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It’s not the economy, stupid
Although it seems so distant, the current political landscape is a direct product of 2016. Without specific reference to the victory of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of anti-immigration parties across the Western world, it’s impossible to sufficiently contextualise the obvious sense of insecurity characteristic of contemporary left-leaning politics and political analysis.
Every twenty years or so, the Western Left convinces itself it can finally do away with its native working class supporters and fully re-align itself along socially liberal lines, catering to the interests of ethnic and sexual minorities, immigrants, women, graduates, the underclass, and the progressive elements of the haute bourgeoisie.
These attempts at fully actualising a rainbow coalition of the oppressed and their allies rarely work out, backfiring and resulting in catastrophic electoral defeats.
Realising it’s jumped the gun on their replacement, the Western Left is once again begrudgingly going cap-in-hand to those it momentarily considered obsolete, hoping to win them over for election time, and hold onto them whilst in government.
The Left’s ‘bipolar’ relationship with its traditional voters has arguably been the central driving force behind its ideological development for the past 40 years. Categories like ‘Blairite’ and ‘New Democrat’ can’t fully be grasped without reference to the strategies by left-leaning parties to ease the anxieties of native working and middle class voters.
In a similar way, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden have undertaken initiatives of their own. The former is scarcely filmed or photographed without a Union Jack whilst the latter plays into his roots in order to present as a scrappy, charmingly cantankerous working class Irishman. As Biden’s successor, Kamala Harris clearly intends to continue this process, leaning heavily on V.P. pick Tim Walz’s ‘White Dude’ minstrel act and various forms of cosmetic patriotism.
However, whilst the comparative lack of political imagination is evident, and the general disinterest in being ideologically creative is obvious, ongoing rapprochement strategies are desperately trying to formulate a convincing counter-narrative to scupper the enduring threat of the populist right.
Confronted with an insurgent New Right on both sides of the Atlantic, the counter-narrative of the Third Way suggested the liberal revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s had crystallised. Despite the profuse sense of hopelessness, the Left had successfully dislodged the traditional moral and cultural tapestry which underpinned Western societies. Rather, they claimed that the activists had simply grown-up, encumbered with adult responsibilities and considerations, which (until fairly recently) went hand-in-hand with fiscally conservative politics.
Of course, this narrative was never entirely true. In no small part, the rise of the New Right was a reaction against the excesses of the social movements of previous decades, although this tendency was sub-ordinated by the right’s shift towards socalled neoliberalism; social conservatism was a present but ultimately secondary characteristic.
Grappling with a new threat from the right, similarly drawing on cultural discontent and siphoning support from the native working class, the Left is trying to use the same playbook, minus any of the context which gives it any credibility or sense.
Bemoaning the alleged capitulation of the centre to the so-called far right in The Guardian, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued:
“Sooner rather than later, the far-right poison will have to be countered with a progressive agenda focused on what matters to people most: jobs, standards of living, fairness and bridging the morally indefensible gap between rich and poor.”
Brown’s article is one of many left-wing think pieces and op-eds which have tried to recast right-wing populism – a movement motivated first and foremost by opposition to immigration and its demographic ramifications – as a misdirected reaction to a cluster of ‘real’ problems which the Left tactically concedes to have ignored: declining standards of living, economic inequality, deindustrialisation, social mobility, and/or a lack of educational opportunities.
Typically, the primary factor is something economical, although a social issue that specifically isn’t immigration can be thrown into the mix too, such as the spiritual deficits of secularism, emasculation anxiety, social alienation, and unaddressed mental health problems.
In their own musing on the issue, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani concluded deindustrialisation, consumerism, and cultural Americanisation (in other terms, not immigration) should be primarily blamed for the loss of social cohesion, oddly using the provincial towns of Southern France and Northern Italy (that is, the strongholds of the National Rally and the Brothers of Italy respectively) as places with a sense of community severely lacking in England.
Putting aside the fact the concept of community is treated as abstract and present-tense in left-wing commentary, or the fact it’s OK to talk about the scourge of foreign culture insofar it originates from America, or that England has its loose equivalents, the fact these picturesque settlements are voting for anti-immigration parties indicates how the inhabitants (either based on an influx of arrivals in their community or elsewhere) can infer that immigration is a threat to the very delicate and complex social harmony required for such places to exist. You could say good things are hard to create but easy to destroy!
Whatever the specifics, the Left is caught between its true constituents (immigrants and their descendants) and its tactical constituents (working and middle class ethnic natives).Not wanting to speak ill of immigration out of fear of offending the former, yet realising the importance of the latter to the integrity of its temporary (but necessary) coalition, it needs to decrease the salience of immigration by shifting the public’s focus, leveraging its media influence to push politically-convenient revisionist narratives.
The vote to leave the European Union was initially written-off as an emotional spasm, which was redefined as a more sympathetic but ultimately instinctive bout of political discontent, before finally being redefined as a desperate but rational economic decision motivated by declining living standards (as understood in purely materialistic terms).
Some attributed this to deindustrialisation, others attributed it to housing prices; some touted austerity whilst others pointed to the cost of living. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter. Politics was being neatly steered back to safe, technical questions, the likes of which could only be solved by the same managerial class which felt threatened by the result.
A similar process happened following Trump’s victory. The White Male backlash at having a Black president (and the plausible threat of having a female president) became another iteration of the paranoid style in American politics, which was revised into a vague disaffection with Washington, finally boxed as an unrefined but understandable protest vote against the offshoring and automation of American industry and jobs.
Consequently, the Biden administration quietly left many of Trump’s trade policies in place and seriously started to entertain decoupling from China, making it a central and pronounced component of the Democrats’ party platform, alongside a more visible association with trade unionism.
Following the riots in the UK and the state election results in Germany, in which the Alternative for Deutschland won in Thuringia and achieved very close seconds in Saxony and Brandenburg, attempts at misdirection have already begun, from Starmer’s flat-out denial that discontent over immigration created circumstances ripe for public disorder to the sudden recasting of the German right’s successes as a reaction to regional inequality and name-calling, rather than Germany bearing the brunt of unwanted immigration into Europe.
In all the aforementioned instances, it’s not that the primary factor behind was initially misunderstood. The Left attacked voters as racist and xenophobic prior to these events and in their immediate aftermath, so they evidently understood the ethno-racial motivation.
Nor can it be said that the cluster of various socioeconomic factors attributed as the driving force of recent rightward shifts in the electorate are being plucked at random. The calculated selection is part of the style.
Right-wing populism is obviously motivated by economic discontent, but so is every political uprising. Even at the best of times, the economy matters to everyone, so it can’t sufficiently explain the behaviour of specific subsets of the electorate on its own.
Rather, it’s the fact that these concerns are secondary to immigration is not publicly acknowledged by the Left, even after ten years of political development, and attempts to revise the motivations behind these movements persist with such stubborn tenacity shows the modus operandi of contemporary left-leaning so-called ideas.
No insights or solutions, only new and innovative ways to distract from the elephant in the room: immigration. Primacy matters, especially when political capital is finite. We needn’t let the importance of economic reform fall by the wayside, but we shouldn’t allow it to be used as an obvious mechanism for deferring a major issue, wrapped-up as level-headed, ‘sensible’ analysis of current political circumstances.
Zero Seats isn’t Over
Keep going. The target isn’t eliminated yet. There is more to do. There is more you must do.
You have felt mush. You must keep pushing. The target must not be allowed time to recover. It is not enough that they’re tired, meandering, and feel like they’re under a slow but inevitable gravitational pull toward irrelevancy. Where they are making mistakes, they must be helped along, not just left uninterrupted.
Waiting for the next general election for the double tap isn’t enough. You must be more ambitious and more aggressive. The work must be put in now. The fight isn’t won in the ring, it’s won long before you dance under the lights.
Certainly, the opportunity for zero seats is still open. Is it possible before the next general election?
The target’s prospects are dim. There are two things a party needs to keep going and they have neither: an offer which enough of the right people want, or an ability to inspire any confidence.
If you have one, preferably both, of these, everything else (people, enthusiasm, money, effect) comes easier.
Sundries
Let’s get two small things out of the way first. Money and supporters.
Money. They’re broke.
Donors ran while their rivals raised 15 times more in large donations. They had to cut spending on cut spending on social media advertising because they ran out of money. They’ve been in trouble for a long time, even firing cleaning and security staff ahead of the campaign to make savings. Now the target is squeezing its leadership candidates. What a convenient way of weeding out the biggest of the timewasters.
Conference this year is looking ropey. Businesses don’t see any reason to go and spend lots of money for a stall or to sponsor an event or two, apparently. Previous years have earned up to £2m profit. Pretty meagre to begin with, but better than an imminent zero. Nobody to influence. That’s long before you consider what the content of Conference will be about. Nothing motivating. This will mean less money.
