What kick can a still quite influential, prosperous, largely functional country get from thinking of itself, as foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt would do in October 2018, as a nation incarcerated in a neo-Stalinist prison of cruel subjection? The frisson comes, surely, from the allure of irresponsibility. In the bondage games playing out in the English reactionary imagination, Britain has spent forty-five years hanging from the ceiling in the Red Room of Pain, with clamps on its nipples and a gag in its mouth. For a significant part of its ruling class, this is a posture of absolute powerlessness
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