1. A Change in the Political Culture
In this year’s UK general election, the victorious Labour Party received 33.9% of the popular vote – 9,660,081 votes in total – compared to 32.1% of the vote in 2019. In contrast, the Conservative Party’s share of the popular vote fell from 43.6% in 2019 to just 23.6%: 6,755,953 votes in total.
What this tells us, therefore, is that its wasn’t so much that Labour won the election as that the Conservatives lost it, with nearly half of their former voters deserting them. Some of these former voters – around two million – simply didn’t vote at all: a level of abstention reflected in the overall turnout, which, at just 60%, was down 7.3% from 2019, making it the second lowest turnout in history. A much larger proportion, however, voted instead for the newly formed Reform Party, which received 4,072,947 votes in total, or 14.3% of the popular vote.
What this also tells us, therefore, is that this mass defection of former Conservative voters was not due to them becoming disillusioned with the underlying principles of conservatism. After all they did not defect to the Labour Party, which, despite winning nearly two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons and increasing its share of the popular vote, did so on a reduced turnout and also actually lost votes. Those former Conservative voters who did not simply abstain defected rather to the Reform Party, which is generally regarded as being more conservative or ‘right wing’ than the Conservative Party, strongly suggesting, therefore, that the disillusionment of former Conservative voters was not with conservatism, itself, but with a party which, over the last fourteen years in office, has not been conservative enough, if indeed at all.
If it has thus been the Conservative Party which has changed in recent years – rather than its supporters – this therefore raises the question as to how and when this change occurred. For the one thing that is fairly certain is that it didn’t happen overnight. Nor did anyone ever announce that the party was changing in the way that Tony Blair announced the creation of New Labour at his party’s conference in 1994. It was that event, however, which almost certainly set in motion the process by which the Conservative Party was also forced to change. For when Tony Blair transformed the old Labour Party into New Labour, he didn’t just change the Labour Party, he changed the entire culture of British politics.
I say this because while, before then, the British political landscape had been dominated by the same two parties as today – the Conservative and Labour Parties – each of them was based on a far more clearly defined and distinctive political philosophy. The Conservative Party believed in free market economics, fiscal rectitude, love of country and the centrality of the family in providing both social cohesion and social support. The Labour Party believed in the state ownership of industry, central economic planning and the state provision of a whole range of public services as well as a basic level of social security.
The most important thing to understand about those holding to these opposing philosophies, however, is that while each party naturally appealed to different sections of society – the Conservatives to the middle class, the Labour Party to the working class – they both nevertheless believed that their political philosophy was best for the country as a whole. The Conservatives quite genuinely believed that free market economics was the best way to promote the wealth, wellbeing and freedom of everyone, while the Labour Party not only believed that a centrally planned economy could be more efficient and productive than a market based economy but that the redistribution of wealth through the state provision of free social services would produce a fairer and therefore happier society. Both parties were therefore able to present their vision for the country with absolute sincerity and simply allow the voters to choose between them.
That all changed in the 1990s, however, when, after two decades of industrial decline and inflation under Labour in the 1960s and 70s, followed by two decades of recovery and growing prosperity under the Tories during the 80s and 90s, Tony Blair realised that the old Labour Party, with its traditional socialist ideology, could never win an election gain. He therefore decided to remake the old Labour Party as New Labour, the defining characteristic of which was a blend of free market economics and state run public services, the exact proportions of this combination to be determined by the voters, themselves, through the extensive use of focus groups. In short, it was the application of modern marketing techniques to politics. First, one did the market research to find out what people wanted and then one packaged it up and sold it to them through the skilful use of the media.
And it worked! In 1997, New Labour won the general election with a majority even bigger than the current Labour government’s, leading to thirteen years in power during which it was the Conservatives who started to believe that they would never win an election again. In fact, it wasn’t until after their third consecutive electoral defeat in 2005 that they finally gave up on ‘conviction’ politics, as the old style politics was known, and elected David Cameron as their leader: a modernizer who set about the task of defeating New Labour by adopting exactly the same strategy, thereby not only making the new style of politics the norm but the only style of politics which most British politicians today know or understand.
The problem with basing one’s programme for government purely on what one thinks the electorate is most likely to vote for, however, is not just that it’s rather cynical but that it does not necessarily produce the best results in government. Without a unifying set of principles to ensure that one’s programme is coherent, in fact, one can easily end up with a ragbag of policies some of which may even be contradictory. It is fairly easy to imagine, for instance, how a pledge to tighten up environmental regulations might turn out to be at odds with a promise to increase house building, both of which polices would almost certainly be popular with the voters. Given the extent to which each of these policies would have to be watered down to accommodate the other, however, it is very unlikely that any of these voters would be happy with the results. By trying to please everyone, in fact, one can easily end up pleasing no one, leaving everyone feeling betrayed.