Money is a real problem. They never had a lot of people dedicated to the political work, or to the grind of knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, etc. and settled for a good chunk of their supporters quietly paying membership fees and other donations, which allowed them to make up for the small number of activists compared to their competitors.
Supporters. What supporters?
One estimate puts the target’s membership numbers at 172,000 as of July 2022. Do you think it has gone up or down since then? You can assume some boost ahead of the leadership election. The results of that vote will produce a number for totals and turnout. Now is a good time to buy low, perhaps, but are the signs particularly good?
Signs from the General Election and associated polling. Certainly, the winners didn’t receive very many votes in absolute – the lowest of any winning party since the 1880s, apparently. Goodness. Well, what does that mean for everyone else? They received even fewer votes. (For a particular newer party this may not mean the same thing – perhaps it’s best judged against other new entries/debuts over the years like the Brexit Party or UKIP more recently, or even going back in further psephological history to the birth of the Labour Party, perhaps).
And of this much reduced voter support, how long will that last? In the +70-age bracket, 46%. For the 60-69 range, 33%. For 50-59, 24%, much lower than the winner’s 34%.
Assuming things stay approximately the same, with the, er, normal circle of life, one projection has the target’s vote share in total declining at a rate of 2% per year. From 2025 to 2029 that would be a reduction of 24% to 16%.
Things never stay approximately the same, though, and why take the chance?
There’s no need to be nasty. Instead, be persistently, relentlessly, merely matter of fact. The target must be made to feel like it is neither hot or cold, just straightforward inevitability that it is empty and pointless. It has no energy and looks a lot like UKIP did after Nigel Farage left it all those years ago.
What is the point of you? What are you even doing? Just give it up and try again aligned with people who might actually take you somewhere.
Leadership election
Their leadership election is certainly reminiscent of those early post-Farage death throes.
This whole thing is set to be one big example of why zero seats is not over yet.
They haven’t even technically gotten rid of the “old” disgraced leader yet. And he’s going to hang around all the way until November? Past the reopening of parliament, the budget, conference season, and whatever unforeseen opportunities and scandals and events of importance might happen in the meantime?
Losing the election and the vast reduction of their MPs was bad enough. In the winner-takes-all system the UK has they might as well have had zero seats. Now they won’t have any coordinated response to anything until November? Isn’t that going to look an awful lot more like zero seats in functionality and practice?
And who have they got? The same old ding-dongs who got them there in the first place.
Many are flexing what little they have for the pony show, it seems. The pattern from the 2019 leadership race is so far re-emerging. Never mind the “front runners”, a series of true nobodies are also taking the chance to float their names. How pointless. There are so few of you that you’ll all almost certainly get a job as a shadow this or that anyway, without having to raise your profile.
And indeed, there are very, very few of you. With only 121 MPs the biggest contenders may well only just scrape together the 10 or so nominations (including themselves) needed to proceed. This is weenie. Why is nobody treating them as weenie? Treat them as weenie. They’re weenie.
Who have they got who can take on the Prime Minister (even if he is Keir Starmer) or Nigel Farage?
They’re not just weenie, they’re totally without any creativity. These people are so empty I reckon I could write every single one of their leadership pitches without having actually seen a single one of them. I’d much rather inflict that slovenly indignity on you, duckies. Does the following sound at all familiar?
“Hi, my name is Blah Blahson, and I’m standing to lead the target.
We need to be honest about where we went wrong. We didn’t listen. We broke all of our promises. We did in fact do too much of [insert random thing that was never the real issue, but something on the side or a symptom like divisiveness and infighting]. I will put an end to all that and start the difficult task of earning back your trust in time for the next election.
Here’s a bit about me and how I grew up to make me seem more relatable or sympathetic or something. Economy. Aspiration. Your dreams.
I want to be a tough ole grind-stoning cliché, cliché, cliché. I am proud of my record as [insert not totally unimpressive but generally not uncommon non-political working background here] + of my record as [insert whatever non-detailed and highly questionable ministerial gubbins they want to puff themselves up with]. I am a true conservative blah blah blah, and that is why I believe I am the right person to deserve your trust and lead us back to glory.
Next time, we’re going to be totally honest. I’m a no-BS kind of politician. It’s time for us all to unite. That’s what real leadership means to me.
That is why I am but humbly putting myself forward for leadership of the target, and I ask for your support.”
What do you reckon? That’s about right, isn’t it? Good grief.
November’s a good while away. You can expect a few relaunches of the same leadership campaign. As in, from the same politician. They’ll either fail to hit the mark or they’ll just be doing it again and again on some excuse to try to get more media attention.
And you know what? They’ll probably go through at least two leaders before the next election. And it’ll be from the same pool of MPs. People are going to get really sick of seeing the same unimpressive bunch over and over again. This is only going to be worse if, because there are so few MPs, shadow ministers are going to have to hold multiple briefs and work multiple appearances. It’ll get worse. Do you think these people have enough capacity for the mental arsenal on multiple briefs? What will this mean for their ability to cut through, to work detail, and nuance, and out-fox civil servant-resourced ministers?
All of this will perpetuate the idea that they’re disorganised and pointless. Weak.
Keep pushing on all of this. Keep pushing zero seats. It’s not over.
The target won’t reorganise
The target’s MPs don’t have it in them. There are a few reasons.
First, they’re scrabbling and struggling to keep their heads above zero seats as it is. What does this mean for reorganisation? At the best of times, MPs are looking to pick party leaders who will win them their seat, secure their seat, increate their majority, etc. First and foremost. The strongest incentive is for them personally, above anything else first, to be in office. (This is not the same as them being in power, but they think it is). It’s just that this means their own job, money, perceived prestige, pomp, etc., it’s at least somewhere in the correct 180° arc that you need to be in officer (power) to actually do anything, and that once you get some office (power) the correct thing to do politically is to keep getting more and more and more of it. The problem for the target is that they are desperate, which has its own ick, but this will also make them short-termist and wrong about what they need to do.
Second, the target has the same problem that the dying days of the Gordon Brown Labour Party had, and the first few post-2010 years. Same old people. The ideal best thing they could have done would have been to fire probably almost all of their sitting MPs and brought in a much fresher (not necessarily younger, though that might not have hurt) and energetic bunch. Even if it was naivety they’d at least sound enthusiastic and eager about whatever ideas they’d cooked up while they were dreaming of being MPs. And they wouldn’t be coming with the same dismal tainted track records. Instead, you’ve just got a bunch of blockers hanging around.
Third, the target doesn’t have anyone willing, let alone capable, of reorganising themselves. They might be making some of the right noises (see the accurate leadership pitch above) but they’ll almost certainly all be missing the point. They’ll be doing it on purpose. What’s the pitch otherwise? Here’s all these truthful reasons about why the target is awful but this time the same people will sort it out despite not understanding what was wrong before? If they understood, why didn’t they do something about it? If they didn’t understand, why humour them now? They should resign, but they won’t. Where else have they got to go? There is nothing so “ex” as an “ex-MP”. Maybe they genuinely, deludedly think that they can turn things around? Does it matter? They’re not going to go. It’s why the target is going to stay in a terrible spot.
Zero Seats is right there. Keep pushing it.
They won’t learn the right lessons
A related, but distinct-enough separate point. They won’t reorganise because they won’t learn the right lessons.
The incentives aren’t set up that way. It would mean admitting they were wrong. If they were wrong, why keep them around? Why not just start fresh with some people who were right?
They’re locked into failing to learn the lessons of the 2019 voter realignment. Reform will probably keep at it. This also incentivises them not to change. You can’t really mimic another party. At a certain point your remaining supporters leave, the ones who left will stick with the real deal, and those tempted will also just go to the real deal.
The same applies to the wets. Why not just go with the absolutely soaking in the form of the Lib Dems? Holiday-fun Ed Davey is already promising to come and kill you, at your house, in real life, and wear your dresses and makeup like the ancient Irish did, from the left.
The target is almost entirely ersatz, at best. Will that inspire at Conference?
You’ve known how empty they are for a while. It seems just as likely that they didn’t win because they were totally without plans (except for banning people from buying cigarettes or something? Who knows?) – not because they weren’t left or right enough or didn’t do anything or deliver on promises.
Beyond substance, do they even have the form for a good pitch? More on that next.
They sit out of the Pareto distribution
A lot of you were hoping for a genuine zero seats. Some of you thought sub-hundred would create the same effect.
