Prioritisation of corporate wealth and privatisation have threatened our heritage and eroded our culture far more than immigration ever has
Chris Hinchliff is the Independent MP for North East Hertfordshire.
Our country is on its knees. From institutions seemingly incapable of common sense, to public services facing a constant battle to stave off crisis, 14 years of Tory misrule have left us in a quagmire of dysfunction.
Getting a doctor’s appointment is a mad scramble, our schools are crumbling, our parents can’t get the social care they deserve, trains are delayed, and our rivers are treated like open sewers.
From the conversations I have with people from all walks of life across North East Hertfordshire, I know that voters are sick to the back teeth of paying into a system which seems to give less and less back.
But the politics of Reform are a symptom of national decline, not an answer to it. When I began working on this article, I originally intended to make it a repudiation of those self-appointed crusaders whose skulking around at night with cable ties and dubious scrawling is a dead giveaway that their agenda isn’t about a warm-hearted love of home but hostility to those they consider unwelcome.
I had planned to write about the political charlatans, who claim to be fighting for Western Christian values but whose values couldn’t be further from the ancient traditions of guest-friendship or Christ’s teachings of mercy, kindness and compassion.
Those that seek to consume our national identity with shouty anger and nastiness towards others offer only a fast-track to terminal decline that would bring a final end to national greatness.
Of course, British fair play requires properly managed borders, which means an asylum system that’s fair both to those fleeing conflict, and to the communities they arrive in.
But from the huge sums of money given by ordinary people every Red Nose Day, to the sacrifices made by cotton workers to uphold the embargo on slave grown cotton during the US Civil War, and from Rolls Royce employees refusing to handle plane parts for Pinochet’s dictatorship, to the thousands of Ukrainian refugees welcomed into British homes, those on the far-right don’t understand this country’s people or its history.
Indeed, political movements which insist that immigration is an existential threat to their historically illiterate notions of Anglo-Saxon ethnic nationalism, tribes which famously invaded these islands by boat, and who idolise the wartime generation but rage against the international rule of law shaped by Winston Churchill, display a total lack of irony that could hardly be less British.
However, when it comes to national decline, the far more important point is that the challenges we face to turn our country around are in many ways the direct result of a mindset which has been guiding decisions in this country for decades. Establishment politics is the author of the very problems it now struggles to grapple with.
Even if we imposed all the most vicious, hostile, and arbitrary policies some are champing for, rounding people up off the street, deporting even those who play by the rules, leaving children to drown at sea, and detaining asylum seekers in camps surrounded with barbed wire, towns and villages like those across North East Hertfordshire will continue to get a raw deal until we grapple with the flaws rooted in decades of ideological consensus.
The loss of opportunities, services and facilities that really threatens the way of life in quintessentially English towns and villages is not an accident of economic policy – it is the economic policy of politicians wedded to the Thatcherite status quo. It isn’t the fact that some of neighbours worship differently or eat different food that threatens to hollow out communities like those in North East Hertfordshire, but the doctrines of ‘efficiency’, privatisation, and profit before the public good which the Tories and Reform want to put on steroids.
It is this way of thinking—the demand we always choose the ‘cheapest’ option, regardless of its impact on the smaller communities that for centuries defined the English way of life—which has seen banks, schools, hospitals, youth clubs, post offices, and the rest close in places like Royston and Buntingford because it is more ‘efficient’ to concentrate services in major urban areas.
Economic policy which sees cities as engines of prosperity, and the rest of the country as somewhere you commute from or retire to, will always drain investment and opportunity away the places millions of us call home. We will never be able to properly fund public services in places like Baldock or Standon if our priority is keeping taxes for big businesses low in the hope we can attract them to set up another office in London or Cambridge.
In truth, if you are worried about the loss of traditional community life, nothing has done more to damage our heritage and erode our culture than the policies prioritising corporate wealth which have led to the triumph of mega-chains like Amazon and turned so much of our country into commuter dormitories with identikit outlets and little sense of place or home.
And for those who mourn damage done to the beauty of our countryside, undoubtedly one of the most precious parts of our national inheritance, the real threat is from politicians in hock to corporate interests, like Messrs Farage and Tice with their willingness to give a free pass for devastating fracking by fossil fuel companies, or Mr Jenrick who when Housing Minister unlawfully fast tracked a planning application for a billionaire developer donating to the Tories.
These are political choices that we can and must change. We all want to see better days ahead for our country, but we will not get there with bitterness, rage and bile of political movements whose raison d’être is to tell people they aren’t welcome here.
True patriotism should be based on things worth celebrating—our love of England’s landscapes, our thousand-year-old traditions of local democracy, the unique social and cultural heritage that can be found in all our towns and villages.
Yes, we are a small densely populated island that needs a fair and controlled immigration system, and no one is likely to shed any tears if we send those who commit crimes packing, but we cannot be misdirected into scapegoating the right-wing press’ age old cast of villains; benefits recipients, striking workers, asylum seekers, and trans people any longer.
The real alternative to sinking further into national decline is patriotism that inspires us to see clearly and insist on economic change which restores opportunity, services and facilities to all our communities so that they can once again thrive in their own right.
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