Basing one’s priorities for government purely on what the people say they want can also lead to a high degree of short-termism, wherein politicians opt for quick fixes rather than trying to solve the underlying problem. Capping energy prices, for instance, may solve the short term problem of people being unable to heat their homes and may therefore be highly popular, but not only can it actually make the problem worse when the cap is eventually removed and prices are suddenly hiked, but the reduction in the energy companies’ revenues during the period of the cap may well lead to a reduction in the capital investment required to increase supply and hence bring prices down.
Worst of all, however, a political culture based purely on promising the electorate whatever polling data says would be most popular almost inevitably leads to a level of convergence between the parties. Yes, they may differentiate themselves on fringe issues and in the way their policies are presented but, based on the same polling data, their core policies will nearly always turn out to be the same, as indeed has been the case ever since the last clear division between the parties over Brexit. If one takes, for instance, what are arguably the three most important issues in last five years – at least in terms of their effects on people’s lives – climate change, the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine – there has not been an iota of difference between any of the parties with seats in parliament: a level of unity which, in itself, would seem to constitute a distinct lack of democratic choice for the voter. Even more alarmingly, there has hardly been a single word of dissent on any of these issues in the House of Commons: a fact which, given the scale of the economic intervention each of these commonly adopted positions has entailed and the level of economic damage each has done, must seem utterly incomprehensible to those Conservative voters who thought that had voted for the party of free market economics.
Take climate change, for instance, and the net zero targets which Theresa May’s government enshrined in British law in 2019. Admittedly, most of the economic damage had already been done by the Labour government’s 2008 Climate Change Act, which didn’t just abolish the free market for electricity in the UK but actually undermined the entire economic basis of the country’s electricity generation. I say this because, before then, the National Grid, itself, had operated as a kind of market, giving priority to low cost electricity generators and only bringing higher priced generators on to the grid as demand increased during peak periods. This meant that generators not only had to decide whether they wanted to be low cost ‘base load’ suppliers or higher priced peak time suppliers and select their energy sources and generating technology accordingly, they also had to be competitive in whichever sector of the market they chose.
The 2008 Act changed all this, however, by making it mandatory that, whenever electricity from intermittent renewable technology was available, the National Grid should always give it priority, even though it was more expensive. This meant that the National Grid could no longer award base load contracts to low cost generators in that it could no longer guarantee that it would be able to take power from them 24 hours a day. These low cost generators were then further penalised by being made to pay ‘green’ taxes on whatever electricity they were allowed to produce in order to subsidise the high cost of electricity produced by renewables. The result was that the price of electricity was pushed up all across the board and, despite the introduction of caps and other measures, in one way or another this higher price was inevitably passed on to both consumers and industry alike, increasing inflation and making British industry less competitive.
When the Conservatives were returned to power in 2010, therefore, it might have been expected that they would have restored market principles and economic sanity to an electricity market sorely in need of them. After steering the economy to a somewhat belated recovery after the 2008 financial crash, however, Theresa May decided to impose even more challenges on an already greatly weakened British industry by setting a timetable and targets for the revolutionary transformation of its energy base.
Not, of course, that many industries have so far felt the impact of this transformation – we are still in its very early stages – but one which clearly has is the automotive industry, which is being forced to scrap billions of pounds worth of investment in petrol and diesel engine technology and invest billions more in the technology, plant and equipment required to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs), even though there is still very little demand for them. This is not only because EVs are more expensive than petrol and diesel engined vehicles and have a lower second-hand value – most of their cost going into their batteries, which have a shorter life than the vehicles themselves – but because the publically available infrastructure for recharging them is still rather thin on the ground and is likely to remain so.
This is because, in order to fully recharge a car’s batteries in somewhere between thirty and sixty minutes – as opposed to the eight to ten hours it takes at home – ‘rapid’ recharging stations have to deliver their charge at a rate of between 50 and 75 kilowatts, which makes them fairly expensive. Even thirty to sixty minutes is fairly slow, however, when compared to the five minutes it takes to fill the average petrol tank. This has therefore led to the development of ‘ultra-rapid’ rechargers, which deliver their charge at rates between 100 and 350 kilowatts, reducing the recharging time to as little as ten minutes. These ultra-rapid recharging stations, however, are very expensive, not least because of the amount of copper in their heavy duty cables, which also makes them a target for thieves. What’s more, an ultra-rapid charging station with eight 250 kilowatt charging points, for example, would require a power supply of 2 megawatts, which is roughly equivalent to the power supply required to power a typical village or suburban housing estate, which, in turn, requires a substantial upgrade to the local power grid.
This therefore brings us to the real problem. For according to the RAC, there are currently 41.2 million motor vehicles on British roads: 32.2 million private cars and 9 million commercial vehicles. Assuming that all of them were converted to EVs, as the UK’s net zero legislation requires, and assuming that, on average, each of them had to be recharged once a week, this would mean that Britain would need around 118,000 of these 250 kilowatt charging points or 14,500 eight point charging stations distributed around the country. What’s more, these would draw an extra 30 gigawatts of power from the grid, requiring an extra 37.5% of generating capacity, all of it to be supplied by renewables.
