The small island nation of Singapore is like the American TV program, The Wire. I understand that is probably one of the weirdest opening sentences to an article about philosophy and global politics, but hear me out.
Co-creator of The Wire, David Simon, once stated the reason for the show’s success was its ability to mirror every conceivable political bias of the viewership. This was enabled by the many different themes and issues exhibited throughout the show. If you are against the War on Drugs, you will see evidence of its failings. If you support it, you will see evidence it should continue. If you believe that police failings are because of cultural or economic reasons, you will see those perspectives reflected too.
In short, within the entire series, you will see nearly every modern political issue at play as understood by every ‘side’ of said issue. What remains interesting is that, as noted by Simon, the show maintains an ability to “validate” and consequently reinforce the beliefs of the viewers.
As such, the city of Baltimore continues to hold a light to America-at-large and its ongoing issues, even if it aired 21 years ago, finishing just before the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Whether it’s urban decay, corruption, or the failure of the American Dream, what we see in the show are things that existed in the 1960’s and still exist today in this post-industrial broken city.
You can follow this train of thought into the world of global politics, which is not as far away from modern media as I would like to admit. Specifically, we have seen a similar situation emerge out of the success story that is Singapore.
Singapore is like a mirror to any political persuasion that one might have, from which also can “validate” one’s own personal politics. The only real difference is that The Wire (and by extension the city of Baltimore, I say this because the city itself is largely the main character for the entire show) are used negatively, while Singapore is used positively.
If you want to see a thriving multi-ethnic, multicultural, post-colonial state, then you can look to Singapore. If you want to see somewhere that champions free-market capitalism, then you can see it there. If you want to see somewhere with a right-wing government that places a strong emphasis on law and order, not to mention the death penalty, it’s right there between Johor and the Riau Islands.
It remains fascinating to me that a tiny island, one which most people could never find on a map, has sparked such a massive debate on what they ‘see’ when they think of Singapore.
A nation with a population comparable to Lebanon or Palestine, yet more than a hundred leagues above such countries. A right-wing free-market paradise with the best public housing in the world. Those who see its publicly-funded universal healthcare system, one of the most efficient in the world, argue to the contrary. A super politically conservative nation that’s current president is an ethnic minority Muslim woman, racial success story, model minority, etc, etc.
Is Singapore perfect? Of course not. Is Singapore used to reflect general political beliefs about the world? Well, yes. Are a lot of these views correct? Yes and no.
Politically, socially, economically, a lot of different political views and philosophies are validated by the existence of Singapore. Fundamentally, Singapore and Baltimore have a comparable effect on the politically-minded.
Do people get murdered and addicted to drugs in both places? Yes. Are both places being led by an ethnic minority leader? Yes. How we view subjects often depends on the viewer itself, as much as the subject matter in play.
Despite this, Singapore has become a symbol of success whilst Baltimore has become a symbol of failure. Singapore is a model whilst Baltimore is a failure, and nobody wants to see their political beliefs reflected or “invalidated” by the latter.
What is revealing is how two completely different places are so similar, while being so completely poles apart. Everyone can infer whatever they want from either place or still be generally, albeit not exactly, correct.
In conclusion, I think that David Simon is largely correct about this idea of how we as viewers of a thing can be so vastly different, yet so widely validated by its existence. Maybe, it’s more revealing for us, as viewers, to look at places or thematic issues within the greater context of The Discourse, whether political or pop culture, and realize we can all be somewhat right, while also being largely wrong.
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Thatcher and the Conservative Ghost Dance
Life, loss, and lethargy have strange effects on peoples, cultures, and movements. And nothing could be more lethargic than our current iteration of conservatism. Neoconservatism was certainly not new, it grew out of, and drew from, the economic thinking that preceded it. However, it at least believed in itself so strongly that it attempted to bring economic liberalism and democracy to the rest of the world. Whether or not this was to benefit those in power at the time is another matter and another article, but there was at the very least a sizeable class of people who earnestly believed in the project and aimed to see it through.
