Boris Johnson has been effectively removed from office under the guise of moral outrage, but there is far more to this picture than righteousness.
Let’s not forget the primary reason Boris Johnson assumed office after Theresa May and was voted in with a landslide majority in the General Election that followed, was because he was considered the man who could ‘Get Brexit Done’. There was never any pretence about his morality, we knew what we were getting. A man who would make jokes seen as politically incorrect by some and casually racist by others; a man who is known for adultery and promiscuity, despite being married – several times; a man with an unconfirmed number of children by different mothers. By no standards is Boris Johnson a morally upright man.
The last time I saw Boris Johnson, he was joking in his apartment above No. 10 about not knowing how the Roman Catholic Church had even managed to marry him and Carrie, in consideration of his previous two marriages.
If the Conservative Party wanted moral leadership, they would have stuck with Theresa May. There are very few in politics with a stronger moral compass than Mrs May. The vicar’s daughter whose most rebellious act as a youngster was to run through fields of wheat. Compared to Boris Johnson and his time as a member of the Bullingdon Club – famous for burning wads of cash in front of homeless people – she was an outright angel. However, she didn’t have the strength of leadership to get Brexit over the line, and that was the national issue that mattered most at the time.
So, to hear parliamentarians arguing about Boris Johnson’s lack of moral fibre, as if to suggest they’ve only just been made aware of it, is laughable. Chris Pincher groped a couple of men in a gentlemen’s club in central London and it wasn’t dealt with appropriately, but that is not the reason Boris Johnson was dethroned. Nor was the fact that he ate some cake and received a fine for breaching COVID regulations. He has previously done far worse, and his colleagues have turned a blind eye.
What we have here is the culmination of multiple fronts of attack. The mainstream media has sustained a continuous attack against the Prime Minister for a number of months now. Sky and the BBC in particular have taken every opportunity to undermine the Prime Minister and paint him as a criminal – not for taking away peoples’ civil liberties, but for briefly attending the most boring party to ever grace the premises of Downing Street. Of course, their real agenda is probably more in line with the second group who has been attacking the PM incessantly, the Remainers and Rejoiners – or Remoaners for the sake of convenience. People who cannot get behind the democratic will of the British people to support one of the largest mandates in our nation’s history; people who, for their own selfish purposes, want to undermine and undo the EU referendum.
The third camp targetting the Prime Minister, is the most devious of all. The political genius Dominic Cummings. Cummings is arguable our country’s greatest campaign strategist, but is not exactly known for his empathy or compassion. Cummings was absolutely the right guy for the Vote Leave campaign, and the 2019 General Election, but he is a campaigner, not a governor. He should have been kept well away from the levers of power during the pandemic. Cummings held far too much influence for a man who was not democratically elected and therefore practically unaccountable. When Cummings was unceremoniously deposed, promised revenge on the Prime Minister and Cummings is a man who cashes in his cheques.
The Remoaners and Cummings are not natural allies, but together – perhaps uncoordinated – along with the mainstream media, they have succeeded in toppling the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and painting themselves as the good guys in the process.
None of this was about morality. The entire situation was both political and personal. A joint venture of vendettas that we may very well yet come to regret, depending on what happens next.
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On Parliamentary Sovereignty | Xander West
Zak Mudie’s article in this publication on 11th December 2021 piqued my interest more than articles or opinion pieces usually do, for its rather bold argument that the United Kingdom should rid Parliament of its sovereignty and instead pursue a separation of powers. Far from being cautious and pragmatic, as Mr. Mudie claims, I find this proposal markedly incongruous with the accumulated traditions and conventions of the British political system which have served this nation so well for centuries. This is not to say I disagree entirely with his analysis, since I do not, but I think an alternate survey of the problems of and potential reforms to our modern Parliament would be nonetheless beneficial. I intend to conduct the rest of this article in a somewhat similar order to Mr. Mudie’s as to not roam too far away from the subject, but with certain digressions where apt.