Of course, not everyone will actually use public recharging stations. Some people will continue to charge their EVs at home overnight. Even if this cut demand for public recharging by half, however, the cost of building even seven or eight thousand eight point recharging stations, along with upgrading the power grid to supply them, would still run into hundreds of billions of pounds. And this doesn’t even include the cost of building the extra generating capacity, most of which would be required whether people recharged their cars at home or at public recharging stations. Even more significantly, this only covers one aspect of the UK’s net zero commitment: EVs. We haven’t even started on the cost of replacing all the gas boilers and gas stoves in people’s homes or, indeed, the costs occasioned by the impact of net zero on dozens of other areas of our lives, some of which we may not even be aware of yet.
The good news, however, is that none of this is ever actually going to happen. It is just not technically feasible. And we couldn’t afford it anyway! The UK government is currently in debt to the tune of £2.55 trillion, or 101.69% of GDP, which means that, with UK Treasury bonds yielding around 4%, it is paying more than £100 billion a year in interest, which it has to borrow, thereby adding further to the debt. In short, we are broke and on the verge of bankruptcy. This whole net zero project is therefore pure fantasy: a delusional chimera dreamed up by people who have become detached from reality, which, in the case of the Conservatives, is almost entirely the result of them having first become detached from the principles of a political philosophy which would have prevented them from succumbing to such nonsense.
I say this because one of those principles, of course, is the belief that free markets, in which hundreds of independent businesses compete to make a living, invariably come up with better solutions to problems than government committees. This is because, in order to be successful, commercial enterprises have to ensure that any solutions they offer to the market are affordable, actually work and are what people want, none of which is the case with regard to the wholesale replacement of petrol and diesel engined vehicles with EVs. It is only because a Conservative government abandoned free market economics and turned, instead, to top down central planning that it thought that all it had to do was decree that this wholesale replacement should take place and, somehow, all the technological and economic problems would be solved and this dream world would magically come into being.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that nearly half of all former Conservative supporters should have abandoned a party which has so manifestly abandoned itself. What is surprising is that the party doesn’t appear to have anticipated this and done anything to prevent it, which rather suggests that it still doesn’t really understand what it has done. What this also tells us, however, is that there has been yet another transformation in our political culture. For while all political parties are now very good at selling their policies to the public via the media, they no longer appear to listening to what the public actually wants. That part of Tony Blair’s formula for success seems to have completely disappeared. For if one actually asked people today what they thought were Britain’s most pressing problems, most would probably say inflation, some would say immigration and some might even say the potholes in our roads. Hardly anyone, however, would say ‘climate change’. After all, no one in Britain has yet been killed, injured or even mildly inconvenienced by the world getting slightly warmer. For many people, on the other hand, net zero and its associated schemes, such as London’s ‘Ultra Low Emission Zone’, are the bane of their lives.
If the policies of neither of the two main parties on such issues as climate change, the handling of the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine originated with their voters, however, the question one has to ask is from whence they did originate. And the answer is almost certainly from three distinct but interconnected groups.
2. Who Decides Party Policy
The first of these, of course, is the media which is always far more positive about communicating a party’s policies if it not only agrees with them but has actually had an input in framing them, something which happens at two different levels.
The first is the corporate level where the owners of large media corporations with interests in other industries – whether these owners be individuals or financial institutions – may discretely but directly lobby governments on behalf of these other interests in return for the support of their media arms. It is highly likely, for instance, that a wealth fund manager with a large portfolio that includes sizeable investments in various media companies would also have interests in the burgeoning renewables industry, which he would naturally like the government to continue subsidizing in return for his media companies playing down or completely ignoring the need for such subsidies. In this very neat form of symbiosis, both the government and big business – through its ownership of the media – thus gain the support of the public for something that would otherwise be entirely insupportable.
The second level then comprises those who work within the media – writers, producers, presenters and the like – most of whom have degrees in the liberal arts or humanities and live in the nation’s capital, where they continually rub shoulders with politicians, civil servants and other inhabitants of the Westminster bubble, many of whom will have attended the same universities and will certainly share much the same outlook, the most salient feature of which is a belief that their views are better informed and more enlightened than the views of those outside this exclusive group and that they are the ones, therefore, who should be deciding the country’s future. The result is that, instead of listening to what people in general are saying, they simply listen to each other, reinforcing not just their almost impregnable groupthink, but their just as inviolable sense of entitlement.
The second group which influences the adoption and development of policy then comprises those who actually formulate it, which not only includes career civil servants but a whole range of political, legal and technical advisors, many of them fairly short term and dependent on political patronage, others at the pinnacles of their careers and in prominent positions, having already distinguished themselves in their respective fields.
Not, of course, that this is particularly new. Those in power have always surrounded themselves with able people, both to advise them and to get things done. Since political parties ceased developing policy primarily on the basis on their political philosophy, however, these unelected advisors have not only played a larger role in determining policy but a more visible role in presenting it.
