31-07-21 08:05:00,

When the Soviet Union was invented, the one thing its supporters and opponents agreed on was that it was a grand experiment. No such state had ever existed. Indeed it was a feature of Communist states that they tried to cut everyone off from the past – Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge displaced most of the Cambodian population, destroyed their towns and villages and moved them into new ones so there was no content to anyone's life before the Khmer Rouge, a process known as "atomisation".

Consequently views on that experiment elsewhere became polarised. Some felt that the system was so tightly controlled that it would never fall. Others sought every last sign, however small, that the experiment was going to fail.

It is often described as "populism" – identifying what a certain aggressive segment of the population thinks, and pitting that segment against "the system" which the same politicians who do this are part of. However it goes deeper than that, which is what makes the UK's variety of populism unique.

BoJo's Clown Show has inflicted on its forgotten plague-ridden islands a new experiment which cannot possibly succeed. It is not a matter of "us" versus "them". It is about taking one aspect of populism to absurd lengths, just to see if it can be done – as victory would be so much of a boost to one already vast ego that the temptation is impossible to resist.

Reductio Ad Absurdum

One reason you end up with "us versus them" situations is that some people feel that the rules made by other people are wrong and are hindering them. So they do the opposite for the sake of it, thinking they are "liberating" the "good" people from the rules invented by their persecutors to keep them in their place.

Former Soviet citizens know exactly where this leads. When you get rid of everyone else's rules, you replace them with a system much more rigid and repressive than the one you were complaining about. There is no tolerance for deviation from the new orthodoxy, because it can only survive as an instrument of repression, designed to benefit those who impose it, rather than because it has any intrinsic merit, which can withstand difference.

The UK has a reputation for tolerance on the global stage,

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