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Foreword by Wikipedia
In political science a legitimation crisis occurs when a governing structure still retains the legal authority by which to govern, but is not able to demonstrate that its practical functioning fulfills the end for which it was instituted.
Three characteristics may be linked with a legitimation crisis.
- Policy incoherence: Government employees are so busy, they don't necessarily know what they are looking at.
- Institutional will is lost: Employees are not careful about tainting a government institution with decisions which may be seen as mistaken or unpopular.
- Loss of public confidence. The public begins to lose faith in the government to act efficiently and effectively.
Britain is currently going through a legitimation crisis which has cast most of the institutions of government and the state as dubious, duplicitous and downright untrustworthy. Obviously this crisis hasn't suddenly happened overnight but it is an unfolding process with what Freud might have called an overdetermined combination of multiple factor causes and drives. It is perhaps paradoxical that the more celebrities are elevated the more they are vilified in the media and this rolling iconaclism engulfs the entire political and social 'establishment'.
Case Study 1
The Great and the Good no longer exist since Jimmy Savile finally killed them off, or was that the Queen's portrait artist and performer of that famous bondage anthem Tie Me Kanagaroo Down Sport, Australian superstar and darling of the BBC for more than half a century - Rolf Harris.
Harris sang "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" (with The Beatles singing backing vocals) in the first edition of the From Us to You BBC radio shows, in December 1963. Harris rewrote the song specially for The Beatles.
On 31 December 1976, Harris performed his hit song "Two Little Boys" on BBC'1's A Jubilee of Music, celebrating British pop music for the impending Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Harris's portrait of The Queen was voted by readers of the Radio Times the third favourite portrait of Her Majesty. The royal portrait was exhibited at Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, and was exhibited on a tour of public galleries in the UK.
On 31 December 1976, Harris performed his hit song "Two Little Boys" on BBC'1's A Jubilee of Music, celebrating British pop music for the impending Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Harris's portrait of The Queen was voted by readers of the Radio Times the third favourite portrait of Her Majesty. The royal portrait was exhibited at Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, and was exhibited on a tour of public galleries in the UK.
Rolf was always loved by the Royals, a real colonial treasure that was swept up by the BBC and beamed into almost every home in Britain for five decades.
Harris was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire
(MBE) in 1968; he was advanced to Officer (OBE) in 1977, then to
Commander (CBE) in 2006.
In 1989 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), and was advanced to Officer (AO) in the Queen's 2012 Birthday Honours. In 2001 he was awarded the Centenary Medal "for service to entertainment, charity and the community".
Harris has received two honorary doctorates: from the University of East London in 2007; and from Liverpool Hope University in 2010
In 2008 Harris was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. ( Australian Recording Industry Association).
In 2012, he was made a Fellow of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) .
In 2012, he was made a Fellow of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) .
Everything in Rolf's life was going just fine and dandy until March 2013 when he was arrested as part of Operation Yewtree the rather belated Metropolitan Police investigation into Jimmy Savile's sex life ongoing since 2012 and netting some pretty big names in British popular culture.
According to our old friend Wikipedia again:-
"Harris appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court
on 23 September 2013, charged with nine counts of indecent assault and
four counts of making indecent images of children. His lawyer indicated
that Harris will be pleading not guilty and he was subsequently bailed. A plea hearing at Southwark Crown Court has been set for 14 January 2014 and the trial will commence on 30 April 2014."I have no more to say on this ongoing court case, but as an illustration and indeed a metaphor for the legitimation crisis itself.... usually more evident in the political sphere than in the glitzy world of the monarchy/celebrity British and international glitteratti! The leakage of this crisis goes deeper into the heart of contemporary Britain as the popular media consumes its own products to attempt to remain profitable in a contracting market.
In the disUnited Queendom if Great Britain the fouth estate is at war with legislators while it has been fatally holed below the waterline by the new fith estate, bloggersand social networkers and is sinking along with all the other estates of the realm. If Britannia till rules the waves it is from below them nowadays not above them any longer.
Jimmy Savile was at the very heart of the British establishment with almost unbelieveable influence and social clout. His fall from grace was faster than the collapse of the twin towers and as everyone knows they collapsed into their own footprint at the speed of gravity, Jimmy Savile and the WTC both demolished as the BBC's credibility went down with Building Seven. Along with the late Savile... the whole British honours system and basis of the British establishment has lurched alarmingly in the ever deepening aftershock. Like Rolf, Jimmy was well in with the RoyalsThe monarchy are not of course 'the government' as such. England unlike Scotland doesn't actually have a government, nor like Wales and Northern Ireland does it have a national assembly either. There is of course a British institution we call the government but it is the Queen's government, not ours. Politicians do get elected by a diminishing number of people who can bother to go out to vote yes, but they don't represent anything other than their own narrow personal and party interests.