You’re all too soft. I wanted to see one seat. Just one. Just one only lonely solely wholly put upon target MP in the whole of the country. Rishi Sunak. Could you imagine that humiliation? And then the humiliation of all the other decisions he would have had to make after that?
Anyway, a lot of you were disappointed that the target retained over one hundred seats. You suspect that this might be enough to keep them alive. Maybe, but also maybe not.
It’s still not a strong position to be in. They’re not clearly in one side of the niche of the pareto distribution or the other, are they? Genuine question.
For the uninitiated, the Pareto distribution is also known as the 80/20 rule. This is approximately that 80% of any phenomenon, market, etc. is due to 20% of the factors/actors involved. It’s never an exact 80/20 ratio, but one example might be that 80% of groceries are sold by 20% of all the grocery providers around. In other words, a small number of individual actors do most, but not all, of the business, and that remaining portion is likely done by many much smaller competitors.
In business in particular, this is important, because you either have the size and scale to do a large amount of generic mass market business, or you go smaller and niche and specialise. Think the difference between a mass market M&S suit versus Savile Row. Each has their place doing a particular sort of thing.
In the political case, does the target neatly sit in the big party or small party category? Too small to have a crack at the 80% market share, but too big to really be niche like the Green Party or Plaid Cymru or whoever?
Reform might have the opposite problem – are they genuinely going to try to break into and have a crack at being on the big boy side of that Pareto distribution? Or is it enough to function as a glorified pressure group like UKIP did (hey, not knocking it, it worked) without the full “mainstream” breakthrough?
The target is sitting very awkwardly right now.
What’s next?
Well, really, continue the Zero Seats campaign.
It’s not over. Slog it out. You didn’t think politics was going to be all excitement and meme wars, did you? Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
The way forward: take their oldies.
The target is pretty much only supported by old people now. As mentioned above, all other things remaining the same, this would see their vote share dwindling at a rate of about 2% per year. But all other things will not remain the same. There will be more oldies along in a minute. The target might start doing good politics and start making a meagre recovery.
No!
I don’t care if it’s Reform UK or the Lib Dems or the Greens or whoever or all of them. Start coming out with plausible policies, announcements, attacks, aimed at splitting off the oldies from the target.
Come on. Zero Seats!
The UK has a child obesity problem and tax cuts are the solution
Today, nearly 30% of children in the UK (Year 6 and younger) are classified as ‘Overweight or obese’. This figure raises serious public health concerns, as it means many children in the country are not just facing early health scares in their youth, but also potentially lifelong healthcare issues.
Recent studies have revealed that one-third of children now leave British education overweight or obese. So, it’s safe to say that the UK is grappling with a severe child obesity problem – as this aptly titled article suggests.
We need to identify the factors driving this increase, which will soon become evident, and the issues exacerbating the situation.
Historical data on obesity and overweight statistics from 1974 to 2006 show an average annual increase of 0.47%, rising from 9.7% in 1974 to 25.3% in 2006. Based on this trend, we would expect the current statistic to be around 27%. However, the actual figure exceeds this projection, reaching around 30%, or in some cases, such as Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, as high as 42.6%.
The Recession
The recession and financial crash not only caused widespread unemployment and economic instability but also led to a boom in fast-food establishments.
Before 2008, Little Chefs were a common sight on British roads. Today, however, the landscape is dominated by the golden arches of McDonald’s, the flame-grilled burgers of Burger King, and the “finger-licking” goodness of KFC. These fast-food giants are now omnipresent, not just on roadsides but also deeply embedded in every facet of towns and estates.
This proliferation of fast-food outlets is not merely coincidental but a reflection of changing consumer behaviours during tough financial times.
While I occasionally indulge in fast food, there is a stark difference between my infrequent visits and the daily fast-food consumption habits of many younger children in modern Britain. According to a 2021 BMJ study, 10% of children consume fast food daily, and more than half purchase food from fast-food or takeaway outlets at least twice a week. This staggering reality highlights a significant shift in dietary habits with concerning long-term health implications.
It might seem harsh to blame the recession for yet another issue, but the evidence is compelling. While the broader economy struggled and many sectors faced downturns, the fast-food industry experienced a surge.
According to the Financial Times, the number of fast-food chains in cities across the UK increased by 8.2% in 2009, following a 6.6% increase in 2008. The rise in fast-food outlets, particularly during an economic downturn, demonstrates the fast foods sector’s resilience and profitability amid financial distress, highlighting the ubiquitous presence of fast food in our society.
So, while the broader economy struggled to recover, the fast-food industry appeared largely unaffected by the recession’s impact.
Perceptions of the costs associated with fast food
Although, and through a Government policy lens it might sounds like an effective strategy to increase the NHS’s messaging that “fast food is bad and home food is good”, we must explore why people go to fast food restaurants.
A 2022 study shows that 32% of people stated that they ate fast food because it is cheap. Now regardless of how true this is, why do people think this? Part of the reason lies in pricing strategies, like that of McDonald’s, which has remained relatively stable.
In 2008, McDonald’s introduced their saver menu, featuring the now legendary Mayo Chicken priced at 99p. Fast forward to 2023, and the Mayo Chicken now costs £1.39, representing a 40.4% increase. Meanwhile, the Bank of England has confirmed that from during the same period, the British pound has inflated by 55%, with £1 in 2008 now equivalent to £1.55. For struggling families, this suggests that in a world where supermarket products like olive oil have seen price hikes of up to 115%, fast food remains one of the few goods with consistent and reliable pricing.
However, the crucial message that the government and councils need to convey is that cooking at home is a more cost-effective option. Despite price increases in certain supermarket goods, cooking at home remains healthier and cheaper. Yet, in my opinion, this is almost an undeniable fact – most people are aware of it. The real challenge lies in breaking the psychological barriers that perceive McDonald’s competitive prices as low and consistent, coupled with its convenience and quick service.
Why we need to prioritise healthy eating vs exercise
Physical activity is essential for children to maintain fitness and a healthy weight. Studies show that children today take 90 seconds longer to run a mile compared to kids in 1975. However, while physical activity is important, it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Dietary research supports this. Approximately 80% of your weight is influenced by diet, with exercise contributing the remaining 20%. Therefore, promoting healthy eating habits should be our primary focus when addressing child obesity.
This emphasis on nutrition is crucial, particularly considering the alarming trend of reduced time allocated to cooking meals.
Researchers have observed a significant decline in cooking duration over the past three decades, with this time decreasing by almost a minute each year – from a full hour in 1980 to just 34 minutes today. In fact, a staggering 52% of Brits now spend less than 30 minutes on meal preparation.
Policy Recommendations
The new Labour Government has confirmed that advertising to children will be a focus of their national health policy. They plan to empower the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to regulate the amount of fast food, vaping, and other harmful product advertisements targeting children. While this is a step forward, it is a very small one and its impact may be limited.
Major fast food brands like McDonald’s have become so ingrained in our daily lives that even if they ceased advertising for the next 20 years, people would still know where to find them. Given that 10% of children consume fast food daily, the effect of reducing advertisements alone will likely be minimal. Therefore, the government should consider additional measures.
The Argument for Tax Cuts on Healthy Foods
The Government needs to act quickly.
We find ourselves in a situation reminiscent of the 2000s recession, with people short on cash, grappling with higher shopping bills, and generally disheartened by their finances.
So what can we do?
Let’s start with an option the Government has direct control over: tax policy. Contrary to Labour’s usual stance on increasing taxes, I propose doing the opposite by providing targeted tax cuts for food producers and supermarkets that sell healthy foods.
To make healthy eating more appealing, the government should consider implementing tax cuts specifically for healthy foods. By reducing the cost of nutritious options, people might be more inclined to choose them over fast food. Additionally, supermarkets could receive tax breaks for meeting certain quotas of healthy food sales.
This would somewhat replicate the successful South Korea model, where the government provides tax cuts and subsidies to farmers who produce fruits and vegetables, aiming to make healthy foods more affordable and accessible to the public.
The South Korean government also promoted healthier eating through the implementation of “healthy food corners.” These corners, launched by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, mandated that stores set aside dedicated sections for healthier food options. These sections prominently feature products with lower sodium, sugar, and fat content, making it easier for children to make healthier choices.
Support School Restriction Zones (Planning Policy)
While I believe that tax cuts are the most effective and well-placed policy approach, it is essential to consider other options that health bodies have proposed to central government and local authorities.
One effective strategy used by local authorities is to implement School Restriction Zones.
This policy prevents new fast-food or hot-food restaurant planning applications within 400 meters of a school. Evidence shows that proximity to fast-food outlets significantly increases the likelihood of students being overweight or obese.
The Issue: without government backing, local councils may face legal challenges from planning applicants, potentially costing them money and leading to the construction of more fast-food establishments near schools.