When we look across the world today however, there doesn’t appear to be one major success story for the neoconservative project. The project was so unsuccessful that the next successful candidate for the GOP following George W. Bush Jr. was Donald Trump, who rode in on opposing the ‘forever wars’. Contrast this with the left, who have certainly undergone a shift from the economic to the identitarian, but have arguably been undergoing that shift for 60 years. In comparison, the ten years between Douglas Murray’s ‘Neo-Conservatism: Why We Need It’, a celebration of the ideology, and the election of Donald Trump demonstrates the awfully short shelf-life of the worldview.
Neoconservatism could probably best be understood literally. What is new is what we conserve. Economic liberalism under the Pax Americana and democracy is new, therefore we conserve it. After all, the Allied powers had just defeated the Axis powers and brought a functioning democracy to Germany, a country which had only ever had it in the form of the dysfunctional Weimar Republic. Regime change, it seemed, was possible. But here we after after Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and what democracy does exist is fraught and unstable.
When a group faces an external threat and their core beliefs are shattered, there is a tendency to double-down. To look back at the victories of the past and attempt to emulate them and relive them. There is a tendency to Ghost Dance.
Ghost dancing was the name given to the phenomena found in Native Americans who had been consistently beaten by the European settlers, who quickly found that tribal formations and dances fell flat in the face of the technology and organisation of the Europeans they encountered. Increasingly, tribes began to engage in a new Native American dance known as the Ghost Dance. The dance promised to summon the ghosts of the ancestors, to have them drive out the white man and rip up the earth beneath their feet, revealing the untouched America they had long known.
It didn’t work, of course. Ghost Dances never do. The past is over, and attempts to revive by recreating the conditions that no longer exist will only ever create artificial facsimiles at best, but Ghost Dances are reassuring, and fun for those who practice them.
When I looked across the Conference floor in 2021, I saw merchandise of Thatcher and her slogans plastered everywhere. Endlessly her name was invoked as some kind of lodestone of Conservatism. Of course, the social conservatism was tactically amiss, but she permeated the halls of Conference regardless. Juxtaposed to this is the current conservative rhetoric: “Getting On With The Job” and “Getting Brexit Done” suggest stagnation, as though leadership were a shift at Subway to muddle through to, a list of tasks to be done and forgotten about and this lack of fervour is reflected in the polling numbers.
As the dust of Coronavirus settles, and the UK remembers that Ukraine is actually quite a far away country that our American masters will not let us get involved in, the certainty of the conservatives’ loss in the culture wars with the looming threat of electoral defeat create the conditions for a Ghost Dance. We even have some ‘conservatives’ with Margaret Thatcher cut-outs in their university rooms ready to lead the dance!
But the appeal of the Ghost Dance is fleeting. The images of Thatcher and her incredible electoral success will be little more than temporary anaesthetic for the elderly base of the Conservative party in the wake of their continued loss to the left. It won’t track with a generation who never knew Thatcher, and actively suffer under the free market policies she advocated. New ways of thinking and governing are required, and must bring a close to the tragicomedy of liberalism.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
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The Original “Original Right-Wing Gramscians”
Last year, The Mallard’s Chairman, Jake Scott, wrote two essays titled “The Original Right-Wing Gramscians”, detailing the history, ideology, and influence of free-market think-tanks in post-war Britain.
However, unlike the post-war free marketeers, whose “right-wing Gramscian” descriptor has been added retroactively, the French ‘New Right’ (Nouvelle Droite) openly characterised themselves, as did others, as “Gramscians of the Right” – both during their intellectual ascendancy in the 1970s, and during revived interest in their movement around the turn of the millennium.
Whilst technically established in 1968 with the foundation of the ‘Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne’ (GRECE; Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the most recent attempt at a unified doctrine for the French (and, by extension, European) New Right is found in an essay titled “The French New Right in The Year 2000” (FNR2K).
