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in fact, I liked it so much, I'm going to post it here...

Blair rants as Britain sleepwalks into slavery

GERALD WARNER

SECOND only to the inelegant word "Kafkaesque", the term "Orwellian" is the next most over-used adjective in the English language. Its significance has been diluted by frequent and irrelevant application to situations that did not merit it. Last week in Brighton, however, furnished an occasion that met every referential criterion to the prophetic nightmare conjured by the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Labour Party conference was a demonstration of the extent to which Britain has succumbed to creeping totalitarianism. This has happened, by a process of osmosis, over the past seven years. The Führer Principle is now as entrenched in our society as trial by jury, civility and bicameral government formerly were. The Leader of All Progressive Humanity is unchallengeable by the whipped curs that constitute his party.

Beyond that, he is now bolstered by the newly-articulated doctrine of "Progressive Consensus" (that’s "one-party state", to you), which the Chancellor brought into the political lexicon last week. This underlined the reality that Blair and Brown are equally committed to displacement of traditional British parliamentary democracy, to be replaced by an all-embracing, all-intrusive state.

The significance of a "progressive consensus" is that it enlists almost the whole of society into one vast movement, with all the People (when that entity acquires a capital ‘p’, pack a suitcase and wait for the midnight knock) subscribing to its doctrines. There was a progressive consensus in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989 and in Germany from 1933 to 1945. China, North Korea and Cuba still enjoy that Utopian state of affairs. The progressive consensus is the indispensable vehicle for a world theory that is too ambitious to be constrained within one political party: it needs to supplant all other parties.

"A world theory is intolerant and is not content with being one party amongst a number of other parties; it insists on exclusive and persistent recognition of itself and on an absolutely new conception of the whole of public life in accordance with its views. Thus, it cannot tolerate continuance of a force representing the former conditions." Who said that - Tony or Gordon? In fact, it was Adolf (Mein Kampf, chapter V). Yet he was describing the prevailing outlook at Brighton - the Leader’s as much as the Chancellor’s. For "a force representing the former conditions", read the New Leader’s "the forces of conservatism".

These latter were represented at Brighton by the pro-hunt protesters, hemmed in by Stasi-style riot police with alsatians. Hunting with dogs has been outlawed in Germany since 1936, on the whim of Guess Who. Metropolitan commentators made remarks about country people that they would never have dared (as the Prince of Wales once pointed out) to make about any ethnic or sexual minorities. Be aware: the rhetoric anent minorities has been reversed, so that the rural community is now dismissed on the very grounds on which other groups were formerly mollycoddled. You have to keep pace with the volatile party line.

Urban scoffers are turkeys voting for Christmas. The hunting issue has been chosen as the Trojan horse for a further erosion of democracy: the imposition of de facto unicameral government. If the Parliament Act can be invoked to bulldoze through legislation that is not government policy, not a matter of urgency nor of the highest national importance (neither the Prime Minister nor the Chancellor bothered to vote on it), then the Second Chamber, in effect, has been abolished. Last week we witnessed Billy Bragg outlining his proposals for an alternative second chamber; we have yet to hear Ozzy Osbourne’s thesis on the subject.

Freedom, in a parliamentary democracy, is indivisible. When the unwary and the partisan yield to the totalitarian serpent’s temptation to applaud the removal of someone else’s liberty to do something they find distasteful, they compromise their own freedom. The tired cliché "They came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I did nothing... And finally they came for me" is still valid. For decades, every spotty polytechnic Trot screamed "Fascist!" at half of humanity, ranging from Margaret Thatcher (in fact, the destroyer of corporatism) to men wearing ties. Now the reality is upon us and the media are so many somnambulists.

The essence of fascism is not the goose-step, coal-scuttle helmets or racism (irrelevant in Mussolini’s Italy). Men in bad suits are the new gauleiters. Until recently, the one technical objection to rating Blair as a fascist was his apparent rejection of corporatism: the Warwick agreement with the trades unions has now removed that obstacle to his full membership of the club. It is time some of our commentators opened their eyes and did an audit of how much freedom has been snuffed out by prescriptive laws since 1997.

Yet this is no Fourth Reich: we are merely a protectorate within the European Union, which imposes 25,000 laws a year upon us without even cosmetic rubber-stamping by Westminster. Last week the Great Charlatan committed himself to Blunkett’s identity card régime. The final measure of the power complex of this deeply sinister mountebank was the insouciance with which he regretfully warned us that, despite any pleas to the contrary, he was not willing to rule us for 16 years - only for 12. That puts "We have become a grandmother" entirely in the shade. If the British public does not hear alarm bells ringing and remove this megalomaniac at the ballot box, this country will be complicit in its own enslavement.