Whilst I would also consider myself a traditional conservative, I am far less pragmatic and a tad more radically inclined than Mr. Mudie. Pragmatism is an anti-ideology, one of those isms which will absorb everything surrounding it until it alone remains. Indeed, most of the ideology of the modern Conservative Party has fallen into this black hole, perhaps never to return, under the guises of ‘modernisation’ and extending the lifespan of impotent governments. Therefore, pragmatism should be used in moderation and out of necessity rather than as a first resort, lest one wishes to be permanently unsatisfied by reform. After all, politics is ultimately about winning.
However, Mr. Mudie is right to question our modern political institutions and whether they effectively serve their goals. Crisis or not, such an activity remains healthy for all those who wish to conserve this nation. The strange times we are living in have acted as a sort of stress test for our institutions and their members, and in that sense most have sadly failed to protect this nation. The content of the laws our representatives now pass, the manner in which they do so, the alien approach to liberty they repeatedly endorse, all run roughshod over our national traditions and what is democratically proper.
Yet I do not see parliamentary sovereignty per se as the root of this problem. In lieu of the true Sovereign, Her Majesty the Queen, political sovereignty is vested in the electorate via Parliament. This has been the case in one form or another since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 shifted the then-Kingdom of England firmly onto the path of constitutional monarchy. The “absolute power” of the House of Commons, though, is a more recent invention and this supremacy can and does cause problems.
Edmund Burke once discussed the “limits of a moral competence” when Parliament was faced with filling the vacated throne of James II during the Glorious Revolution. Parliamentarians could have “wholly abolished their monarchy, and every other part of their constitution,” as was theoretically their prerogative during that moment of parliamentary supremacy, but they did not out of convention and principle. Presently, the respect and deference to the true foundations of this Kingdom and its people, which should be requisite of anyone wishing to have power over its constitution, is clearly lacking in many of our representatives. I am afraid that means the problem at hand is one where a majority of the House of Commons no longer share the same convictions as our politicians once possessed, resulting in Mr. Mudie’s core issue of its prolonged supremacy.
Armed with this realisation, one can start identifying the symptoms and consequences which the decline of the British politician has wrought on the political system. The British constitution, after all, is now but a forest of felled mighty oaks, their leaves littered all around for those who dare to see them.
For one example, allow me to divert one’s attention to the other half of Parliament. The House of Lords used to be something far more useful and dignified than the ermine-clad purgatory for cronies and ex-ministers it mostly serves as today. Burke believed it was “not morally competent… to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature,” yet such is the incompetent eventuality which has nonetheless graced this country. The impatience of the Commons crippled the Lords through the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, seizing the second chamber’s veto and then reducing its power to delay bills. If the Acts are invoked, which has occurred several times, it removes the requirement for the Lords to approve of a bill at all. The Life Peerages Act 1958 all but assumed the monarch’s power to create peers and enabled the flood of life peers in a less than ideal example of modernisation, whilst the House of Lords Act 1999 gutted the Lords Temporal out of thinly veiled spite and Blairite revolutionary zeal. To add insult to injury, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 extracted the judicial functions from the Law Lords, depositing them into an America-lite Supreme Court in the name of the equally foreign concept of a separation of powers.
Returning to the subject at hand, I think Mr. Mudie nearly reaches the same conclusion I have on the House of Commons with his discussion of the double-edged sword our constitution provides for our liberties. If the standard of our politicians were higher and their knowledge of this Kingdom’s political heritage richer, I doubt this double-edged sword would need to be considered with the intensity recent events might justify. Mr. Mudie identifies several other benefits and flaws of parliamentary sovereignty and our unwritten constitution in his article, but I think we would both agree those necessitate representatives of a certain calibre to handle responsibly before arguing about reform.
Obviously, Mr. Mudie and I diverge substantially over alternatives to the current state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier, I consider the separation of powers a foreign concept to British political tradition because a polity as old as this should never be artificially divided. Such things are simply incompatible with organically evolving systems such as ours, which is why the Blair revolution has caused so many of this nation’s present problems. In essence, the United Kingdom should only ever be a modern democracy in the literal sense of being democratic and existing in the modern day. To adapt Walter Bagehot, only the utilitarian “practical men who reject the dignified parts of government” would pursue a modern democracy because our constitution’s dignity yearns for true constitutional monarchy.