The current British government wasn't even elected by those in the four countries that comprise the UK whose voters did bother to turn out for the Westminster elections, they were cobbled together by bankers and lobbyists and God knows who?
The alliance between new and old money which takes in these media celebs and the old landowning Norman aristocrats are by and large in favour of globalism of course. Why shouldn't they be?
It is they the globalist elite who avail themselves of offshore tax havens, like the despicable Margaret Thatcher and her family have done for example. Her £12million Central London mansion where Lady Thatcher spent the last years of her life is owned by an anonymous trust registered in the British Virgin Islands – a notorious tax haven.
Through
this arrangement she seems to have avoided up to £5million in inheritance
tax – the 40% that would have been due if it was owned by any UK resident, which of course in reality Margaret Thatcher was.
This actually is just the tip of the corruption iceberg in post-Thatcherite Britain whose eponymous leader was always a cunning old con artist of course, but even those people who actually voted for her now know (some of) the truth about her nefarious non dom tax status, too late of course as ever to put the matter right.
This actually is just the tip of the corruption iceberg in post-Thatcherite Britain whose eponymous leader was always a cunning old con artist of course, but even those people who actually voted for her now know (some of) the truth about her nefarious non dom tax status, too late of course as ever to put the matter right.
Even private sector multinational public opinion and information harvesters like TNS Global a world leader in the belief in the existence of a Commitment Economy and the secret agents of Mammon in the murky world of shopping can discover this for themselves from their own super penetrative research.
In May this year TNS gloomily announced that:-
In May this year TNS gloomily announced that:-
"....(a) recent survey showed that British people feel trapped in an
unfair class system and feel politically disempowered as they do not
trust politicians, the media, or business leaders. This downbeat picture
of low morale in austerity Britain emerges from opinion polling by TNS
BMRB which was conducted among 1196 adults."
The survey found only 17% trusted UK government ministers, but even that was better than the 14% who trusted MPs generally and the mere10% who said they trusted 'popular newspaper journalists'. The BBC did slightly better.. trusted by 28% of population which of course means that the British establishment's primary media mouthpiece was actually distrusted by 72% of the research population.
The survey found only 17% trusted UK government ministers, but even that was better than the 14% who trusted MPs generally and the mere10% who said they trusted 'popular newspaper journalists'. The BBC did slightly better.. trusted by 28% of population which of course means that the British establishment's primary media mouthpiece was actually distrusted by 72% of the research population.
The present government's policies have not only been incoherent as the first indicator of legitimation crisis would predict, but completely irrational like the handing of contracts for catastrophically dangerous nuclear technology to government owned companies in China and France. David Cameron is not only widely perceived as the dishonourable member for Wall Street, but also the loyal messenger from Beijing and the shameless plaything of Paris as well. Globalism is clearly a doctrine based upon doing nothing for your own electors whilst bending over backwards to service various interests from abroad. Cameron behaves like an economic streetwalker touting himself on behalf of his rich pals while doing selfies with Barack Obama and Danish leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt... at the Mandela photo-op and hypocrisy fest in South Africa this week.
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| Lightweights Spoiling Mrs Obama's Memorial Mandela Moment |
This image is the epitome of empty and failing celebtocracy captured perfectly in one single shot.
In the next part - Legitimation Crisis Britain II - we will be considering the potential death of political parties and the end of representative democracy as it has evolved across the various territories comprising the United Kingdom today and since the UK was first created in 1707.
here's a thought...............I'm sat here watching a 'special' edition of Question Time, presented us usual by David Dimbleby from Johannesburg with a panel of various South African political personalities in a room full of angry black South Africans discussing life after Mandela. . Many of these angry black South Africans are calling for radical land distribution similar to ( but hopefully more successful than and lass brutal than) Robert Mugabes land redistribution in Zimbabwe. I'm thinking angry black South Africans are not the only ones who have effectively had their land stolen. Neither are they alone in needing some sort of radical land redistribution, hopefully starting with the afore mentioned Thatcher mansion and land.
ReplyDeleteHi Loretta, I have a newspaper clipping somewhere of the Unemployed Against Apartheid demo I was involved in when I was secretary of an unemployed action group in 1984.
DeleteIn the local newspaper article I am correctly quoted (gasp) as stating that there was "a form of social apartheid in Britain between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' and therefore it was I said, entirely appropriate that local unemployed people express solidarity with the excluded and marginalised black South African majority'. Here we are 30 years down the road and the situation has only deteriorated still further
The distribution of land and other fundamental social assests are the true measure of partipation in the life of the society in which we live.