Junk Food Tax
Labour will love this one.
Similar to the sugar tax on sugary foods, a “Junk Food Tax” could challenge the affordability of fast food while increasing government revenue.
This policy could help change the perception that fast food is a cheap option, acting as a deterrent without restricting consumer choice. Though it may seem like a centralising measure, there is a strong case for its introduction, as evidenced through its effectiveness in Mexico.
Parent Supervision Policy
A potential, albeit controversial, measure could be requiring children under a certain age to be accompanied by an adult to purchase fast food.
This policy would aim to curb the habit of children frequently visiting fast-food outlets without parental guidance. However, this would be difficult to enforce and would not be appropriate, as it limits children’s autonomy and access to food.
Conclusion
Among the various solutions, implementing tax cuts for healthy foods stands out as the most effective and balanced approach.
Unlike restrictive policies that infringe on individual autonomy, this strategy makes nutritious options more competitive, supports British farmers, and promotes healthier eating habits. By making healthy foods more affordable and accessible, we can shift consumer behaviour away from fast food and towards home-cooked meals.
The current state of child obesity in the UK is unsustainable, and without swift intervention, the NHS will face overwhelming pressure from an aging population struggling with obesity-related health issues.
Tax cuts for healthy foods provide a practical, immediate, and sustainable solution that benefits both public health and the economy.
How to Deal with an Ideological Villain
A pet peeve of mine is when an antagonist in a book, show, or movie is driven by an ideology that, when he or she is inevitably defeated, nonetheless remains without being dismantled or rendered inept in some way. While, today, it is more often the protagonist driven by his or her writer’s self-inserted worldview, antagonists have, for over a century, often had ideological motivations–saving the climate, achieving some form of racial or sexual (but never ideological) equity, promoting radical resource conservation, whatever. Of course, we keep our hands clean by having the villain nominally lose, but that still leaves the ideology to be dealt with.
If left unanswered, the antagonist’s scheme, though foiled in its dastardly implementation, can too easily become a case of a merely overzealous attempt to produce what some believe to be a nonetheless good, noble goal with whatever hue of progressivism initially drove him or her. The good and the bad becomes, thus, not a matter of principle or goal but of method–the villain or villainess was such because he or she was too radical for those around him or her, etc. Hence, you get people considering whether the Marvel Universe’s Thanos was right in trying to reduce planetary populations by half, whether it wouldn’t be just for Godzilla: King of the Monsters’s Dr. Emma Russel to accelerate some a titanic climate emergency to fully dispense with humanity, or whether X-Men’s Magneto’s openly violent revolution for minority-mutant acceptance wouldn’t be justified–if not just a little satisfying.
Of course, the author who led the way with dealing with explicitly ideological villains was Dostoevsky, who reached his zenith of popularity, not to mention innovation, by dismantling Turgenev’s and Chernyshevsky’s ideological heroes. He did this often through mockery but predominantly through exposing to light of their ideologies through his antagonists who share them. Let us attend: the two–exposure and mockery–can and arguably should go hand-in-hand.
Dostoevsky made it his M.O. to resolve his characters’ conflicts by showing why their motivations are as bad as (or worse than) the attempted implementation. However, there was another writer, up to whom Dostoevsky looked, who was already doing this in England before Dostoevsky hit the Russian literary scene. I am, of course, talking about Charles Dickens.
No reader of Dickens can miss his criticism of the perspectives and politics of his day, be it open scorn, mocking satire, or earnest plea. While not all of his villains recant their ideas, one of his most complete cases of repentance is also one of his most popular tales, especially come Yuletide. This is none other than A Christmas Carol.
Now, readers will not need me to review the plot of Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name has become synonymous with Christmas in the English-speaking world. However, I nonetheless want to briefly examine points in Scrooge’s arc to see how it is not only his avarice but also the then popular ideology that justified it that is defeated in the end. Dickens pretty handily sets up the contemporary pop philosophy that gilds Scrooge’s greed. Rejecting personal charity for the impersonal, tax-funded state institutions of ‘“prisons…Union workhouses…the Treadmill and the Poor Law,”’ he identifies himself in the first scene as a Social Darwinist and Malthusian Utilitarian. ‘“Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,”’ as one of the scene’s collectors of charity puts it? Bah–humbug! ‘“I help to support the establishments I have mentioned,”” he says, ‘“they cost enough; and those that are badly off must go there…If they would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”’ In Scrooge, Dickens concretises the worst versions of the ideologies gaining popularity as an increasingly rationalistic society dispensed with Christian superstitions of God’s image in each individual, and with them the Christian ethics behind giving of one’s own to the poor.
Of course, Dickens includes us in the dramatic irony that Scrooge’s integrity is neither admirable nor monstrous (yet), but pitiable and foolish. The former is articulated when, drawn through key moments of his past by the Ghost of Christmases thereof–his lonely Christmases as a child, his little sister who would leave behind his supposedly foolish nephew, his erstwhile love for the Christmas season at Old Fezziwig’s regardless of its cost in ‘mortal money’–Scrooge is reminded of how spectacularly he fumbled the bag with his fiancée Belle by grasping a different bag too tightly. The enlightened self-righteousness of Scrooge’s post-Christian ethic is neither as internally consistent nor as impressive as its holder might try to maintain: juxtaposing Scrooge’s excited apology for Fezziwig’s party in spite of himself with an unwillingness to look on the greed that would lead to his present loneliness, Dickens makes clear that Scrooge’s ideological righteousness covers a deeply buried sense of failure, regret, and betrayal of the best aspects of his past self. The scene shakes Scrooge’s supposedly staid principles, and his explicit and implicit admissions that gold is not the be-all, end-all valuer of life serve to begin his reformation.
Having shown why Scrooge is to be pitied for his Malthusian views (which he may not even fully hold), Dickens progresses to show Scrooge that he has also been unnecessarily foolish to hold them. Satisfying the first scene’s foreshadowing, this foolishness is shown when the Ghost of Christmas Present gives us more of his nephew, Fred.
Hard on the heels of shaming Scrooge with the mistreated Bob Cratchit’s nonetheless toasting him, the second Ghost presents Fred’s dinner party, sans uncle. Whereas Cratchit politely rebuffed his wife’s insults to Scrooge, Fred does the same to his wife’s with jollity. ‘“His wealth is of no use to him. He doesn’t do any good with it.”’ When his wife says, ‘“I have no patience with him,”’ Fred returns:
‘“Oh, I have!…I am sorry for him: I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always…[The] consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that…he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts, either in his moldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him.”’
The girls mock the idea of Scrooge’s ever taking Fred up on that chance. However, unbeknownst to them, their mock unknowingly digs the knife of change further into the invisible uncle–not by disclaiming the immorality of his avarice (which might harden him), but by showing how foolish he is to maintain his proud isolation in it.
And the fact is that Scrooge would much rather be with them. In spite of himself, he tries his invisible darnedest to play along with the group’s games, which leads him, unsuspectingly, into being the butt of the night’s climactic joke. Having already shown Scrooge the ineffectuality of his gold and spite, Dickens meets both not with other characters’ argument but with mockery. Little wonder that the later Dostoevsky, who would mock his characters while showing the disastrous real-world consequences of their ideas, counted Dickens as one of his primary influences.
And yet, Dickens does not risk leaving things there, for one man’s pitiable past and foolish present might not undermine an entire ideology, even to the man himself. Before he leaves, the second Ghost reveals to Scrooge the true nature of his ideas–in the forms of the emaciated siblings, Ignorance and Want, hidden beneath his heretofore abundant cloak. ‘“Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.”’ Pushed to choose between the utilitarian phrases of his ideology and his own human sympathy, Scrooge ultimately cannot utter the former.
Readers don’t need me to review Scrooge’s interview with the third Ghost. Suffice it to say, his initial viewpoint, if followed through, will land him little posthumous respect among the living, even those who nominally venerate the old skinflint. Furthermore, to add insult to injury, with none to care for his affairs, Scrooge’s possessions will land in the hands of petty thieves–who, as a last insult to his way of life, parody him in their penny pinching over his personal effects. In death, he is treated according to the utilitarian ideology he espoused in life.
Now, several moments in A Christmas Carol are, without a doubt, moralistic and even a bit preachy in dealing with Scrooge’s ideology (example, the two waifs, above), and can, thus, arguably be skipped in retellings or depictions without the story’s–or Scrooge’s humbling’s–losing much weight. As I have previously written on the story, the falling away of such excesses, bound as they are to ideas and issues contemporary to its writing, is the beginning of a work’s usefulness as art. That so much of A Christmas Carol remains despite its initial polemic speaks to Dickens’s ability to make a point without its feeling like he is doing so.