A relatively short work, the FNR2K reads less as a political manifesto and more as an intellectual one. Granted, the content is political, but it doesn’t confine itself to the trappings of electoral politics. After all, the French New Right (FNR) grew out of electoral alienation, instigated by consecutive right-wing electoral defeats throughout the 1960s.
This prioritisation of intellectualism over electoralism is made clear off-the-bat when Alain De Benoist, often dubbed the FNR’s leading figure, dispels the idea that the FNR constitutes a “political strategy”. Instead, the FNR is defined as a “school of thought” attempting to “formulate a metapolitical perspective”.
Metapolitics, Benoist continues, is “not politics by other means”. Rather, it is the idea that “ideas play a fundamental role in collective consciousness”. All human actions, trivial or revolutionary, take place within a framework of “convictions, beliefs, and representations which provide meaning and direction”. These “convictions, beliefs, and representations” are the focus of the FNR’s work. In simpler terms, metapolitics is that which is outside, but shapes, the development of politics.
FNR2K is divided into three sections: Predicaments, Foundations, and Positions. ‘Predicaments’ is divided into three sub-divisions: What is Modernity?, The Crisis of Modernity, and Liberalism: The Main Enemy, all of which provide context to the FNR’s intellectual work.
‘Foundations’ establishes the FNR’s theoretical first principles in relation to a variety of topics: man, society, politics, economics, ethics, technology, the world, and cosmos. Throughout, these first principles are juxtaposed with the theoretical first principles found in liberal modernity.
Finally, ‘Positions’ summarises that which the FNR is for and against, as well as an additional 13th stand-alone commitment to promoting “independence of thought and a return to discussion of ideas”.
The FNR interprets Modernity as a convergence of five processes: Individualization (the destruction of traditional communal life), Massification (the adoption of standardised lifestyles), Desacralization (the replacement of religious understanding with scientific understanding), Rationalization (the hegemony of “instrumental reason” via capital and technology), and Universalization (the globalisation of assumed-to-be superior models of social organisation).
The Crisis of Modernity refers to the failure of these processes to produce their initial promises of Freedom and Equality. Freedom has been reduced to a procedural formality; it means to operate “within the marketplace, technoscience or communications without ever being able to influence their course”. Erstwhile, Equality has failed two-fold. It has both “betrayed” the people it allegedly sought to benefit (e.g. the murderous nature of communist regimes) and has been “trivialized” (e.g. growing economic inequality under capitalism). Specifically, this has happened despite Equality being the foundational principle of both communism (equal access to means of production) and capitalism (equal opportunity to prosper within a market economy).
As such, the end result of Modernity is “the most empty civilization mankind has ever known”. Contrary to a free and equal paradise, “the language of advertising serves as the paradigm for public discourse, the primacy of money has made commodities an omnipresent feature of society. Man has turned from a social animal to a hedonistic object; he occupies an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality, media-hyped sports” – he operates as a “solitary individual” amid an “anonymous and hostile crowd”.
Considered to be “the dominant ideology of modernity”, it follows that Liberalism is the FNR’s primary intellectual target. Attacked for reducing life to individualistic economic competition, erstwhile imposing a hypocritical notion of value-neutrality, the FNR considers Liberalism responsible for creating a barren existence: survival for the sake of survival, an existence devoid of higher purpose or aspiration.
However, Liberalism is not the only target. Whilst charitably described as a “legitimate reaction”, the FNR dismisses Marxism as a counter-productive and misdirected response to the problems arising from Liberalism, being rooted in common modern presuppositions.
As an example, Benoist points to the modern welfare state. Emerging as a reaction to the autonomous market, the welfare state does not restore historic communal ties undone by Liberalism. Rather, it assisted in re-engineering society to adhere to the matrix of mere production and consumption. Whilst Liberalism is nothing more than a “global system of production and reproduction”, Marxism has created conformity around “an opaque redistributive structure”, one which has “generalised irresponsibility” and has transformed members of society into “nothing more than recipients of the public system”.
