News & Comment
British Establishment Miscalculates Again

News

After a disastrous election result for British Prime Minister Theresa May, one of her opponents, Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the SNP, spoke on Friday about the danger of the Conservative (Tory) Party:

And in a scathing attack, she criticised Theresa May for her election gamble which spectacularly backfired on the Conservative leader.

The Prime Minister had now “lost all authority and credibility”, Ms Sturgeon said.

She added: “The damage the Tories have done to the stability and the reputation of the UK cannot be overstated.

“In less than a year they have caused chaos on an industrial scale.

“Now they’re planning to cobble together an unstable administration, causing yet more damaging uncertainty.

“All of this because they have consistently put the interests of the Tory party ahead of the interests of the country.” [https://reportuk.org]

Comment

In fact, Nicola Sturgeon’s comments are equally applicable to the British establishment as a whole, of which the Conservative Party forms merely the political face. From the gross misjudgement of the Brexit referendum last year to the gross miscalculation of the surprise general election this year, the British establishment has demonstrated striking overconfidence in its ability to win British public opinion in its favour.

Britain claims the world’s oldest contemporary democracy, and it is highly instructive for Muslims to study the inner workings of this parliamentary monarchy to discern the true nature of the democratic project. Referenda are called and snap elections held not to defer to common public opinion but to resolve disputes within the ruling elite.

Pro- and anti-EU factions have existed within the political class in addition to the Tory Party itself since the time of Thatcher, three decades back. The referendum was designed to settle this conflict in favour of continued EU membership, just as the Scottish referendum was designed to put off any discussion of independence ‘for a generation’. The establishment entered the Brexit referendum with such confidence that they were totally unprepared for the possibility of having to actually exit the EU, resulting in dramatic upheavals within party and government and a delay of almost a year before formally notifying the EU of the UK’s intent to exit the union. Then, spotting a sharp lead in the opinion poll data, Theresa May recklessly announced a snap election with the aim of massively increasing her majority in parliament without considering the possibility of failure, and the implications for a government embarking on two years of crucial EU exit negotiations.

The theory and the fiction of democracy are that the people are sovereign. But can anyone seriously imagine that the people collectively can design and supervise something as complex as a system of ruling and government? In fact, British political institutions carry the legacy of the Christian era that predated Capitalist democracy with only limited alterations in line with later thinking. The people collectively neither design the system nor supervise it. It is the establishment that governs the system; the people are usually only presented with one of a maximum of two fairly similar options and asked to choose between them. That is the normally the wildest extent of their ‘democratic participation’.

It is true that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is an outsider to the establishment. But his elevation to leader really happened quite by accident, demonstrating again the incompetence of the establishment at this time. Nevertheless, they have many techniques for preventing him from achieving real power and, even if he still does, there are many more techniques to isolate him as Prime Minister and prevent him from executing real power in any meaningful way.

Democracy is not a Christian idea. It is a product of materialist atheism. If all that exists in the world without a Creator, then it falls to man to be sovereign of himself. The Western establishment adopted the irreligious concepts of freedom and democracy under pressure from the European atheistic movement which endured even after the failure of its French revolution and the defeat of Napoleon.

Neither religion nor democracy rules the West. It is ruled by the Capitalist interests of the establishment alone; an establishment that stands ready to compromise with any ideological proposition to survive and prosper.
The solution is not more democracy. How can philosophical fiction be a practical solution for anything? This is as democratic as it gets.

The true solution is to return to religion. The Christians have lost their way, so it falls to Muslims to re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah on the method of the Prophet (saw) to lead mankind to a just and prosperous future.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah