Nazigate and the danger of playing with fire

Anna Soubry, a Conservative MP, is at the centre of a ruckus concerning her objections to being shouted at, apparently one of the epithets being "Nazi". It was an ugly comment, but there are two things to say about that. Firstly, when a cadre of parliamentarians try to frustrate the democratic process at every turn, this is what happens. Secondly, Soubry is no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric, having smeared Leave Supporters as "fascists" and "racists", as you will see from this TV clip from about 50 seconds in - it's an aircheck, to use the coin of the heyday of recording audio cassette tapes from TV, so you may have to turn up the sound:

As I say in the tagline to this blog however, sometimes it is what it is, and sometimes it ain't.

Ostensibly she was as upset as anybody would be at being compared to Nazis, and democrats all over Europe have become familiar with that feeling.

In reality, the strategy, I believe, was to parade Establishment-friendly MPs in front of democrats angry at the betrayal of an exercise in democracy, that being the UK's EU membership referendum. They were there as lightning rods, and Soubry caught the strike. The object of the exercise was to provide senior members of security services with a pretext to clear the streets around the Houses of Parliament of democrats. (And by democrats, of course, I don't mean only people who voted Leave, as a lot of people who voted Remain are unhappy with the Establishments in London and Brussels riding roughshod over a plebiscite which produced a definite result.)

The reason can be found to the south, in France, where democrats are massing against elites whom they cannot rotate by peaceful means, and may soon find themselves being shot at with live ammunition if some of those elites have their way.

Previously, leveraging disorder has been quite to the Establishment's liking. Then something went badly wrong for them - ironically, during the Brexit referendum.

In June 2016, Project Fear was in full swing: five former sescretaries-general of Nato warned that Brexit "would give succour to the West's enemies", and European Commission President Donald Tusk warned that our exit "could be the beginning of the destruction of...Western political civilisation in its entirety"; as if that didn't raise the emotional temperature far enough, then-Prime Minister David Cameron made pointed comments about the war in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Srebrenica,

We know the result of the resulting hysteria: Jo Cox MP, an able and well-liked Labour MP, was gunned down by a Nazi with mental health problems called Thomas Mair.

Nazis were and are, of course, supra-national pan-Germanists; but I mention Mair's mental health problems advisedly. In Planets and Meaning: A Phenomenology of Fate, I refer to the murder as a "weakest-link assassination", which I define thus:

This is a hands-off operation where, unlike a Manchurian candidate situation, the identity of the assassin and of the prey are unimportant: all that matters is that emotion-laden toxic rhetoric is weaponised so that somebody who is already struggling with reality is pushed over the edge to commit an atrocity. The point is to leverage the subsequent outrage, usually to produce calls for further incursions into citizens’ freedoms but in this case to silence democratic debate so that the electorate might marinate in fear and half-truths.

Everybody was shocked at the outcome, and I'm sure even the Establishment had not meant for somebody on its own periphery to be targeted. The subsequent suspension of political debate, in the vital last week of the campaign, was undoubtedly to allow us all to express our  shock and grief, but also to shut down the operation behind the scenes.

I don't think for a moment David Cameron was aware of the intended outcome, as he is, famously, a follower and not a leader. Similarly, Soubry probably complied with being trotted out for the cameras without being aware of any further agenda. Nevertheless, the Establishment had been hoisted by its own petard, and it is scared that disorder in France that is not of the French or EU Establishment's making will spread northwards, as it ineluctably will if parliamentarians - with some honourable exceptions - continue to make it clear that they will not allow the ship of state's direction to be altered by peaceful democratic means. 

It's time to action the electorate's four-word instruction to parliamentarians: "Leave the European Union". 

I wish to make an appeal to parliamentarians: put a stop to drones buzzing airports, to scare-stories about shortages of medicines, and, most of all, to raising the emotional temperature with no knowledge of what the result would be. The last time this was done a good, innocent woman who was a credit to Westminster died. Brexit should succeed, but there is a chance it will not - welcome to the uncertainty we all have to live with. Get your job done, and stop playing with a series of fires you know will slip out of your control.