In summary, Modernity has reduced humanity to the lowest-common denominator; to the barebones of production and consumption, supplementing its constituents with a hypermodern array of metastasized rights and a dehumanising system of welfare. Compounded, the end result is a frightful and depersonalised lumpen.
In response to this hellish existence, the FNR begins to lay the ‘Foundations’ of its counter-ideology. At bottom-level, this means recognising a distinction between Pluriversuum and Continuum; a distinction between what is diverse and particular (‘plural’) and what is constant and universal (‘continuous’).
Contrary to Modern depictions of man, either as an “infinitely malleable” atomised individual or the sum of a single specialised factor (i.e., economy; homo economicus) – man is neither wholly determinable or determined.
For example, one can’t change his ethnicity or family, but can, in a moral sense, choose to “go beyond himself or debase himself”. In this instance, the Pluriversuum of man is exemplified by the natural diversity of communities which exist in the world, whilst the Continuum of man is exemplified by his ability to engage in decisions, irrespective of his particular community and its customs. Neither is more key to man’s nature than the other; they are distinct but equally important aspects of what he truly is.
Against the backdrop of the first section, the FNR sees Modernity as reducing Earthly existence to Continuum (technical decision-making within a globalised system of production and consumption) at the expense of Pluriversum; liberal modernity means global homogenization (or, as it has become known in some circles: globohomo).
Given this, it follows that the origins of man, a social animal, as well as the affairs of his society, are also beholden to this logic. Society cannot be reduced to a homogenised collective or aggregated individuals, but a “body of communities” – families, neighbourhoods, localities, national ethnicities and supranational groups; they are distinct and defined by their respective, precise, and unique relation to each other.
Politics is an art, offering a vibrant plurality of forms, renditions, improvements and cultivations, unlike the Modern understanding which situates politics as a system of management; decisions are made to be purely technical and “neutral”, denying any fundamental alternatives to the machine, reducing politics to a matter of stability, rather than the deliberation and actualisation of ideas.
Economics (oikos-nomos; family law) must be recontextualised, from the narrow realm of immediate and quantifiable transaction to a broader understanding which incorporates distinctly qualitative values, such as beauty, ecology, family, and ethics.
Ethical values, whilst universally contingent on the distinction between good and bad, and other such related categories, must be allowed to organically develop into specific customs appropriate for particular societies. The universal reduction of morality to “practical materialism” must be resisted. This principle of striving towards excellence, provided specific meaning by context, is also true of different modes of life within a community; a good plumber is better than a bad philosopher.
Technology, whilst celebrated for its “Promethean” capabilities, must be harmoniously balanced with environmental custodianship. Concern for the natural world should stem not from government regulation or technophobia, but from a shared moral conscience; one which earnestly wishes for future generations to inherit a world “no less beautiful, no less rich, and no less diverse than the world we know today”.
Having established their given context and theoretical response to said context, the FNR2K concludes with its ‘Positions’ – what it is against and for:
Against Uprooting, For Strong Community Identities; Against Racism, For Difference; Against Immigration, For Cooperation; Against Sexism, For Gender; Against The New Class, For Bottom-Up Autonomy; Against Jacobinism, For a Federal Europe; Against Depoliticization, For Democracy; Against Productivism, For New Forms of Labour; Against Ruthless Economic Policies, For Economy at the Service of the People; Against Gigantism, For Local Communities; Against Megalopolis, For Cities on a Human Scale; Against Unbridled Technology, For Integral Ecology; For Independence of Thought and a Return to Discussion of Ideas.
Many of these points will be intuitively, if not immediately, understood, such as the first, third, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth. After all, these are matters regularly discussed and supported by more traditional conservatives: social cohesion, national identity, strong borders, developing social and economic capital, aesthetical refinement of all kinds, and environmental custodianship.