And yet, his depiction of Social Darwinism remains relevant–not the least because Scrooge’s hardnosed display foreshadows those in our own day who promote state redistribution schemes while foregoing personal charity, yet somehow still thinking themselves moral and on the side of the poor. Furthermore, current progressive ideologies often take on the same self-satisfied tone, even glee, as Scrooge at the supposedly justified handicap or destruction (always their fault) of the designated outgroup–white men, “the rich,” landlords, heteronormative family units, groups indigenous to European lands, etc. Their hijacking every medium they can for the sake not of creating good art but of spreading “The Message” has left a dearth of art and stories that seek not only to include the majority of audiences but also to simply be good for their own sake. The question among conservative creators (which, as I argue in the above linked article, not to mention my novel, includes many more than those who consider or label themselves conservative) of how to create the best art can and should point us to authors like Dickens and Dostoevsky.
While politics was not the point for such authors, they did not shy away from dealing with insidious ideas of their day. The difference between them and authors who see art as inherently political was and should be that, in treating art as a function of greater things than politics–not to mention weighing it against human experience and tradition–they exposed inhuman ideas fully in the lives of their characters. Such a thing necessarily leads, as can be seen in A Christmas Carol, towards at least some characters’ repenting of their ideology towards a more wholistically human ethic that balances personal rights and interests with duties and responsibilities for others–one I would argue is best found in the Christian view of man and its subsequent moral tradition, articulated implicitly in Dickens and explicitly in Dostoevsky.
Like many pre-20th-century books, A Christmas Carol is refreshing, if nothing else because its lesson is for its protagonist (who is also its antagonist), not its readers, who are included in the joke. However, even thus reducing it to a “lesson” is to render it as inhumanly provincial as is the pre-repentance Scrooge. We should look to older literature not just to nostalgically escape the present (though that’s often a necessary salve), nor to learn how to “retvrn” to a time before all the other advancements our culture has made (on the backs of the previous centuries’ literature and ethics, one should add). We should do so because older books have survived the changing of times.
Said survival is not, as Marxist progressives claim, because their popularity has been artificially and oppressively maintained in various social traditions and structures (though one man’s supposedly oppressive structure might be many other men’s most efficient means of justly and safely ordering society). Rather, it is because their authors concretised elements of human life that are and will remain immutably true. That, of course, can have implicit ideological or political (etc.) ramifications, but such accidental effects are not their core substance. Watching a rendition of A Christmas Carol to get into the Christmas spirit might have the effects of motivating us to give to the less fortunate or to look, Cratchit-like, with forgiveness on even the most oppressive of our fellow men (or on ourselves, as Scrooge, himself, learns to do). However, to see this kind of thing as inherently political or ideological is, itself, to maintain an ideology about the relationship between art, actual people, and each other that would reduce all three. Thankfully, should we want to dismantle such a thing, we know where to look.
Labour’s Plans for Constitutional Reform
First principles
We need to begin by understanding what a constitution is and what it ought to do. The history of the constitution as a political idea is one in which a single term came to be associated with the twin principles of the “spirit” of the people over whom politics is exercised, and the “health” of the body politic from whom the government is drawn.
It is no coincidence that the word “constitution” emerged in politics to refer to the central laws (written or otherwise) that govern a community, during a period of increased use in the medical community to mean “health”.
A simple Ngram chart shows that, whilst “medicine” and “constitution” have an established history of coterminous use, from the mid-1720s onwards – a time of increasing popularity of focusing on constitutions in the modern sense as a written set of basic rules upon which all laws should be based – the use of constitution skyrockets.
Carl Schmitt wrote in the 1920s that a constitution ought to be a reflection of the people, as they exist simultaneously above and below the political order that seeks to represent them in the world. Above, because like Hobbes’ Leviathan they tower over all political figures in judgement; below, because they are the very foundation upon which all political institutions can be built. If a people ceases to exist, then the institutions become hollow machines turning and maintaining themselves for nobody but themselves. And it must be remembered that institutions, as all things incorporated in some way, become entities in themselves.
A constitution is, therefore, simultaneously the spirit and mind of the people. The spirit, because it captures what Montesquieu attempted to identify in L’Esprit de Loi, the spirit of the laws; the truth that there is something intangible behind the tangible laws by which political institutions operate. In other words, rather than analysing the laws that existed, Montesquieu asked why those laws existed, rather than some other set of laws, in the political community in which they were practised. Why did the English have the common law, when the French had parlements? Etc.
The mind, because the constitution moves beyond unthinking instinct and into the strategic realm of forward thinking, extended temporal existence and predictable security. As Montesquieu feared of tyranny, and as Hegel recognised of Spirit in Man’s infancy, when the law becomes the domain of a single person, fear is the spirit of the legal order because there is no predictability, no consistency. Arbitrariness becomes the basis of decision making. It was not fear as fear of the government itself, but fear of the inability to know what the consequences from the government might be.
A constitution, then, speaks the unspoken sentiments of a people and does so in a consistent and unifying way.
The question that arose in the enlightenment over whether this speaking constitution should move to the page and transform from an unwritten to a written document was, of course, central to what Yuval Levin called the great debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Whilst Paine railed against what he saw as the “tyranny of the dead” when Burke defended tradition and custom, Burke gently replied that it is the very dialogue that thrives between the living and the dead that produces freedom; just as a traveller in a forest might wander from the beaten path and find a lush grove, so too might he get lost in a swamp. Innovation and the freedom that experience brings with it is possible only when there is a point from which you begin.
Instead, said Burke, it was that very tyranny – of a dead set of people from a particular moment in time – that would be cemented in a written constitution. Rather than allowing for the continual expression and interrogation of custom and tradition that comes with an unwritten constitution, a codified one would narrow the temporal horizon of a people into a strict moment in time in an attempt to speak forever. Some of the American Framers argued that a way around this would be to revise the constitution at the end of every generation – roughly 19 years or so. Sir Roger Scruton put the problem very (and typically) eloquently when he said that the Treaty of Rome was written in a year that’s gone for a circumstance that has passed by a group of people that are dead.
The two great constitutions that emerged in the late-1700s – in America and in France – had two very different goals that determined the direction in which they moved. America, said the political historian Hannah Arendt, framed a constitution on a set of institutions that already existed expressing a people that already had a heritage. For that reason, the American constitution can be said to have achieved those two goals around which this briefing note has thus far revolved: the expression of the spirit and mind of a people. France, on the other hand, attempted to create a people through the act of constitution: the Bretons, the Provencals, the Roussillions, the Orleanais, all were to be washed away and the remnants dissolved in the universal humanity of la France. The French constitution preceded a people; the American constitution expressed one.
Yet the constitution that has thrived where even the American one has failed has – or had – been the British one.
In their obsession with formalism and written rules, most psephologists have made the mistake of thinking that Britain’s constitution, uncodified though it is, can be found in the many documents that stretch from Magna Carta through the Bill of Rights to the Act of Union to the Great Reform Acts to the Parliament Acts to the Human Rights Act. No – to do so is to mistake a man’s words for the man himself. These are not Britain’s constitution, but the consequences (and in many places, the mutilation) of the constitution itself.
What is Britain’s constitution?
It is the Parliament itself.
Parliament, in the synecdochal slip of the tongue common in modern politics, is not the House of Commons, nor the House of Lords. Not even is it the building in which those assemblies meet. Parliament, as understood by Bagehot, Dicey, Maitland and all the eulogists of Britain, exists when the three traditional branches of British government are assembled in one place: the Monarch; the Lords; and the Commons. Hence, the momentous occasion when the Monarch delivers his speech to the Lords and Commons, Parliament is said to be together.
But why is Parliament Britain’s constitution? Because, properly understood, Parliament is the voice of people in all of its aspects. The Monarch is the people embodied, a singular head of state who gives to the constitution the only missing ingredient from spirit and mind – a body. He is the body of the politic. The Lords are the people as understood by Burke, as a transtemporal entity who speaks for the country as a physical entity – hence why it was tied to land – and a spiritual entity – hence the Lords Spiritual – and a legal entity – hence the Law Lords. The Commons, finally, are the people as understood by Paine, as the vocal element of the constitution, demanding changes in the moment and transient in its demands.
The British Parliament is, and always has been, the constitution. The doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty reflected this fact, that no power exists above Parliament – as the Monarch, Lords and Commons in one.
Labour’s constitutional reforms: past and present
This was undone entirely by New Labour. The greatest acts of constitutional vandalism – the creation of the Supreme Court, the Human Rights Act, the project of devolution, the reforms to the House of Lords – all committed by the forebears of the current administration upended this balance in a way none but constitutional historians loyal to the idea of Britain could have predicted.