This was particularly evident during the Covid pandemic, for instance, when we regularly saw Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, stand up in front of the television cameras, not only to announce the latest figures chronicling the spread of the virus, but to advise and even tell people how they should be behave.
That politicians were happy to go along with this new role for what had previously been purely backroom advisors was almost certainly prompted by two considerations. The first is that it effectively absolved them of responsibility for any negative consequences resulting from the way their governments dealt with the emergency. As they continually reminded us, they were just following the science. The second is that it greatly simplified the issue. I say this because any previous Prime Minister dealing with such an epidemic would have almost certainly felt obliged to weigh multiple factors. In addition to listening to medical advice, he would have asked various economists what effect closing businesses and paying people stay at home would have, not just to the economy, but the national debt. He would then have had to consider the effect on morale of closing down such regular meeting places as pubs and churches and the effect that not allowing families to get together could have on the elderly. He would have also had to take into account the effect of closing schools on the education and socialisation of children, especially in a society largely dominated by one child families, along with the overall effect on mental health of isolating people in their homes and forcing them to wear masks and stand two metres apart whenever they went out.
By concentrating purely on the medical issues, Boris Johnson thus made life a lot easier for himself. Not only did abdicate his responsibility as Prime Minister to take a broader view, however, but by focusing attention on infection and fatality rates, he actually fostered a climate of fear and dread when he should have been urging people to stay calm and go about their lives as normally as possible. Indeed, it could be argued that his delegation of responsibility for handling the epidemic to specialists in a particular field and his consequent failure to view what was happening in a wider context, effectively turned what was actually a fairly mild epidemic into a social and economic disaster from which the country has still not fully recovered.
Nor is this problem of too narrow a focus confined to one-off emergency situations such as epidemics. For if the delegation of responsibility to specialist advisers has, as I suspect, a natural tendency to reduce the range of issues taken into account when making decisions, then in today’s culture of bureaucratic compartmentalisation this tendency will be more or less the norm all across government. The organisation charged with determining the UK’s climate change policies, for instance, is the Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent non-departmental public body formed under the 2008 Climate Change Act and staffed almost entirely by unelected climate change experts chosen primarily for their belief in climate change and their determination to prevent it. In fact, it was the CCC, rather than Theresa May’s Conservative government, which first put forward the UK’s net zero target for greenhouse gas emissions, making it highly unlikely, therefore, that the economic effects of this target would have been given very much consideration when the Climate Change Act was amended in 2019 to include it.
This then brings us to the third group which influences the adoption and development of government policy, although in this case the term ‘influences’ is a bit of an understatement. For in many cases, international institutions such as the UN, the EU and NATO do not just influence their member states; once an international treaty has been signed, they can usually find ways to put a lot of pressure on the signatories to fulfil their treaty obligations. The ultimate basis for the UK’s net zero target, for instance, is the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by committing signatories to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though by when and how much it did not specify. In this regard, the UK was thus free to set its own targets and timetable, giving it a fair amount of leeway. There are, however, treaties that impose far more stringent constraints upon their signatories.
One such is the World Health Organisation’s proposed Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, the fundamental objectives of which were agreed by the 194 WHO member states in December 2021, along with a timetable which should have seen the treaty finalised by May 2024. That this finalisation has not yet occurred is largely due to the fears of some members states, including the UK, that if we were to sign it, then in the event of another pandemic, it would not just be bureaucrats in Britain, like Sir Chris Whitty, who would determine UK government policy as to what measures it should take, it would actually be bureaucrats at the WHO.
What this highlights, therefore, are some of the very serious dangers implicit in national governments signing any international treaty under the auspices of any of these international institutions. For not only can such international commitments severely limit a government’s freedom of action, including its freedom to act on the wishes of its electorate, thereby further diminishing what little democracy may be left after public opinion has been manipulated by the media and actual policy making placed in the hands of unelected technocrats, but, unlike government legislation, which can usually be repealed by future governments, multinational international treaties may remain in perpetuity unless abrogated, which can have severe penalties.
Indeed, it raises the question as to why any government would bind itself in this way. There are, however, two not good but understandable reasons why they may choose to do so. As in the case of giving unelected technical experts more responsibility in specialised areas of policy, the first is that it, again, effectively absolves national governments of responsibility for any negative consequences resulting from their implementation of the terms of the treaty in question. Thus when, after decades of fear-mongering, it is discovered that there is no climate emergency, that marginally increasing greenhouse gases does not lead to runaway global warning and that we didn’t therefore need to destroy our economy in order to prevent it, the government of the day can simply say that, like all their predecessors, they were not only following the science but fulfilling their international treaty obligations.
At both a national and individual level, however, there is a more profound reason why today’s politicians are drawn to this kind of internationalism. At the national level, of course, it stems from the history of the 20th century in which millions of people were killed in two world wars, leading those who survived them to vow that such carnage should never happen again. It was to this end, therefore, that these international institutions were created, not only to prevent war, but to help create a wealthier and healthier world through collaboration rather than competition. Any nation which does not toe this internationalist line and chooses to go its own way is therefore regarded as an international pariah, especially by the West, which regards itself as the moral guardian of this internationalist world order and shuns the representatives of any country it regards as outside the fold.