I suppose the central question for me is who or what created Robert Mugabe 50 odd years ago... and what are the conditions that have sustained him in power now for more than 30 years?
Between 1994 and 2008 the Queen had him as a 'Knight Grand Cross in the Order of the Bath'... before he was kicked out of the British establishment when the Queen retracted the honour... ironically because of Mugabe's alleged... "abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided" ...
The pot calling the kettle "black" (extremist....) or what?
Anyway, I think we all are in need of a bit of land/wealth redistribution myself.
The gap between rich and poor has grown faster in Britain than in any other developed country over recent decades.
Even according to the 'Torygraph' no less...the reason for this increase is mainly down to the fact that the share of total income taken by the richest 1 per cent has doubled, from 7.1 per cent in 1970 to 14.3 per cent in 2005.
Within this group, the super-rich 0.1 per cent of top earns took some 5 per cent of total pre-tax income.
As some of your adopted countrymen will gladly attest there is a "parcel of rogues" in Westminster, what some are less willing to mention is that 59 of them were elected in Scottish constituencies, but nevertheless this unmandated government we have now, like the Labour government before... them delivers an IMF driven cuts agenda in the greatest global rip-off of all time.
One of the hoped for outcome of Scottish independence would be that it would break up this cosy little cartel and add some useful uncertainty into the economics of the British archipelago - or Airstrip One as post Orwellian geopolitics nerds like me sometimes call these 'occupied' but apparently also 'sceptered' isles.
I wonder if politico-glitterati will be as approving of Mugabe like land reform in SA Loretta, somehow I don't think so. In the perpetual war of the corporations against the populations that would be a definite knock back I think. Viva independent Scotland I say let's start to deconstruct and quietly dismantle Airstrip One... while Dual Power continues to ignore the establishment and its corrupted institutions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_power
Cheers Loretta!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8935943/Gap-between-rich-and-poor-growing-fastest-in-Britain.html
Yes..............I agree with all of the above. But as I get older I feel more and more powerless and less hopeful of any sort of change. Part of the reason I want independence so much is because its the only real vehicle for change I can see on the horizon. It will give us the opportunity to vote in the government we want using proportional representation and it will make the rest of the UK sit up and take stock. I have this creeping realization that we ( and the U.S.) are the real 'baddies', we are the invaders, the exploiters and the oppressors. It makes me very nervous. I found a video on a blog that I follow and if you've not already seen it, I think you'll find it interesting. Its long but worth the effort.
Deletehttp://arabwomanblues.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/fear-not-path-of-truth.html
Thanks for posting a link to that very interesting film about one man's coming to terms with the crimes against humanity he was part of. It is in many ways an optimistic film that shows that people can and do change and grow out of their experiences. Ross Caputi is hope at Christmas, his film is excellent, his supporters glittering, his endorsement in the media a valuable insight into heroicism today.
DeleteI am pleased to hear Ross Caputi's testament and welcome it, but I can also recall hearing other ex-soldiers condemn the reality of war when really I think the trick must be don't do it in the first place. Realisation obviously can't undo the damage that has been done. I'm glad this ex-warrior has seen the error of his and his officer's ways, but until young men and young women reject the use of force as a legitimate tool in fporeign policy we can only expect post mortums and lessons learnt.
Having said all that films like this should be shown in every svhool and every home. As the centenary of the Great War dawns in the New Year I shall be celebrating survival, refusal and mutiny as high points in an otherwise tragic tale of mechanical slaughter and utterly wasted generations of lost minds and depleted culture. It is true that all American wars are wars of aggression as are most of Britain's foreign adventures too. There is no such thing as a 'just war' although some conflicts do have a discernable if twisted logic... American and NATO's wars are simply psychopathic, dullard, thuggish and criminal. Scottish independence would give the whole rotten shooting match a wonderful kick up the arse, I'd like that to happen Loretta :-)
Yeah I have to say I thought that shot of those idiots enjoying themselves at the funeral to be totally disrespectful. Here in NZ I have to say we have been rather enjoying our illustrious leader's discomfiture at being labelled as "unidentified" by the Americans in a picture where he sits next to your illustrious Cameron, clearly hoping for whatever crumbs he can get. Serves the ass-licking bloke right, I reckon. Mandela who stood for equality and peace etc is lucky enough to get these racist capitalist guys at his funeral while the real people and the protesters who worked to end apartheid were either left at home or had to find their own fares - that's how it worked here anyhow.
ReplyDeleteAs for Rolf and his mates (you forgot Ken from Corrie) they seem to belong to an anachronistic group of men who seem to think that the female race exist only for their enjoyment and that even little kids faced with great big men are capable of actually giving consent, which appears to be being role modelled to younger generations, at least as far as New Zealand's experience seems to be showing recently. And it is my opinion that racism, sexism etc is all fuelled by the bully boys of the capitalist movement where everything is commodified and nothing is allowed to be held as sacred or respected. Even Mandela.