Each of these deserves an invective all their own, but the simple fact is that each of these altered the operation of Britain’s constitution in different ways, but creating a legalistic straightjacket around Parliament: the Supreme Court subverted the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; the Human Rights Act made that Supreme Court loyal to a power beyond the boundaries and popular
control of Britain; devolution created parallel laws applying to the same citizens at different times and in different places across the country; and the neutering of the hereditary aristocracy resulted in an upper chamber dedicated to ambition, avarice and cronyism.
Thus the supreme entity of this nation – Parliament – has ceased to act as a unitary government and now must act as one amongst many. And by extension – and by design – the constitution has died.
This is the scene into which the new administration enters, ready to finish the job through solutions to a problem of its own making. One of the greatest architects of this situation, Gordon Brown, penned a document aimed at creating a “Reformed United Kingdom” by empowering the different regions of the United Kingdom to be competitors to the central government in Westminster, whilst the absurd phrase of “devolution deserts” now seeks to spread the insanity of an unequal legal landscape across the whole map of the British Isles.
These plans will make a legal reality the idea that Westminster is the English parliament and merely one amongst many. When Brown began his document by stating that “the crisis we face in Britain is not just short-term – it is deep-seated”, he did so without a hint of irony.
Why?
The reader might be left thinking, why? Why did New Labour do all of this, and why does Labour now seek to carry us further down this road?
By design or not, the New Labour government destroyed the constitution of this country because it blew apart the unity needed to underpin the idea of a people. Alongside the administrative vandalism of devolution – which exacerbated the delusions that the Scots and the Welsh, whilst culturally different to the English, are not legally the same nor subjects of the same crown – the surrendering of the nations courts’ abilities to mediate between its citizens to a foreign power only made worse the emerging sense of dual loyalty that was gestating in an increasingly multicultural Britain. The amazement that integration has ceased in Britain whilst the legal tradition of this country has been hollowed out has never yet joined the dots to arrive at the simple conclusion that integration is impossible in the current administrative state masquerading as a constitution.
Yet this is not the only reason Labour now pursues these goals. Indeed, it does so because it must. We have moved from circumstances in which a constitution might have been written to express a people that already existed – indeed, the people, understood properly as a transtemporal entity, never old or dying nor young or being born, that has occupied these islands for centuries – to circumstances in which a constitution must be written to summon a people into being.
We are France at the height of the revolution. The idea of Britain is being re-written, and re-constituted, because Britain has died. The elegists – Scruton in his England, an Elegy; Hitchens, in his The Abolition of Britain; and Murray, in his Strange Death of Europe – mourned a people that has passed away. Labour must now begin the process of constructing a new one, based on “values” and “identity”. And it must do so because it began this process 25 years ago.
Kino
For My Ex-Libertarians
The United Kingdom, and especially the Isle of Great Britain, has a very particular legal quirk that sets it apart from Western Civilisation, and possibly most of the uncivilised world as well. There is no legal right to self-defence. Everyone knows that to some extent, “guns are banned” in the UK, and we’re nothing like those silly Americans who can carry so-called assault weapons in Wall-Mart. Yet most Britons will be surprised to learn that non-lethal options such as pepper spray are only available to law enforcement personnel, and that possessing any product “made or adapted to cause a person injury” (aka the most effective way to reasonably defend yourself or those around you) in a public or private space is against the law. Instead the ladies and gentlemen of the UK may purchase a rape whistle, as politely suggested by the West Yorkshire Police on their “Ask The Police” webpage. The UK is so averse to the concept of self-defence that in 2012, American Self Defence instructor, Tim Larkin was barred from entering the country by Theresa May during her stint as Home Secretary.
This is a stark contrast to the continent, where countries like Austria, Germany, and Hungary have strong, codified legal definitions of self-defence with “stand your ground” laws, as well as the option to carry things such as bear spray, and with an easily obtainable permit you can even carry pistols capable of firing rubber bullets or CS gas pellets. In France, similar laws apply, pepper spray, gas pistols capable of firing CN or CS Gas are available to any law-abiding citizen above the age of 18. Whilst carrying them in public for self-defence is not a valid reason, French law stipulates you may use them lawfully to defend your house and person. Of course, there are still problems here. Stéphane Charbonnier, the director of the famous Charlie Hebdo magazine and sports shooting enthusiast applied for a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence, this permit was denied, and he was told he could rely upon his police protection. We all know what happened next.
Following the various terror attacks across France in 2015, the French government permitted all police officers to carry their service firearms whilst off duty. Compare this to the UK, where outside of Northern Ireland, only specialist police are allowed to even think about firearms and have very little support from the government or the courts when they do shoot, despite their enshrined right to kill in service of the state and his Majesty. Imagine if Westminster had decided to arm all British city police services after the Murder of Lee Rigby, or in 2017 after multiple violent terrorist attacks across Britain. Imagine a Britain that allowed off duty police or even current or ex-servicemen the ability to carry a firearm in public for the purposes of self-defence. I digress, the arming of the British Police is another debate for another time.
This all seems rather reasonable and modern, two European democracies with modern, democratic attitudes towards personal self-defence, but that’s not all. Countries like Italy and Spain allow high risk individuals and business owners such as jewellers or cash transit guards to carry firearms on their person, or to be kept in a secure location at their place of work. There are similar laws like this across the less developed nations of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But what’s extremely interesting, is that right in the heartland of Europe, there are two countries that stand alone when it comes to modern European firearms and self-defence law, Austria, and Czechia (formally known as the Czech Republic). Both of these countries permit civilians to own firearms for the express purpose of self-defence, and even allow civilians to carry them (Czechia) or very conditionally (Austria). The majority of all firearms held in Czechia are held for protection, and more than half of all Czech firearm owning citizens have a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence. Austria has some more specific use cases, but the general legal position is that if you own any sort of firearm, or any other kind of legal weapon for that matter, it can be used to lawfully defend yourself or your property. Austrian business owners or employees of said businesses (with express legal permission from the owner of the premises) can carry their firearms within their private premises but carrying prohibited weapons in public is illegal without a lawful reason. I don’t need to attack your brain with graphs, stats, and differential equations to prove to you that modern European nations with clear self-defence laws that empower victims with the ability to neutralise threats quickly and effectively to their person, their personal liberty, and their property are better places to live in than any major British city.
If you cannot effectively defend yourself or your property, how can you be expected to defend your country? In 2013, after Lee Rigby was brutally executed on a busy street in broad daylight, there was a lot of discussion about how people in the background are just carrying on with their own lives, walking past the two-blood-soaked Islamic militants as if public beheadings were just a normal part of life in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. A similar discussion has opened up regarding the recent rape case on the tube, about how other passengers just sat there and let it happen. The general public is aghast and shocked at such cruel indifference. But all official documentation from government and law enforcement officials in the UK recommend non-intervention, that your best choice of action is to merely alert the authorities and wait. And even then, there’s a possibility that even a police officer acting in the course of their duty to protect the general public, can be charged with murder. The current UK legal system requires all violent action towards others to be “proportional force” to be considered lawful self-defence, but how do you calculate what is proportional to a man raping an unconscious woman right in front of you? Surely in this instance you apply the most efficient and effective method you have at hand, regardless of how much damage is done to the assailant?
With the official legal advice of the government and all Law Enforcement in the UK advocating a form of learned helplessness, it’s no wonder that when confronted with difficult and violent situations, many can only watch in horror as they wait for the equally ineffective authorities to arrive and diffuse the situation. Now what happens if you are a young woman, and after calling for assistance you are greeted by Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens? After that incident, the complete indifference to the “Near-Eastern Ceasefire of the week” public disturbances, and the overall lack of an effective police presence across any British Urban centres, what’s the point in calling the police? They won’t arrive on time, and it’s more than likely they’ll have you sleeping in a cell when they finally get there.
