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The theory behind all of it, gas, telecoms, water, rail, was called popular capitalism, and it rested on a wager: that if enough ordinary Britons held shares directly, they would develop a stake, literal and psychological, in the fiscal health of the nation. Capitalism would stop being something done to people and start being something done by them.
Scotland has a parliament, a flag, a football team that loses with tremendous dignity, and roughly the population of Lagos’s Ikeja Local Government Area. The Yoruba nation and I use the word advisedly has an empire’s worth of history, a written and oral constitutional tradition running from Ile-Ife through the Oyo Mesi and the Alaafin’s checks and balances, a diaspora spanning three continents, and something in the region of forty million native speakers. One of these is routinely described in the Financial Times as a nation debating its constitutional future. The other is routinely described, by the same publication, as a tribe engaged in an ethnic dispute. I invite the reader to spot the empirical difference. I have been looking for thirty years and have found only prejudice wearing a monocle.
First, the Palestine Action episode. These were people who did not bother with balaclavas or the theatrical anonymity so beloved of the modern political cosplay set. They targeted warehouses and facilities linked to the supply of arms to the Israeli military. The Labour government, with the practised solemnity of a government discovering its inner authoritarian, reached for the terrorism laws. Proscription followed. Arrests followed. Jail terms followed. Even the barristers who dared to represent them found themselves in the crosshairs. The message was clear: damage property in the service of a cause the government finds inconvenient, and you will be treated as the domestic equivalent of Al-Qaeda, complete with the full legal theatre that accompanies such a designation.
Andy Burnham did not inherit a government so much as a stage set. After years of mayoral apprenticeship in Greater Manchester, he arrived in Downing Street with a ready-made philosophy called “Manchesterism” and a clear preference for the photographable over the structural. The high-street crackdown is not an aberration. It is the strategy in miniature.
Yet the political theatre continues as if the data never arrived. Immigration remains the ultimate litmus test, the issue on which every faction must prove its manhood by sounding harsher than the last.