Although there has been strong pushback against ‘gender ideology’ and corresponding issues (i.e. transgenderism), one shouldn’t be misinterpret De Benoist’s use of ‘gender’ – he’s saying very much the same thing: men and women are ontologically different and one cannot, and should not, become the other.
Even unfamiliar terms like “The New Class” immediately become familiar once De Benoist pins down a summary:
“…the manpower for the media, large national and multinational firms, and international organisations. This New Class produces and reproduces… the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day to day realities… engenders abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, an obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes… The New Class depersonalises the leadership of Western societies and… lessens their sense of responsibility.”
All this said, some points are likely less understood from the get-go. Despite being listed second, the commitment to ‘difference’ is perhaps the central defining tenet of the FNR. Dubbed “the right to difference” De Benoist suggests, as a matter of principle, that diversity is good – diversity of people, cultures, systems, products, religions, and ideas.
Placing primary emphasis on ethnocultural diversity, the “right to difference” is meant to counteract what De Benoist sees and refers to as “the ideology of sameness” – an all-encompassing term for global homogenization and all its various forms: mass immigration, economic and cultural globalisation, philosophical universalism, egalitarianism, and so on.
However, whilst the “right to difference” forms the basis for the FNR’s support for group-based, individual, and ideological differences, it also provides a basis for conserving differences in a whole host of other domains.
Democracy is, first and foremost, understood as a rejection of universal equality; it recognises “a people” – defined by a common, but distinct, sense of membership – as the basis for legitimate deliberation and decision-making, both in the name of the common good and as an expression of individual agency. This is situated in contrast to depoliticization, which does not recognise the existence of a people, and by extension the sovereignty of the people, allowing bureaucrats, technocrats, and lobbyists to forego pluralism and disqualify certain political programs at will.
Similarly, instead of a “Europe of Nations” or a “European Nation”, the FNR2K poses organic regional secession from existing European nation-states, and the ‘bottom-up’ federalized along Eurocultural lines (including Russia), affording distinct identities and devolved powers to all principalities, with the exception of “those matters which escape the competence of the lower level” and apply to “all the federal communities” of Europe, such as major military, diplomatic, legal, environmental, and infrastructural matters.
The FNR believes: “the nation-state is now too big to manage little problems and too small to address big ones” – civilizational superorganisms, organised in a polycentric patchwork, albeit with integrated research, industry, communications, and currency, are necessary for securing autonomy, tranquillity, and difference.
Labour must be reinterpreted beyond a ‘productivist’ understanding – it must incorporate work that is conducted and valued for qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, reasons; this ranges from labours of love and duty to ensuring the fruits of labour strive for timelessness, rather than obsolescence.
Additionally, modernity has created a society “where payment by salary is the principal means of integration into social life”. As such, the mission of reimagining labour is two-fold: “to work less in order to work better and in order to have some time for oneself to live and enjoy life”.
Tell me: doesn’t it feel as though you’ve heard all of this before? That you have felt, read, or even articulated such sentiments yourself? To be clear: I am not remarking on the originality or unoriginality of the FNR2K. After all, what good would such a point prove? ‘Originality’ – the moralist insistence to reinvent, the insistence of newness as a virtue – is a cornerstone of modernity.
Rather, I am remarking on how a document published over 20 years ago still bears an uncanny resemblance to matters the British right has, seemingly, only begun to publicly engage with, even if only peripherally, over the past few years: disaffection with liberalism, deracination in a society struggling to be cosmopolitan, the ‘bloatedness’ of institutions, the sense of ennui amid barely managed decline, the ‘re-emersion’ of tribal and class antagonism, the vicious discourse surrounding hereditarian innateness and social malleability, the homogenisation of everything from brand logos to community identities, from the sound of music to values and customs, from architecture to our options at election time.
Despite this, Francophobia has become something of an informal cornerstone of the British right’s identity; THB Britain Should Invade France, etc. Such parochialism, whether sincere principle or hollow performance, does not aid our political or intellectual development.
