Island of the Damned

The Tory Nightmare We Can't Wake Up From

Students of sixties cinema may remember the 1960 cult classic Village of the Damned, in which the entire population of the village of Midwich suddenly falls unconscious. When they come to, it turns out that six women from the village have become pregnant that day. They go on to give birth to a brood of starey-eyed blonde-haired children who instantly bond with each other, but with no one else.

It soon becomes obvious that these children are a little odd. They are all extraordinarily precocious and more than a little sociopathic . They don’t seem to feel any conscience, love or compassion. They are able to communicate with each other by telepathy and they can also read and control minds in order to destroy anyone they perceive as a threat. They can make their enemies crash cars into walls and shoot themselves. They are an alien infestation using human bodies as pods. Their single interest is their own survival.

Some readers may recognise some similarities between this scenario and the political nightmare that is unfolding across the UK, and not only because of the physical resemblance of these mutant-children to the creature who occupies the office of Prime Minister.

If these children hadn’t been blown to pieces by George Sanders, they might have grown up to look like Johnson, but they would have sounded more like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who probably encapsulates the sociopathic drift of 21st century Toryism even more than the World King himself. Asked last week why Tory MPs didn’t wear masks in parliament, Rees-Mogg replied that he and his colleagues had such a ‘convivial fraternal spirit’ between them that they didn’t need to, because Covid, as we well know, is only ever passed on between strangers.

It’s easy to mock the Haunted Pencil for spreading misinformation, but he wasn’t just proclaiming bad science: what he was actually saying is that neither he nor his colleagues actually care about masks or Covid or public health, or anything else except their own political interests. Rees-Mogg made this pronouncement in a week in which daily Covid infections reached 50,000, and the weekly death toll reached nearly a thousand, in which the government refused to adopt mitigation measures despite its own recognition that the UK faces a ‘challenging’ winter.

Just to be clear: the winter will be ‘challenging’, in part, because the most dangerous, incompetent and corrupt government in British history prematurely abandoned all quarantine and social distancing restrictions during the summer to please the hard libertarian right of the Tory Party and the rightwing press, and failed to use the summer to build resilience, for example, by investing in ventilation in classrooms.

In July the government all but told the population the pandemic was over. No masks - unless you felt like it, and if you didn’t feel like it then that was fine too. No social bubbles. No social distancing. Everyone back to the office. Chop chop, otherwise your colleagues might gossip about you.

Behave like that and your winter is very likely to be ‘challenging.’ This is what the government calls ‘living with the virus’, but what it actually means is that the population is being encouraged to accept close to a thousand deaths a week and the ongoing collapse of the NHS, while the Tory media - with the complicity of the government - whips up anger against GPs.

All this is taking place against a background of rising verbal and physical attacks on NHS workers - the same workers who have toiled for the best part of two years to save lives at the risk of their own, who we once clapped for. Last week ‘anti-vaxers’ continued to disgrace themselves - and us - by presenting nurses with ‘Magna Carta’ and ‘Nuremberg Code’ letters.

It is tempting to attribute such behaviour to alien populist life forms that have turned the supposedly sober English into spittle-flecked loons, were it not for the overlap between anti-vaxxers and Brexiters, and the chaotic messaging from the government that has given licence to every pub bore in the land to declare himself a member of the anti-vaccine ‘resistance.’ Only two days ago the ‘Minister for Care’ said that mask-wearing should not become a ‘sign of virtue.

If a government ministers thinks mask-wearing is virtue signalling, you can’t be surprised if elements of your population are also a little sceptical about them. As Caliban said, the isle is full of noises, but these are not ‘sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.’ Quite the opposite.

So it is very likely that we will be quarantined again, as Covid infection rates shoot up, and new variants emerge, and hospital operations are cancelled because there aren’t enough beds, and all this because the mutant-politicians did not take action once again, when they should have done.

Levelling Down

And Covid is only component of this challenging winter. Last week Tory MPs voted en masse against an amendment to a bill that would have stopped companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas. On Wednesday Johnson announced a trade deal with New Zealand. Of course it was a ‘great’ deal, because it always is, regardless of the consequences for British farming

And how is that ‘levelling up’ going? No one can say it’s going well, as food and energy prices rise, and food banks run out of food because of supply chain shortages and rising demand - in part caused by the end of furlough and the £20 cut in universal credit? Or that the drivers of bin collecting lorries are taking up better-paid jobs as HGV drivers - a development is likely to result in overflowing bins at Christmas and beyond. That will be good news for the country’s rising rodent population, but not for anyone else.

I did say it was a horror film, and things like this will happen if you don’t prepare for anything until it’s too late and sign trade deals that you didn’t understand, because the only thing that matters to you is your own party.

The effectiveness of Village of the Damned derived from the contrast between the sociopathic mutant children and the everyday English rural world where their ‘nest’ was established: women in headscarves going about their business, post offices and genteel posh-speaking middle classes.

In our Island of the Damned it’s tempting to think of the modern Tory Party as an alien invasion, as it lays waste to the countryside, abandons business, humiliates and undermines the country, fails to protect the public, staggers from one disaster to the next, and breaks all the old rules of the parliamentary gentleman’s club, with its quaint ‘ministerial codes’ and admonitions against ‘misleading the house.’

This brood care no more about these rules than the mutant children of Midwich cared about their parents. Their single concern is their own political survival. To achieve it they will tell any lie, make up policy as they go along, and they will gaslight the entire nation and force it to drive itself into a wall or shoot itself in the head in the hope that they can blame the consequences on Covid, ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ or whoever else they can find.

To paraphrase Tacitus, they will make a wasteland and call it Global Britain.

But unlike the Midwich cuckoos, this isn’t a government with superpowers. It only has the power that the electorate has given it and that we continue to give it, exacerbated by a supine opposition with no sense of outrage and urgency, and a supportive and often complicit media.

So in this horror film we are not only the audience, but protagonists. And we don’t have to blow ourselves up as George Sanders does to annihilate our mutant-politicians. We merely have to resist them. We have to hold them to account and counter their lies, and build the political coalitions that can defeat them. But in order to do that we need to acknowledge how destructive and dangerous they are.

At the Labour Party conference Keir Starmer said ‘I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man, I think he is a trivial man.’ This is not just a comforting underestimation, it’s also false, because Johnson is very definitely a bad man, and as Hannah Arendt pointed out many years ago you can be ‘bad’ and ‘trivial’ at the same time.

And either way Johnson and the Tory Party are still leading in the polls, and that is perhaps the most terrifying scenario in this nightmare that we can’t seem to wake up from.