As for laws, the English tradition of common law suffices for rules which benefit and protect the people. Although trampled by such Blairite semi-codification efforts as the Human Rights Act 1998, I believe the common law tradition stands ready to be reinvigorated. As for some “fundamental laws” against the power of government, our history shows this has emerged through the centuries without the need for a codified constitution. Swathes of our liberties have been gained in opposition to and as limits on the monarch’s power. This concept of negative liberty has served the people well in the past and if given the space to flourish it could yet further. Furthermore, Mr. Mudie’s proposal to hand emergency powers to the executive during a crisis would not look too dissimilar to the situation we have at the time of writing, given the rot of poor governance knows no bounds in the modern British political system.
Therefore, the alternative I would propose is one of constitutional restoration wherein Parliament’s sovereignty is maintained but the House of Commons’ supremacy is curtailed. I hope I have proved, at least in part, that a system once existed which worked well and would assuage Mr. Mudie’s valid concerns. Far from synthesising a Frankenstein liberal democracy out of a myriad of other dysfunctional exhibits plaguing the modern West, we should gaze back at the accumulated wisdom of centuries of politics with some inspiration and faith that it might orient us towards a brighter future. Pragmatism actually has a place in such a paradigm shift insofar as whatever can be salvaged from this current system should be.
As long as those with power are either indifferent or hostile to this country, parties will continue to populate Parliament with bootlicking careerists and jumped-up student union activists alike. Until the political paradigm of decline the United Kingdom finds itself choked by is utterly destroyed, next to nothing can be conserved and Parliament will continue to damage the people they serve from simply lacking the wherewithal to understand the political traditions they have inherited. A separation of powers, devolution or any other such scheme will not stop the apparatchiks and bureaucrats from grasping at ever more of the people’s rights and liberties. The Blob, simply lacking the moral competence of our forebears and working in lockstep with many politicians, will continue to consume everything still worth conserving until they become scattered arrays of hollowed out and meaningless shadows. The time for slowly changing to conserve a losing battle has long passed. Instead, the time is upon us for radical change to restore the political system of the country we love.
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The Dark Triad of Progressivism (Magazine Excerpt)
Those of a progressive disposition have differing moral foundations to those on the right. Moral foundations theory was first proposed by Jonathan Haidt and subsequently developed in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind. The theory’s intention is to explain human variation in moral reasoning based on innate moral foundations. Right-wing foundations would be best characterised as group-oriented values centred around order and hierarchy; left-wing foundations would be best characterised as individualistic values.
Rightists value all five moral foundations, but uniquely value in-group loyalty, purity and obedience to authority. Right-wingers care about harm avoidance and fairness, but to a lesser extent than their left-wing counterparts — leftists only care about these foundations. This creates a situation of asymmetric empathy. The right can empathise with the left, as they share the two individualistic foundations; the left can’t empathise with the right, as they don’t share the three group-oriented foundations. As a result, the left perceives the right as fundamentally nasty and wicked, whereas the right views the left as misguided and ignorant. This asymmetric empathy has been a persistent factor throughout time and allows the left to seize control of culture, pushing ever leftward as they take advantage of the right’s empathy for them. This condition persists until a point of such disorder is reached that a conservative backlash takes place within the society’s elite. A clear historic example of this backlashing tendency would be the social conservatism of the Victorian era juxtaposed with the decadence of 18th century England.
Psychologically speaking, progressives lack a full set of moral foundations, but leftism also correlates with mental illness. Slate Star Codex carried out a survey of more than 8,000 people which showed that those on the further left are more likely to be “formally diagnosed with depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia”.
This is an excerpt from “Progress”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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Foucault was right, actually; Everything is a prison
Generally, in our circles, Foucault is mostly mocked for his personal life and called one of ‘those French intellectuals that ruined it all’. However, if we were to actually investigate his claims, we’ll realise that he is quite close to the Moldbugian thought, except he never connected the dots.
I’m here to introduce an opinion that may shock you. Foucault was right, actually. And I’m going to explain why.
For those, who don’t know much about his theories, we can pretty much boil it down to the following:
1. Everything is a prison
2. There is no escape from the prison
3. The institutions are your enemy
4. The system creates ‘docile bodies’ that are not able to rebel against the power structures
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault comes out with the theory of The Carceral, he brings up the example of the Mettray school which was known for its “cloister, prison, school, regiment” function. He uses his example to develop an argument about institutions being the main tool for surveillance and punishment.
