cannot rebuild it, only we can. ■

Emma Hayes