My own personal experience of the ineffectiveness and apathy from the British Police Services, was last year, when my mother’s car was stolen from her drive in the early hours of the morning. Already prepared for the Brazilification of the UK, the car was equipped with a tracking device. Being model citizens who know better than to engage in vigilantism, we scoped out the location on google maps and informed our police service that the car had been stolen, but we could also provide the police with the approximate location, aiding with the investigation and bringing about swift justice to car thieves! After all this isn’t South Africa, where you have to bring your own pen to the police station to report a crime. Amidst the excitement, our local police service informed us that since the car was now located in Outer London, the case would have to go through a lengthy transfer process to the Metropolitan Police Service before anything could happen. This process could take hours or days depending on how busy things were, and things are always busy for the Met. This immediately put a damper on the celebrations. Who knew how long it would be before the tracker was found, and the car relocated to a secure location beyond the reach of google street-view…
The deskbound officer heard our dismay and informed us that car theft in the UK currently follows a rather specific modus operandi. Cars are stolen to order by professionals, who then take the cars to out of the way locations, blocking the car from view with vans or other large vehicles, then they leave the cars alone until multiple stolen cars can be transported in bulk to the coast and then shipped off into the unknown. Then the officer told us that we could, as private citizens, retrieve our own property, as long as we believed that it was safe to do so. Yes, you read that correctly, the policeman who took our call, told us to go get our car back by ourselves, and to bring proof of ownership and identification because we would most likely be stopped by the police on our way home as we would be in the possession of an “un-stolen vehicle”. When I heard this I actually belly laughed, it was like being back in South Africa again. Nevertheless, we decided to sally forth.
As South Africans, our natural instinct was to reach for the 9mm for some insurance. Sorry, this is a civilised western nation, you can’t have that anymore. And even if we could, British laws would criminalise us for bringing anything with us for self-defence, and we would potentially receive greater punishment than any of the car thieves if we had anything on us which could be used to harm another person. To cut a long story short, despite assurances from police that someone would be dispatched to make sure we weren’t bleeding out on a dodgy council estate, we retrieved the vehicle with zero assistance from the police. It was located on an estate covered in bits and pieces of various luxury SUVs and Saloons, with masked youths cutting up cars on driveways in broad daylight. If anyone came at us with a knife or blunt instrument, my only effective means of self-defence would’ve been to hit them with my car, certainly a gross violation of “proportional force”.
This is what made me realise that the British Police and the legal system have completely failed the ordinary person. We were explicitly told by the police that if we ever wanted to see the car again, our best course of action would’ve been to retrieve it ourselves, providing that “it was safe to do so.” How is retrieving a stolen vehicle from a council estate safe in any capacity? Is “safe vigilantism” the future of law and order in Britain? The British police outsourcing law and order to the general public is not a recent phenomenon, and there have been many other cases where the police have been dependent upon law-bending civilians to enforce the peace.
Now if we were Sikhs, rather than dreaded White South Africans, we would be well within our rights to carry a blade during this endeavour because the legal system makes an exception for a weapon that has to be carried at all times “for religious purposes”. That religious purpose is explicitly self-defence mind you. Despite the fact that carrying any kind of blade explicitly for self-defence is a gross violation of UK law. Quite famously during the 2011 riots, Sikhs took to the streets with swords, bats, and all manner of weapons to defend their communities, and instead of the police disarming the sword-wielding paramilitary forces and dispersing, the Sikhs were praised by the Prime Minister! If I took even a rounders bat with me to rescue my mother’s stolen car I would’ve gone to jail.
The interesting thing about this Sikh tangent, is that the Seax, the famous historical general-purpose knife of the Anglo-Saxons, was considered to be a status symbol of a freeman, and that anyone without one was possibly a serf or a slave. Could an Anglo-Saxon freeman lawfully carry a culturally and religiously significant object like the Seax in modern Britain?
The 2011 August Riots revealed a long-held apathy within the police and the law enforcement caste of the United Kingdom. Across the country, militias appeared outside of Turkish barber shops and kebab bars. This mass mobilisation was welcomed across the political landscape, with no minister brave enough to question why these businesses and community centres had a surplus of edged weapons and baseball bats conveniently ready for an occasion like this. The EDL came out in force in Enfield and North London, and were reprimanded by the police and political establishment merely for being present. None of them were armed with more than an England football shirt, yet received none of the praise the middle eastern baseball enthusiasts got from the then Prime Minister, David Cameron.
I was going to conclude the article there, but since writing began, three more events have come to attention. On the 30th of December, 2023, roughly 50 men from the London Eritrean community gathered in Camberwell, armed with bats and wooden planks, injuring four officers and disturbing the public good. Apparently only eight individuals were arrested during this act, when you can clearly see countless men violating every British weapon law, as well as assaulting police officers and vehicles with weapons whilst the police seem only capable of timidly backing away. 50 or more Eritreans with cudgels fighting a pitched battle with the police, barely any news coverage, less than a quarter of the perpetrators arrested… Why? What’s the point in even showing up? Let the Eritreans bash up their own embassy if you’re not going to arrest them, it’s probably better they harass their own government rather than vent their frustrations on ordinary Londoners.
The second event was the reveal that Lawrence Morgan, the Jamaican Gangster whose deportation flight was prevented by a jumped-up Cambridge grad who now resides in Norway, was scheduled to be physically removed after a string of violent firearm related incidents. In 2016 Lawrence Morgan was imprisoned for only five years and ten months after being charged with the unlawful possession of a firearm, ammunition, and controlled substances. Another two-year sentence in 2017 for drugs charges, and then in 2020 he is caught on CCTV footage participating in a lethal Birmingham gang shootout whilst riding a small bicycle. No murder or attempted murder charges, despite the battle causing the violent execution of his associate, and Morgan himself caught on CCTV firing a pistol with intent. Jailed again in 2021 for only five years. The authorities attempted to deport Lawrence Morgan in 2023, if they fail to do so again (Border authorities have reportedly hired a hanger to stage deportations since they have become completely incapable of doing their job) Lawrence Morgan will most likely be back on the streets of England in a few years’ time. Ideally Lawrence Morgan would’ve been deported after his first firearms offence, but the only reason the authorities have attempted to deport him now was because in October last year, UK prison governors announced that British prisons were rapidly approaching full capacity. How many failed deportations do they let you have before they grant you citizenship?
And thirdly, a horrific chemical attack was carried out by an Afghan Asylum seeker, one let into the country despite a history of violent and sexual offences. The police now seem incapable of finding him and have publicly lamented that it’s “sooo difficult” to find someone who doesn’t use their bank card or a mobile phone. The forces of the state have no issue when it comes to keeping track of every football fan who has ever gotten a little rowdy at an away match, but a violent sexual predator can disappear into thin air as long as they stay away from their smartphone. As an ordinary citizen, no rape whistle or panic button can defeat a lunatic armed with even a small quantity of a corrosive substance. What can you possibly do when threatened with life changing injuries and or death? The legal precedent of proportional force would suggest that ordinary civilians should disfigure or maim an acid attacker, instead of putting the threat down with a human and instantaneous response.
Idris Elba and other lionised television gangsters such as the Labour party have begun a call for the complete ban of items such as machetes and “zombie knives” aka any large single bladed knife or sword, like the various kebab knives and industrial cutting tools that many people use for work, daily life, and the odd riot prevention. Nevermind the fact you’re more likely to be stabbed to death by a supermarket steak knife or B&Q screwdriver than meet your end facing an authentic katana or antique sabre wielding urban youth. There has been nothing from these public figures about controlling the usage of drain cleaner or any other household substances that can permanently disfigure or kill someone, but tools and items used by ordinary citizens, historians, law abiding collectors, and specialist craftsmen must be taken away because their mere existence corrupts the urban children and encourages them to embrace gang culture. As usual, our politicians would rather punish law abiding citizens instead of actually attempting to tackle why the urban populations of Britain prefer smoking weed and carving each other up instead of going to youth clubs and boxing gyms.
I expect Lawrence Morgan and other violent Jamaican gangsters will be back on our streets on “good behaviour”, in no time, and other local roadmen will be offered shorter and shorter sentences. Violent schizophrenic, with a history of incidents, Valdo Calocane, who stabbed three people to Death in Nottingham is not being charged with murder, but manslaughter. Following this trend, after a few years of medication and observation in a secure hospital he will undoubtedly be released back into the general public, to make room for more aggressive mentally unwell individuals.
We can no longer rely upon nautical building accessories like Narwhal Tusks, and have a sensible European approach to the legal right to defend one’s self, one’s property, those around you, and that which you hold dear. If you look at prior days of infamy, such as the Siege of Sidney Street or the Tottenham Outrage, when doing battle with violent aliens, the forces of law and order were joined by armed civilians giving chase themselves, or equipped and supported by civilians. Conveniently enough, the fact that the police during the Siege of Sidney Street were armed with firearms provided by a local gunsmith is left out by almost all official sources such as the BBC and London Police museum exhibitions.
With the appropriate equipment, perhaps it would be possible to galvanise the British public and restore even a semblance of law and order to Urban Britain. If at least one person had ready access to an incapacitating weapon like pepper spray or even a concealable firearm on London Bridge that day, five people would not have been stabbed. Across all of England’s terror attacks and similarly violent incidents, there are multiple references to bystanders resorting to desperate and weird items to defend themselves with like skateboards, tusks, or ornamental spears from historical displays. Granted pepper spray won’t do very much against a Christmas terror-lorry barrelling towards you but merely knowing in a violent situation you would be capable of doing more than cowering in fear and waiting for the royally appointed death squads might encourage the British population to have more of a spine.