This then leads to a very similar attitude at the individual level. For national leaders naturally like being welcomed into the international leaders club. They do not want to be ostracized or left out, which means that they are more or less obliged to conform to the internationalist views and attitudes of their colleagues, which they can only do by working with them to solve such international problems as climate change and pandemics. The problem is that national leaders then have to go home and enshrine the agreed solution in their country’s laws, no matter how detrimental to their country’s interests these new laws may be. Indeed, it is a kind of test of a national leader’s internationalist credentials that he or she is prepared to do this. For those who pass this test, however, there are significant rewards.
Take Mark Rutte, for instance, who was Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024, when he was finally thrown out of office by the Dutch electorate for consistently putting the interests of the international community before the interests of his own people, one of the most egregious examples of which was his 2023 enactment of legislation that will eventually force around 11,700 farms to be closed and will restrict the output of many more, all to reduce the methane emissions of Dutch cows. For this selfless act of economic suicide on behalf of Dutch farmers, however, he is not to be banished from politics for the rest of his life, as many might have justly expected, but rewarded by being appointed as the next Secretary-General of NATO, a post he will take up in October 2024.
Another celebrated champion of the international order is of course Donald Tusk, former President of the European Council, who was rewarded for giving the British such a hard time over Brexit by being made Prime Minister of Poland with EU support. The cost to Poland, however, is that his remit from the EU is almost certainly to stamp out the very strong tendency among Poles towards Polish nationalism and to take Poland to war with Russia.
What is truly remarkable about each of these career moves, however, is not just how porous they reveal the interface between international institutions and national governments to be, but how abjectly submissive we all are not to be more outraged at the idea that someone could regard being Prime Minister of his country, not as the pinnacle of his career, but as a mere stepping stone to a better job, or that those in real power should be able to parachute someone into the job of Prime Minister merely to keep the people of a particular country in check.
Part of the reason for our indifference, of course, is that having handed responsibility for deciding government policy to technical specialists, the media and international institutions, the role of Prime Minister is no longer what it was. Far from being the country’s leader, all a Prime Minister has to do nowadays, in fact, is stay on message and avoid looking a complete fool in front of the cameras. The result, however, is that Britain has had five Prime Ministers over the last eight years, each as shallow and vacuous as their predecessor.
Even more fundamentally, however, the change in our political culture has actually brought forth a new political philosophy, one significantly different from either the traditional socialism of the old Labour Party or the traditional conservatism of the old Conservative Party in that it naturally reflects the values of the three groups that largely decide policy: technical specialists, the media and international institutions. For many people in Britain, of course, this is still not yet clear, not least because both Labour and the Conservatives still pretend to be their former selves, refusing to admit that their policies are more or less identical. As the new Labour government starts to reveal itself, however, this will become increasingly apparent, with the result that more and more people will become disillusioned with politics on the grounds that it makes no difference who they vote for. What they will also gradually realise, however, is that this is not an accident, that it is actually a feature of this new political philosophy and that one of its consequences is the inevitable death of democracy.
3. The New Political Philosophy
Not, of course, that advocates of the new political philosophy will ever admit to this. On the contrary, they invariably claim that are the true defenders of democracy. For while international institutions may be entirely staffed by unelected bureaucrats, most of them have governing councils on which member states are usually represented by government ministers, most of them democratically elected in one way or another. The real enemies of democracy, or so the internationalists claim, are ‘right wing’ nationalists who threaten the peace and stability of the international order by putting the interests of their own countries first in order to garner enough popular support at home to eliminate democratic opposition. Worse still, they often both achieve and justify this by claiming that their country, with its unique culture and traditions, belongs to its people, who are therefore accorded a privileged status within its borders in contrast to foreigners, especially foreigners from different cultures and traditions, who may be prevented from entering the country on what are therefore largely ethnic or racial grounds.
According to this line of reasoning, a politician who puts his own country first thus goes from nationalist to antidemocratic to racist in just two neat little steps. What’s more these two characteristics of being antidemocratic and racist have become so closely associated with nationalism in the popular imagination that any politician who loves their country and wants to see its distinctive characteristics preserved is immediately labelled a fascist.
A prime example of this is Victor Orban, who is a passionate defender of Hungary’s rather unique culture – based as it is on an equally unique combination of ancient Magyar traditions and the Roman Catholic church – and who is therefore extremely popular with his electorate, having been re-elected in each of Hungary’s last two general elections with around 60% of the vote. One of the reasons for this is that, as a Hungarian patriot, he is greatly opposed to mass immigration, especially from the Islamic world with which Hungary has fought numerous wars, and has therefore found himself at odds with the EU on several occasions, most notably during the 2015 migrant crisis, when he ordered the erection of a fence between Hungary and Serbia to block the entry of illegal immigrants and opposed the EU’s plans for a compulsory redistribution of migrants within the bloc.
