Body Politic.

According to legend, this country was founded and named after the Trojan hero Brutus. Brutus was believed to have been the first King of this new realm and he boasted a long and glorious lineage dating all the way back to the days of the Biblical Patriarch Noah.

The legend of Brutus is a celebrated part of the lore of this land and is also incorporated into a later medieval concept of the “Body Politic”. Brutus and his legion of Britons convened to create a corporate nation, “corporate” being the Latin for “body”.

If we put this concept simply it refers to the combined might of the King and of the community that he in turn inspired. However as we have become a much more enlightened nation these notions of the divine and absolute right of rulers have gone out of fashion. Yet the convention of the inviolability of the Crown has remained and arguably this has helped to maintain the stability of our society.

In our modern age this stability was tested with the advent of the Second World War. Britain has always been a very tolerant nation. The philosophy of “live and let live” has been exemplary, unlike other European nations such as Spain (Franco), Italy (Mussolini) and particularly Germany (Hitler).

Extreme political movements have always failed to gain any traction here. However this fact has been overlooked and forgotten by people with much more sinister agendas, namely the Left. The Left now present a fictionalised version of Britain during the War years, which is something entirely contrived by them. They also misuse our language and this is dangerous.

(Illustration is by Chloe Scheffe. Will the British Labour Party and its Leftist apologists finally say sorry to the British people for calling them “racist”?)

Consequently loaded words like racism, Nazism and Fascism have been divested of their true meaning. REAL racism, Nazism and Fascism was happening in Europe throughout the thirties and forties when minority communities were persecuted, attacked and systematically murdered. The kind of “racism” that the Left accuse British people of isn`t actually racism in the sense that I and many others understand it.

(Photograph is of the George`s Dock Building in Liverpool in the aftermath of an air raid. This was one of the tallest buildings in the city and was used by the ARP wardens on the look out for bombs during WW2).

The real history is this. Us British fought valiantly alongside our allied counterparts in our old Empire to defeat right-wing racism in all of its nefarious manifestations. We should feel proud that we all pulled together to destroy such a murderous ideology.

But now we are facing a new murderous threat to our “Body Politic”. This is the Coronavirus and frankly political ideology is useless in this war. This is a disease we are fighting. Politics will not kill it. Diseases have no respect for man-made concepts and COVID19 is a ruthless killer. Viruses like this are similar to cancer. They all act to divest the human body of vitality even though they are entirely different biologically speaking. The tragic folly of this country is that we are all engaged in an ideological squabble which isn`t helping anyone.

However this is nothing new, writers have always found ways of highlighting the absurdities of the modern “Body Politic”. Soviet Russia is one example. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn composed his great novel “Cancer Ward” to document this. The novel is set in a Soviet era hospital where all the characters are receiving treatment for cancer. They are forced to dwell upon the futility of their diagnosis and to endure the inhumane indifference of the doctors treating them. The treatments are crude and ineffective, the medicines given to them have side effects which are worse than the illness. Whenever a patient objects or questions the doctors respond with disdain and arrogance because to them they are just experimental specimens rather than truly human.

The cancer riven body is itself a metaphor for the failing political system and also a kind of symbol for the inherent inhumanity of politics. All political ideologies reduce and belittle the human experience and act to deny the individual of any voice or independent agency at all.

Illness allows people to contemplate deeper questions. This enforced confinement has lead to more people reflecting upon those aspects to our own mortality that transcend reductive notions like politics.

In Solzhenitsyn`s novel the main protagonist descends into a reverie. He remembers his experience as a political exile and profound moral questions arise on the price or worth as a human being forced to live and die through a sickening regime. In the political bubble of today very few people actually contemplate the consequences of ignoring humanity for the sake of political ideology.