A long coup was carried out in the UK between 2016 and 2019, the protracted assassination of Corbyn and the left. It was achieved by a section of the Labour party and the media, with BBC/Guardian leading the charge, and with near-unanimous compliance from broadcasters and press.
The coup was successful, and the staus quo ante restored. We now have a compliant and neutered opposition, and a Tory government which is steadily deforming the state in its own image.
The media who carried it out continue as if nothing happened. They carry on in their career trajectories, they are rewarded, they are championed. No adverse consequences attach to them. It’s as if nothing happened.
The MPs who screamed about second Holocausts and suitcases in the hall, they carry on. Just carry on, as if they had not just committed a violent and brutal coup. ‘Who, us?’ It’s as if nothing happened.
We’re all supposed to ‘move on’. Because that’s what you do after a coup: you move on. Moving on is the next act in this slow-motion assassination, in which the first act, the screaming and hate and madness, is all forgotten and everything is normal again.
Act 3 will be to deny it ever happened at all.
A successful coup writes its own history, and it will of course never call itself a coup. It will be allowed to fade into the near-past as we attend to other, more urgent, matters, and soon it will have quietly obliterated all trace of itself.
As if nothing happened.
As if nothing happened.
>status quo ante
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