If the British right is prepared to concede, as it has done so before, that despite historic animosity and cultural differences, Britain and France share common civilisational challenges (multi-faceted demographic change, the future of freedom, sclerotic and hostile institutions, etc.) then it should also be prepared to engage with and learn from French – and more broadly, European – interpretations of affairs.
It’s no debate. The French right talks about positive visions for the future, the British right talks about the Plank of the Week. Whilst the British right mobilised to find footage of Keir Starmer not wearing a seatbelt, the French right almost made Eric Zemmour president of the republic. In Britain, we’ve only just got around to discussing illegal immigration. By contrast, France is way ahead of us.
It’s clear that many of our problems are here at home, not with the “Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys”. Given how intellectually barren the political landscape is generally, particularly on the right, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to look beyond the English Channel, and see what our continental adjacents can offer as inspiration.
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Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better
Since Brexit, an embittered, drawn-out separation procedure which homogenised the UK’s political news for almost half a decade, political commentators have routinely surmised the future of the UK-EU relationship.
Whatever differences may exist in the specifics of their predictions, many operate under the pervasive assumption that the relationship is a work in progress – it doesn’t quite know what it is yet, it needs time to root itself into something tangible, which thereafter can be analysed at a deeper level.
Unfortunately for professional pontificators, the essence of the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship has already materialised: “anything you can do, I can do better.”
One might argue that every international relationship is like this. Even where this concord and sainted ‘co-operation’, the vying interests of states lurks beneath the surface.
Whilst it’s true that competition is an indelible component of politics, it’s worth noting that just because states can act in their own interests doesn’t mean they will. Now more than ever, the course of politics is dictated by PR, rather than policy.
As such, when policy considerations arise, states are prone to pursue goals which aren’t necessarily in their interests but provide a presentational veneer of ‘superiority’ when compared to rivals.
“Shot yourself in the foot, eh? What’s that? With a flintlock pistol? Pfft. Amateur.”
*Proceeds to aim cartoonishly large blunderbuss at own foot*
The UK’s ‘divorce’ from the EU was officialised over 3 years, yet both are desperate to ensure the other is perceived, well-in view of family, friends, and random strangers, as the cause for the nasty, bitter, and very well-publicised breakdown of relations.
In response to the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first AI regulatory framework, Paul Graham’s brief, but accurate, outline of the EU’s relationship with technology regained online attention:
Following the EU’s announcement, the UK government announced their intention to one-up them. Prime Minister Sunak pitched Britain as the future home for AI regulation.
On the surface, it looks like the UK is one-upping the EU, beating them at their own game, doing EU tech policy more effectively than the EU themselves.
This wouldn’t be bad thing if the EU didn’t suck at tech, something even its most ardent supporters have admitted. It’s not a coincidence that none of the top 10 tech global companies are from the EU, or that every tech start-up leaves for (or gets bought-up by) the United States or China.
In America, you are told to “get out there and do it!” In China, you are told to “get out there and do it, or else.” In Europe, you are told to “sit tight as we process your application.”
Despite their differences, whether ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘statist’ in their methods, both America and China have a far more action-oriented culture than Europe, which is inclined towards deliberation.
Given this, the UK is well-poised to become technophilic outpost in a seemingly technophobic region of the world – the beginnings of a positive post-Brexit vision.
The Prime Minister seems to, at the very least, loosely understand this fact, as the recent tweet gaffe would suggest, but continues to push the aspiration of turning Britain into Europe’s biggest bureaucratic wart.
However, this “Anything you can do…” attitude transcends the realm of tech policy, extending to other major areas, such as the environment and energy security.
Back in 2021, UK Environment Act came into force. Described by the government as the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth, the bill includes, amongst other loosely connected environmental commitments, new rules to stop the import of wood to the UK from areas of illegally deforested land.