In fact, this opposition between Hungary and the EU over immigration almost certainly represents the single most defining issue that separates the new internationalist political philosophy from the old fashioned politics of both left and right and is clearly one of the most important battle grounds between the two. For both sides know that if the EU can force enough immigration on countries like Hungary then their cultures and national identities will eventually become so diluted that nationalist politicians like Victor Orban will not be able to get themselves re-elected, thereby ensuring that the new internationalist political philosophy has a permanent majority wherever it is able to establish a sufficient foothold.
This is also why other methods of diluting national identity, such as the rewriting of national histories, are also being employed. For if one can rewrite the history of a country in such a way that its people come to despise the way their ancestors behaved, then they will cease to identify with their own past. And one of the best ways to do this, of course, especially in Europe and North America, is to cite the slave trade. In recent years in Britain, for instance, we have gone through a period in which the statues of anyone even remotely connected to slavery were being torn down. In fact, one didn’t even need to be involved in the slave trade, itself, to be subject to this kind of iconoclastic vandalism; one only had to be a shareholder in a company like Tate & Lyle, which, until slavery was abolished by the British government in 1833, employed slaves on its sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
The irony is, of course, that Britain was not only the first country to abolish slavery but one of the few that actually took steps to eradicate it, deploying the Royal Navy to patrol the Atlantic in order to stop the flow of slaves to the Americas. And yet there are still many people in Britain today who not only use the country’s past association with slavery to disown their own history but seem to want to wear that history as a badge of shame, as if the taint of slavery were still upon us. All this does, however, his weaken social cohesion. For if one does not identify with the country of one’s birth as an historical entity, it makes it very difficult to identify with those who share the same cultural heritage, especially if, instead, one embraces a multi-ethnic, multicultural society which identifies with that country even less. Indeed, it can actually create a deep and highly corrosive social division between those who want to identify with their country and those who see this as being, in itself, racist. What’s more, this division can then be further exacerbated if the indigenous population starts to realise – as well it might – that a multi-ethnic, multicultural society created by mass immigration is greatly to their own economic disadvantage.
I say this because, continually importing low cost labour into a country over an extended period of time, not only suppresses wages – particularly at the lower end of the spectrum, thereby disadvantaging the poorest most – but it does nothing to incentivise businesses to increase productivity through technological innovation and therefore weakens the economy as a whole.
Indeed, we can see this quite clearly in the case of the UK. For although our government and the media continually tell us that we are one of the richest countries in the world, with the 6th largest GDP, our per capita GDP is only the 21st largest and is well below countries like Iceland, Denmark, Australia and Finland. What’s more, even this figure is deceiving. For it assumes that our population is somewhere close to the officially stated figure of 68 million. Based on food sales, however, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, estimates that the real figure is more like 83 million, the additional 15 million being made up of illegal immigrants and those who have outstayed their visas and have never completed a ten-yearly census form. If Tesco is right, this would then drop our position in the per capita wealth table to 25th.
Even this, however, is probably an overstatement of our real wealth. I say this because a disproportionate amount UK GDP is generated by government spending on things like health, education and various other social services. Every new immigrant who accesses any of these services, therefore, not only increases government expenditure but actually increases UK GDP. Indeed, it is possible that the only thing driving growth in the UK is immigration and that, without it, we would be in a permanent state of recession. In fact, it is also possible that the main reason successive governments have done nothing to curb immigration is that they know this and have realised that, even though it is actually impoverishing us, they need immigration to make the economic data look better.
The problem with simply feeding us misleading information, however, as the last Conservative government discovered to its cost, is that people also have real world experiences. And one of the ways in which everyone can see that immigration is making us all poorer is, of course, by causing a housing shortage, which pushes up the price of both buying and renting a home. It is for this reason, indeed, that the new Labour government has promised to build an extra 1.5 million homes over the next five years. Just like its promise to decarbonise our electricity grid by 2030, however, this target has absolutely no chance of being met.
I say this because, while successive governments have been wasting billions of pounds each year in a futile attempt to combat the entirely imaginary problem of climate change, a very real environmental problem has crept up on us almost unnoticed. This is the problem of water companies allowing raw sewage to flow into our rivers, which successive governments have simply blamed on the failure of some of these companies, particularly Thames Water, to adequately invest in the necessary infrastructure. The real problem, however, stems from the fact that the downstream parts of any sewage system – the main sewers which deliver the sewage to treatment works – cannot be upgraded or expanded anywhere near as quickly as politicians would like to see new houses built and connected to the system upstream.
A good example of this asymmetry is the Thames Tideway: a new twenty mile long super sewer that is currently being built under London at a cost of £4 billion, if, that is, it actually comes in on budget, which is by no means certain, not least because it is estimated that it is going to take another nine years to complete. What’s more, this nine years does not represent the full duration of the project. For it was already many years in the planning before construction even got started, which means that if one really wanted to build an extra 1.5 million homes over the next five years, and wanted these homes to have an adequate water supply and be connected to a downstream sewage system with sufficient spare capacity, one probably should have started the planning process around five years ago, when most of the houses already scheduled to be built over the next five years entered the planning system, one of the main purposes of which is to give utility companies enough time to put the required infrastructure in place.