Excellent analysis, AA. The disgusting Thatcher story concerning her mansion brings to mind a favorite throwback comedy of the Ealing studios era, "Passport to Pimlico" (1949), with Stanley Holloway, where a group of irate Londoners discover that their little district is actually part of Burgundy and therefore is no longer subject to onerous post-war rationing or any laws passed by Parliament.
DeleteThe difference is of course the film was a "happy idea" where ordinary people lucked into something totally unexpected. This is chicanery of the highest order, something that would have made all but a Bourbon King or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos blush No wonder The-Lady-Not-For-Turning stated there was "really no such thing as society."
Lady Thatcher "final gift to the nation" being an elaborate and secret tax dodge should come as no surprise to Americans who remember that Ronald Reagan came into national politics in the USA in mid-1960's only after some powerful millionaires bought his modest land holdings in California's under-developed San Fernando Valley for 10-15 times what the acreages were worth. Shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected governor of the "Golden State" he and wife Nancy came into a 660-acre ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara, one of the toniest spots about.
Then, upon leaving the White House, they received a new mansion from their "friends" in the exclusive Bel Air section of West Los Angeles. You would think the smell of corruption then and now would cause real populism to come forth and demand an end to money in politics. Were that it would be so.
It is testament to the low state of public expectations for high public officials that such outright bribes go largely into the category of historical footnotes.
So it's no wonder politicians think they are entitled to behave like frat boys and half drunk debutantes at memorial services. Look what others before them have gotten away with!
You can't be much less significant on the global stage than if you are overshadowed by Dave Cameron, but John Key deserves the nonentity tag as much as any lameduck IMF shill does I think Iri. I don't think anyone here was encouraged to think they had an option of attending the Mandela gig... we as a nation had more than overdrawn on our arsehole account with the ones who did go, it was never presented like a participataive event here...like the World Cup or the Olympics.
DeleteYou are quite right to upbraid me for not mentioning Ken from Corrie, sorry, because Ken is one of the the few Corrie characters I do know, he was in it when I last watched the programme in about the Spring of 1965. He was a student teacher then as I recall.
There are so many celebs in the clink for kiddy fiddling its hard to keep up if you don't read the tabloids everyday. I think we have to cast our minds back to the celebrity/groupie ethos that was part of the dominant culture in the latter part of the 20th century to make sense of any of this.
I agree with you about the bigotry fuelled by aggressive zombie capitalism and the commodification of people while corporations enjoy personhood and the rights of the individual in a mad world of suicidal excesses.
Nothing here works anymore, every organisation is to some lesser or greater degree a 'failed' one, standards have slipped and we have all the conditions that comprise a full blown legitimation crisis.
This cisis like all crises is characterised by great dangers and unfolding opportunities, the trick as ever is to avoid the former while fully exploiting the latter. To me this is the alchemy of our Age Iri, thanks for your comments.
Thanks Doug ...those Pimlico Burgundians wanted both their cake and eat it, they didn't want the rationing... but they never complained about being the only part of Burgundy not invaded by the Nazi hordes a few years previous.
DeleteThe thought has just occured to me that 'Passport to Pimlico' may have been a precursor to the "me me society" where exceptionalism stops at the front door.
But then I decided it was probably more a harbinger of localism and the collapse of the nation state which is a lot more encouraging I think, during these long cold winter nights.
It is no exageration or fantasy to declare the world is run by gangsters and hoodlums and the black economy is the only real economy there is in zombie capitalism's ruins.
Arms dealing, drug running and prostitution are the only growth industries in town now that slavery has been reintroduced to meet the demand and the mafia are in control of the nation state hologram global franchise.
We are repeating the fall of Rome all over again, not forgetting that the word "palatial" originally referred to mansions on Rome's Palatine Hill, the origin of the word "palace" lies there I believe.
The only difference this time is that it is the Barbarians who occupy all the mansions and it is the civilised masses of decent people with burning torches and placards asking "what's going on in there?"
Thanks for your comments Doug, you are of course quite right when you describe the antics of our representatives as behaveing like "frat boys and half drunk debutantes" ... no decorum at all.. its all a big scam to the politico-celebs.
Somehow the infamous "selfie" shot is however a more honest account of who these people really are than a thousand biographies could ever tell Doug. The legimation crisis means the game's up.
And on a happier note, its Christmas Eve and I would just like to wish you seasons greetings :-),
ReplyDeletemay Santa be good to you this year and may we all be good to each other next year :-)
Thanks Loretta....hope your having a wonderful Yule. Upward and onward into 2014!
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