What struck me when reading Foucault was the close resemblance of his thought to the Moldbugian concept of ‘The Cathedral’. As claimed by the man himself:
“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.” – Mencius Moldbug, Gray Mirror blog, 21/01/2021, ‘A Brief Explanation of The Cathedral’
Foucault claims that universities are the main vehicles of power. There’s a never-ending cycle of power found within the university halls – a student is punished by the teacher, and the teacher is punished by the institution. A teacher is just a function of the power structures ruling over them.
When we then look at Giroux and his essay on Zombie Politics, (who completely misunderstands the political climate of the modern era but let’s forget that for a moment) – ‘zombies’ (here meaning politicians) have an “ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and at the forefront of mainstream media”, which makes us think of the Chomskian concept of media manufacturing consent – there is a clear connection of the governmental powers using media and academia exerting power onto its subjects – they gatekeep access to higher levels of society if it doesn’t comply with their agenda. They are the ones wielding the power as they choose who will get high up in the ranks of control or not.
As such, when we’ll take Foucault focusing on academia being at the core of the power structures, Chomsky with manufacturing consent by the media, and Giroux linking it to the governmental controls, we basically have the Cathedral.
Foucault, although labelled as a left-wing thinker, which is perhaps more prominent in his other writing, never claims to have a solution to this problem. He just states the issues with the power structures and where they come from – and here, he is inherently correct.
The problem is that the status quo is currently left-wing. These power structures mobilise against right-wing thought – we have academia which is oversaturated by left-wing thinkers, mainstream media which doesn’t dare stray from the status quo and the ‘conservative government’ which is neoliberal masquerading as conservatives.
Foucault and others unwittingly pointed out the issue, but they never connected the dots.
So how do we deal with the world where the power structures surround us? There is no way out. Foucault claims that power structures use surveillance to catch any outliers, punish them by gathering knowledge against them and by using educative/punishing methods, render them docile and bring them back into the world, brainwashed, repackaged and back within the power structures they wanted to oppose.
And we see it these days – anyone who tries to dissent from the ‘current thing’ is immediately shut down, de-platformed, removed, their bank accounts closed, and freedoms curbed until they have no choice but to conform again.
Foucault may have not expected this to happen in this form, yet the issue remains. The increasing surveillance in the modern era is a cause of concern, too. One cannot function without technology, but this same technology cripples and watches us. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.
Another interesting point from Foucault was that it is the labels that the institutions give to the ill that cause the diseases. Considering that we live in an era where mental illness and gender dysmorphia becomes trendy, the labels are easy blankets to use to justify behaviours that would have been otherwise abhorrent.
Foucault offers a lot of useful insight. He describes the power-wielders as “technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality”, sounds familiar? Currently, every current thing is manufactured, the individuality is only allowed if it fits the regime. The freedom of political thought is a thing of the past.
‘Orthopaedists of individuality’, orthopaedic suggests improving something that needs correcting – individuality is treated as a deformity that’s an unpleasant problem that needs correcting.
It is blatantly obvious that academia and journalism are overwhelmingly filled with left-wing thinkers and government structures are trying to appease the left-wing voters who are largely demographically middle-class, so the societal left-wing shift is apparent, this being facilitated by the large corporations. This noveau bourgeoisie class has got full cultural hegemony over the dominant cultural and political thought.
This successfully gatekeeps from the right-wing thought ever arising or being put under serious scrutiny, since it isn’t acknowledged in the first place.
With the rise and increase of surveillance and more legislation being put through by the government continually attempting to bow to the on-the-fence voters, the ever-increasing monitoring of free speech renders it no longer free.
This continuous surveillance and forced self-correcting of speech proceeds to create docile bodies – it incapacitates and removes any form of political discussion and fuels the actual Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. The government structures alongside academia and mainstream media create an unbreakable mode of power that devours and forces its subjects to yield.
Foucault may be a less popular guy on our side of politics, but he brings in a lot of important insight that can help us understand the power structures at hand. Everything is a prison. A man made, neoliberal hell of a prison.
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