The real reason there is so much raw sewage flowing into our rivers, therefore, is not because the water companies are unwilling to make the necessary investment – as, indeed, the Thames Tideway so clearly demonstrates – but because the need to constantly build more homes to house our ever increasing population puts government ministers under pressure to foreshorten the planning process – to cut ‘red tape’, as they usually put it – usually by strong-arming the utility companies into agreeing to new housing projects in places where the infrastructure is already overstretched. And while they may sometimes get away with this, sometimes they do not. What’s more, the more pressure the government applies to the planning system, the more these failures occur, until at some point it becomes politically counterproductive, as when utility companies start leaking this kind of information to the media.
The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain, therefore, is that the government is not going to get planning permission to build an extra 1.5 million new homes over the next five years, not least because, if the utility companies actually gave in to this demand, everyone concerned would probably end up up to their necks in excrement. What’s more, the ministers involved already know this. Indeed, they are probably already planning to blame their failure to meet their housing target on the stifling bureaucracy of the planning system, which therefore raises the question as to why they should have set such a ridiculous target in the first place. The answer, however, is simple. For the alternative would be to obviate the need to build all these new houses by restricting immigration, which is the one thing, of course, they cannot do. For apart from the effect that this would have on our growth figures, not only would it outrage the new Labour government’s supporters in the media, it would also undermine their credibility as adherents of the internationalist order, thereby greatly diminishing their prospects of obtaining well-paid sinecures in international institutions when, after five years of failing to either curb immigration or build enough homes to house all the immigrants, they are unceremoniously dumped out of office.
4. Signs of a Fightback?
Not, of course, that that is likely to happen. For while some people see the defection of so many Conservative voters to Reform in the last election as a sign of a fightback, the fact is that our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it more or less impossible to break the two party strangle hold on parliament. After all, Reform obtained 14.3% of the popular vote, or 4,072,947 votes in total, but only won five seats, just 0.77% of the seats available. Unless something of seismic significance occurs in the interim, therefore, dramatically changing the political consciousness of the nation, when it comes to the next election, most people will probably see a vote for Reform as a wasted vote and the party will quietly disappear.
Of far greater significance, therefore, is the state of the Conservative Party. For given the fact that most Conservatives still don’t seem to understand why their voters deserted them, it is highly unlikely that the party will be able to sufficiently reform itself by 2029 to win many of these voters back. Indeed, I’m betting that most of them won’t vote at all. The probability is, therefore, that no matter how badly the current Labour government performs over the next five years, it will be returned to office at the next election.
Nor is this electoral predicament confined merely to conservatives in Britain. The situation is more or less the same in France, where Marine Le Pen’s party, Rassemplement National, won the largest percentage of the popular vote in this year’s parliamentary election but only gained the third largest number of seats in parliament. This is because the French system allows for two rounds of voting such that, if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote in the first round, the third and fourth place candidates and below drop out, leaving just two candidates to go head to head in a second round the following week. This means, however, that, between rounds, parties have a chance to do deals in which even the second place candidate may withdraw if, for instance, the third place candidate has a better chance of collecting up the votes of the other withdrawn candidates, thereby beating the candidate who obtained the most votes in the first round.
And this is precisely what happened to Rassemplement National in July this year. Between the first and second rounds, Emmanuel Macron’s party, Renaissance, and a number of small socialist parties under the coalition banner of the New Popular Front got together and stood down candidates in favour of whichever grouping was the stronger in any given constituency, thereby ensuring that, despite winning the largest share of the vote in the first round, Marine Le Pen’s party did not win the largest number of seats in parliament.
What’s more, the same thing is likely to happen again in the presidential election in in two years’ time, when Le Pen will probably stand against Macron and whoever is chosen as the presidential candidate for the socialist coalition. Again, Rassemplement National will almost certainly win the first round, forcing either Macron or the socialist candidate to stand down. The supporters of Renaissance and the New Popular Front will then, however, combine their vote to defeat Le Pen in the second round. In fact, the only way that Le Pen can win is if she gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round, which is very difficult in a three-way race.
Not, of course, that this is in any sense illegal or improper; it is just the way the system works. Not only does it effectively disenfranchise a large proportion of French voters, however, but it does so on the basis of their conservative, traditionalist or nationalist leanings, which are considered unacceptable in today’s liberal, tolerant and internationalist France. What’s more, the scales are weighted against them simply through the use of this language, which, due to a clear bias in the media, is already loaded with negative connotations on the one hand and positive connotations on the other.
Worse still is the use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, both of which have the negative connotation of being at the polarised end of a one-dimensional spectrum in permanent opposition, which contrasts markedly, for instance, with Macron’s party – the party of the new politics – which describes itself as centrist or centre-left, both of which terms connote moderation and a willingness to compromise.
