Civitas Blog

In it, Paul Dukas’ symphonic poem of that title is brought to cartoon-life with an initially hubristic, but ultimately very much chastened, Mickey Mouse in the role of the Sorcerer’s hapless Apprentice.

Charged by his master late one day with the unenviable chore of drawing water from a well and bringing it into the kitchen by pail, instead of carrying out the task himself, Mickey has recourse to his Master’s spell-book so as to summons to life the kitchen-broom to carry out the task for him. This allows Mickey to settle back for an unearned nap in which he dreams of using his newly gained powers to control the very forces of nature itself.

He is woken from his slumbers at a point in his dream at which he is busy conducting the sea to realise that, instead of coming from the waves he is summoning up around him, the water lapping at his ankles in the dream comes not from them but from the steadily rising waters the broom is still relentlessly continuing to carry in, even though it is now massively surplus to requirements.

Without success, because lacking the magical know-how, Mickey tries in vain to command the broom to stop. In desperation, he takes an axe to i,t shattering the broom into a thousand splinters that simply turn into clones of the original broom and continue the relentless task in a way that threatens to entirely flood the Sorcerer's home.

Mickey is only rescued from his self-induced plight by the re-appearance of the Sorcerer who puts an end to the chaos by means of a spell.

A suitably chastened Mickey is ordered to clean up the mess he has created, sadder but wiser for having learned the limits of his competence.

The analogy between the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the present Government should, I hope, be clear.

Like Mickey, the Government has apparently convinced itself it has found an easy way to discharge its responsibilities through conjuring up new life with which to carry them out. In its case, its responsibilities amount to managing the macro-economy as well as catering to all the public services with which the state now finds tself saddled. That way has been for it deliberately to open the sluice-gates of cheap foreign labour by enabling and encouraging vastly increased rates of immigration since 1997.

Lke the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Government is now beginning to discover that it cannot cope with or control the forces that it mustered up to help it. Instead of proving a boon, unprecedentedly high levels of immigration and asylum- seeking threaten to become a menace. Unlike in the cartoon, however, there appears to be no Sorcerer waiting in the wings to enter as a deus ex machina to restore order to the chaos that it has created.

… Or isn’t there?

For, surely, to the Sorcerer in the film, there corresponds in reality the great British public. Although never consulted by the Government before it decided to open the sluice-gates of mass immigration, the public did accept the Government’s offer of increased public spending and full employment, all promised without raising taxes.

It was a hopelessly unrealistic promise that the Government has only been able to maintain the illusion of keeping by bringing in ever greater numbers of immigrants to fill low paid jobs in the public and private sector and keep the economy on the boil.

However, there has been a massive down-side to this Faustian pact which the electorate struck with the Labour government. The price of swollen but inefficient public services and cheap domestic labour has been increasingly segregated and racially divided neighbourhoods and an increasingly disaffected white working class.

Turning the country into an asylum threatens in time to drive near all of us Barking mad!

There are other and better remedies than a lurch to the extreme right, but ultimately they require the British electorate to realise that, just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there can be no such a thing as a very cheap one that is also nutritious and not poisonous.

In the absence of the electorate learning to moderate its appetites and expectations of public services, I fear the British electorate may yet turn for help to a very evil and still worse demon who will promise to clear up the mess the present Government has created by its short-sighted and misguided immigration policies through draconian measures of its own that, had an equivalent of them been shown in the Disney cartoon, would have qualified it for an 18-rating.