EDITORIAL

The Elite That Failed

Jan. 17—On Dec. 22, weeks before the unprecedented parliamentary defeat of Theresa May’s government on Jan. 15, the London Economist published “The Elite that Failed: Britain’s Political Crisis Exposes the Inadequacy of its Leaders” in its weekly “Bagehot” column.

“Bagehot” describes the unprecedented misadventures the May government has suffered in just one year in office. Three major ministers have resigned, along with many more minor officials. Parliament has voted to hold the government in contempt.

Although Mrs. May survived the Conservative Party vote of no-confidence called against her, she was left badly wounded. Bagehot writes, “And it is going to get worse. There is no parliamentary majority for any Brexit deal, and no way out of the impasse that won’t break promises—and possibly heads. There are two popular explanations for this mayhem [omitted here]. . . . Both explanations have merit. But there is also a third: that the country’s model of leadership is disintegrating. Britain is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence, and self-confidence above expertise. This chumocracy has finally met its Waterloo.”

Significantly, today’s issue of the London-loving New York Times carries the same diagnosis, but much more harshly stated, under the title, “The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class: With Brexit, the Chumocrats who Drew Borders from India to Ireland are Getting a Taste of Their Own Medicine,” by Pankaj Mishra. Mishra calls Louis Mountbatten, the royal who plunged India into genocide as its last Viceroy, a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler.”

“Mountbatten, derided as ‘Master of Disaster’ in British naval circles, was a representative member of a small group of upper- and middle-class British men from which the imperial masters of Asia and Africa were recruited. Abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, they were nevertheless allowed by Britain’s brute imperial power to blunder through the world, ‘a world of whose richness and subtlety,’ as E.M. Forster wrote in ‘Notes on the English Character,’ they could ‘have no conception.’ ”

Forster blamed the catastrophes which followed, on the graduates of Britain’s elitist, so-called “public” (actually private) school system. These “eternal schoolboys, whose ‘weight is out of all proportion’ to their numbers, . . . have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before,” Mishra writes.

Regardless of these specifics, facts are facts. The British Establishment is an utter failure. It could not be otherwise. As Lyndon LaRouche has said, and as every leader of the American Republic has understood, there has never been an empire which has not failed and collapsed. The Twentieth Century, under the dominance of London, was one of the worst in human history, despite some major steps forward otherwise.

Against the background of the disasters created by Britain, Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative became U.S. policy under Ronald Reagan, and LaRouche’s proposal for a Eurasian Land-Bridge was adopted by the Chinese government and then many others, becoming a great force in world history. Now LaRouche’s design for Alexander Hamilton’s Constitutional credit system must top the agenda, both for the United States, and as a world system.

The British elite has utterly failed. The chickens of 1763 have come home to roost at last. But all the same, that elite must now be defeated and removed at last, and promptly. If it is not, it will rise from its ruins for a desperate, savage strike.

Who will remove it? Some of the people who are reading these words right now, will have a critical role.