Initially implemented as an expression of new powers acquired through Brexit, hoping to upstage the EU by implementing comparatively stricter environmental regulations, the EU have since ‘one-upped’ the Brits in pursuit of going green.
In December 2022, the European Commission approved a “first-of-its-kind” deforestation-free law: European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
EUDR is one of several measures by the EU to tackle biodiversity loss driven by deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to achieve net-zero by 2050.
Set to be implemented in December 2024, the EUDR prohibits lumber and pulp companies ensure from importing any material which has contributed to deforestation after December 2020.
Additionally, companies must know the origin of their products, ensure their products are produced legally in their country of origin, and obtain precise geolocation data for all the products they place on the EU market.
If companies fail to comply with the incoming regulations, they will not be allowed to sell their products on the EU market. Expectedly, companies with business practices in violation of the EUDR will face criminal charges, including non-compliance penalties of up to 4% of their EU turnover.
Putting aside snide comments about European pedanticism (isn’t selling lumber definitive proof of deforestation, what more proof do you need?!), this new regulatory framework is significant for two major reasons.
Firstly, the EU accounts for one-sixth of the global lumber trade and over $4 billion in tropical timber-related imports alone, contributing to the highest import value in a decade.
Whilst wood imports to the EU from Russia have declined, largely due to incrementally impose restrictions dating back to the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia was still Europe’s main provider of wood, exporting (alongside Belarus and Ukraine) $6.71 billion’s worth of wood (including furniture) to the EU in 2022.
To provide such a strict and through regulatory framework for a market as large and as unprepared as the timber trade is ambitious, to say the least.
New data from the Zoological Society of London’s Sustainability Policy Transparency Toolkit (SPOTT) assessment shows only 13.3% of lumber and pulp companies are publicly monitoring deforestation within their own operations, and only 4.3% are monitoring their supplier’s operations.
Only 6.4% of the 90 companies surveyed by SPOTT are currently able to trace 100% of their supply to the location of harvest. Additionally, only 21.3% of companies report the processes they use to ensure suppliers comply with their legal requirements.
Secondly, during the winter of last year, firewood prices spiked, warehouses were placed under immense pressure, and crime (especially illegal logging) flourished, both in the EU and the UK.
In August 2022, firewood sales in the UK surged by a fifth, around which time wood pellets nearly doubled in France, Bulgaria, Poland, and several other EU counties, with practically all of Europe scrambling for firewood, drowning out the protestation of environmentalists.
Whilst this was certainly caused by Europe’s ‘green’ policies, such as the closure of Germany’s last operating nuclear power stations, and the embargos on Russian gas, leading people to source alternative sources of fuel, the EU’s less-than-publicised import ban of Russian wood and pellets in the month prior certainly did the trick.
Given that building up a reliable, long-term stock of relatively clean energy is politically untouchable, it’s safe to assume things will get worse, if not much better; that goes for both the Europe-wide energy crisis and the UK-EU relationship.
Indeed, “Anything you can do…” has trickled down into the media class. Several commentators have remarked that as Europe lurches rightward, the UK has remained a bastion of liberalism, on course to elect the centre-left Remainer-led party by a landslide.
This flies in the face of several important facts, such as Britain’s electoral system which does not reward upstart or fringe parties in the same way many EU countries do, or that Britons (when asked) generally display conservative views on immigration (and have done so for over 30-odd years), having arguably led the ongoing ‘right-wing populist revolt, etc, etc.’ with UKIP, Brexit, and the 2019 General Election, or that Christian, social, and liberal democratic still have a lot of electoral influence across Europe.
If Britain is a bastion of liberal/social democracy, and Europe is becoming a post-fascist conservative bloc, where does that leave their droopy-eyed fascination with ‘Bregret‘?
The rather boring reality is that the politics of the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU will be non-existent. Policy agendas and goals remain aligned on a fundamental level, with the only ‘political’ tension constituting a war of nerves – in short, not especially political at all.
If it was political, there would be room to instate the reform our state so desperately requires.