My point, however, is not just that the language of politics comes with these very significant but largely implicit value judgements already built into it, or that most of us just accept these judgements without questioning whether the party or politician to which they are attributed actually warrants this attribution, or even whether the attribution, itself, really ought to have the negative or positive connotations we attach to it. What is far more harmful to our democracy is the fact that both politicians and the media use this valued laden language deliberately, to manipulate us.
Nowhere has this been more apparent in recent weeks than during the race riots which have afflicted towns and cities all across Britain following the stabbing and murder of three little girls in Southport in July. One such town, Middlesbrough, is a town I know very well, in fact, in that it is only about twenty miles north of where I live. With respect to what value laden terms might or might not be justly attributed to its inhabitants, therefore, the most salient piece of information I can probably give non-UK readers is that, based around the chemical industry, it is one of the most working class towns in the country. In fact, it has voted Labour in every general election during my lifetime, making it more than a little ironic, therefore, that, in response to the riots there, our Prime Minister, Sir Kier Starmer, chose to label the rioters ‘far right thugs’, when most of them – those old enough to vote – will have almost certainly voted for him just a few weeks earlier.
This therefore raises a whole raft of rather intriguing questions, the first and most obvious being whether there really were any far right thugs involved in Middlesbrough’s riots. This, however, raises the slightly more nuanced question as to what actually constitutes a far right thug? Is it essential, for instance, that they have swastikas tattooed on their necks, or is it sufficient that they merely object to mass immigration? I ask this question because so far in this essay, I, myself, have criticised mass immigration on two counts: firstly that it makes us all poorer and secondly that it is the ultimate cause of raw sewage being pumped into our rivers. If criticising or objecting to mass immigration is a sufficient condition of being a far right thug, then that would make me equally guilty. Of course, I didn’t actually join in the riots, which may mean that I do not qualify for the ‘thug’ part of the epithet. But if there is any substance to Sir Kier Starmer’s accusation, that would still make me ‘far right’, a term which, in our value laden language, has extremely pejorative connotations, thereby raising the further question as to why our Prime Minister should have used such a term about his own voters, especially as it was more or less bound to exacerbate the situation.
I say this because, while the rioters may have been protesting against mass immigration, their anger was far more visibly directed against those in authority, firstly the police, the local and most proximate representatives of state power but, behind them, the shadowy presence of successive governments who, on the subject of mass immigration, have consistently ignored the concerns of ordinary working people. Dismissing them as far right thugs, therefore, was not only to dismiss their concerns once again but was more or less guaranteed to confirm them in their belief that their government doesn’t actually care about them, thereby inflaming their anger still further.
What made this political insensitivity all the more egregious, however, is the lamentable but nevertheless undeniable fact that not all rioters are primarily driven by a sense of grievance. Human beings being what they are, many rioters, in fact, simply join a riot because the breakdown of law and order gives them licence to do things they have never been allowed to do before. The most prevalent emotion in most riots, as a consequence, is not anger or hatred but exhilaration. When faced with a riot, the most important thing those in authority should do, therefore, is take the heat out of the situation and calm things down. And the best way to do this is to tell the rioters that their message has been heard, that their concerns are taken seriously and that they will be addressed as soon as law and order has been restored.
In fact, this is what any Prime Minister with any political nous would and should have said, even if he had no intention of actually keeping his word about addressing the rioters’ concerns once they were off the streets. The problem for Sir Kier Starmer, however, is that this was precisely what he couldn’t say. For had he told the rioters that he understood their concerns, this would have been to tacitly admit that mass immigration does indeed cause economic and social problems, which would have been to contradict his entire political philosophy or, at least, the political persona he presents to the cameras. He had no choice, therefore, but to come up with all this nonsense about far right thugs, both to explain the riots and justify not listening to the rioters’ complaints.
What this also did, however, is confirm – at least to some – that Labour is no longer the party of the white working class and hasn’t been so for some time, which, oddly enough, may actually represent a glimmer of hope. For one of the main preconditions of our democracy being restored is that a lot more people come to realise that the political divide in Britain is no longer between the traditional socialism of the old Labour Party and the traditional conservatism of the old Conservative Party but between those who would govern us in the interests of multinational corporations and their own political class and those who would see us governed in the interests of ordinary British people. That is to say that the battle is now between a totalitarian oligarchy and democracy itself.
Not, of course, that this hope that democracy may yet be revived is any more than a glimmer, not least because as soon as Sir Kier made his proclamation, the mainstream media got on board with his ‘far right thugs’ narrative and stifled any discussion of the real issues. With people being arrested and summarily imprisoned even for such trivial offences as retweeting so-called ‘misinformation’ about the riots, it is to be doubted, therefore, whether the great awakening is going to happen any time soon. It may therefore take many more waves of killings and riots before the damn finally bursts. Our one consolation, however, is that nothing lasts for ever and, eventually, even this will be history.
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