Why we need a Hitchens-Navalny strategy for GE 2024
A few days before the 2010 general election, Peter Hitchens wrote an article in the Daily Mail titled ‘This is the most important article I’ve ever written – and loyal Conservative voters will hate me for it’.
In it he argued that, despite being counterintuitive, voters must eschew the Tories if there was to be any chance of implementing a genuine, conservative agenda for Britain.
Much of its analysis of Britain’s woes are completely applicable today. He ends it by writing: ‘Five years’ from now we could throw the liberal elite into the sea, if we tried. But the first stage in that rebellion must be the failure of David Cameron to rescue the wretched anti-British Blair project and wrap it in a blue dress’.
Fourteen years later, not only is the anti-British Blair project wrapped in a blue dress still ruling the country, but David Cameron is again one of its leading figures, rubbing more shoulders at Davos and advocating military actions more brutal and destabilising than even Blair could dream of.
In 2019, Brexit allowed the Conservatives to completely refresh their image and successfully brand themselves as a populist national-conservative party. I myself, for the first (and last) time, voted for them in that election. For this I am ashamed.
What has transpired since is that, what we once identified as Blairism, is in fact part of a wider and even more sinister agenda. If what Hitchens realistically desired was an internal struggle within the Conservatives after a 2010 loss, what we can achieve today is that party’s shattering into a million tiny pieces.
‘But Labour will be even worse’, you will undoubtedly hear the Tory Boys cry. If this was convincing and arguable back in 2010, today it is wrong on its face.
If grassroots supporters and ordinary voters could hear how Tory journalists, politicians and advisors speak amongst themselves, they would be taken aback over how deeply their views are reviled and how deep the liberal rot is.
It is a party run almost entirely by childless, rootless metropolitans, whose view of conservatism is a Randian wet dream of identikit glass skyscrapers and GDPmaxxing.
When it comes to social values, foreign policy, education, health and every other significant policy area, there is no difference between them and the people who run Labour.
In fact, I would go as far to say that Labour is actually run by more ‘normal’ people. So why is it so important to destroy the Tories? Because of what comes after.
Starmer’s Labour is at this stage a well-oiled machine raring to go. Unlike the Tories, it does not pretend to be something it is not. It is an out-and-proud party of the Davos agenda.
Its current popularity is based on it not being the party to preside over the last decade and a half of chaos and decline.
If we are going to have a globalist government, let’s have the exhibitionists instead of those in the closet, as this will help the public correctly identify their enemies.
Right now, there is no appetite on the left to disrupt Labour from its course, but once they are in power it will not take long for the Corbynista wing to start making movements.
This could remove from Labour the contingent that actually can make some common cause with the dissident right (Euroscepticism, averseness to dangerous foreign entanglements, distrust of corporate and financial elites, and a belief in the nationalisation of strategic industries come to mind).
More important is what happens to the Conservatives. Hitchens correctly identifies the Westminster consensus as being ‘only propped up by state funding and dodgy millionaires’.
The funding is allocated based on the number of seats a party holds, and the donations on its prospects of power. A Tory wipe-out would kill both birds with one stone.
If the rump of it is allowed to remain as a significantly large party, it is likely to limp on and even capitalise on its new ability to talk the talk from the opposition benches without having to walk at all.
A vacuum, which we know nature abhors, must be created in its place.
Current polling shows that support for Reform UK could cost the Tories many seats in favour of Labour, despite Reform not winning any themselves.
Reform platform is a damn sight better than anything else out there, but Richard Tice’s neocon Tory-lite outfit will not bring about the reform we actually need. It could, however, be the catalyst for it.
Destroying the Conservative Party once and for all would be a noble and worthwhile aim, and would open the door for major, long-needed shakeup of our politics.
This is a strong argument that Tice would be well advised to use, but predictably he will say that the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories in 2019 and they failed on Brexit and immigration, so this time they won’t stand aside.
He will, equally predictably, be countered with the argument that he will still let Labour in without winning seats himself.
Openly declaring war on the Tories as a necessary first-step in building a viable and genuine conservative political movement is something that is hard to argue against. Such a battle cry could also attract non-Tory voters.
The only Reform UK politician I have heard express this intent openly is its Co-Deputy Leader, Ben Habib. So it is not an impossibility that they take this line.
Habib is the real deal, but would need someone with the profile of Farage to meaningfully spread this message.
If the straightjacket of the two-party system can be broken, a genuine political realignment can take place, making the ‘Red Wall’ shift pale in comparison.
You might now be wondering where Alexei Navalny comes into all of this.
We have all heard of ‘tactical voting’, but have you ever heard of ‘smart voting’?
Umnoye golosovaniye was a website set up by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation that had a single goal: letting people know who to vote for to have the best chance of ousting incumbent United Russia politicians.
Unlike British tactical voting, this was an integrated, mathematical system that had no limits or any other goals, and would advise you to vote for communist, ultranationalist and liberal candidates alike; whoever had the best chance.
Many in the ‘non-systemic opposition’ said it would be impossible to vote out the ruling regime in any case, and that engaging with it by participating in elections would only legitimise it. Yet Navalny argued convincingly that shouting from the side lines alone ultimately changes nothing.
For obvious reasons, success of smart voting was limited in the Russian system, but it is a strategy much better suited to our own system of illusory free elections, which are based on brainwashing and narrative control, as opposed to the more primitive techniques used by the Kremlin.
There, the process of voting itself has to be manipulated to maintain the status quo, with there being a limit to the amount achieved by propaganda alone.
Here in the UK, propaganda is the overriding method of keeping out the non-systemic opposition.
What this means is that our actual electoral system is, compared to the American one at least, largely free from rigging and ballot manipulation.
This provides opportunity to collapse, or at least fracture, what is an all-encompassing regime by using its own structures against it.
The Conservative Party is the weak link in the chain – and it can be broken.
The success of a British smart voting system would depend on how convincingly the argument is made.
If it is made well enough, we could indeed throw the liberal elite into the sea five years from now.
The Post-Polar Moment
Introduction
Abstract: Nations and intergovernmental organisations must consider the real possibility of moving into a world without a global hegemon. The core assumptions that underpin realist thought can directly be challenged by presenting an alternative approach to non-polarity. This could be through questioning what might occur if nations moved from a world in which polarity remains a major tool for understanding interstate relations and security matters. Further work is necessary to explore the full implications of what entering a non-polar world could mean and possible outcomes for such events.
Problem statement: What would global security look like without competition between key global players such as the People’s Republic of China and the United States?
So what?: Nations and intergovernmental organisations should prepare for the real possibility that the international community could be moving into a world without a global hegemon or world order. As such, they should recognise the potential for a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape and are urged to strategically acknowledge the importance of what this would mean. More research is still needed to explore the implications for and of this moving forward.
Geopolitical Fluidity
Humankind has moved rapidly from a period of relatively controlled geopolitical dominance towards a more fluid and unpredictable situation. This has posed a question to global leadership: what would it mean to be leaderless, and what role could anarchy play in such matters? Examining the assumptions that make up most of the academic discourse within International Relations and Security Studies remains important in trying to tackle said dilemma.
From this geopolitical fluidity, the transition from U.S.-led geopolitical dominance, shown in the ‘unipolar moment’, to that of either bipolarity or multipolarity has come about. This re-emergence, however, has not directly focused on an unexplored possibility that could explain the evolving trends that might occur. Humankind is entering a post-polar world out of the emergence of a leaderless world structure. There is the possibility, too, that neither the U.S. nor the the People’s Republic of China become the sole global superpower which then dominates the world and its structures”. The likelihood of this occurring remains relatively high, as explored further on. Put differently, “it is entirely possibly that within the next two decades, international relations could be entering a period of no singular global superpower at all”.
Humankind is entering a post-polar world out of the emergence of a leaderless world structure.
The Non-Polar Moment
The most traditional forms of realism propose three forms of polar systems. These are unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar (The Big Three). There is a strong possibility that we as a global community are transitioning into a fourth and separate world system. This fourth and relatively unexplored world system could mean that anything that enables the opportunity for either a superpower or regional power to establish itself will not be able to occur in the foreseeable future.
It can also historically be explained by the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the emergence of the U.S. as the leading superpower within global politics. For lack of better words, it was a generational image of a defining dominant nation within both international relations and security circles. From this, it was widely acknowledged and regarded that Krauthammer coined the’ unipolar moment’ in the aftermath of the Cold War. This meant that there was a period when the U.S. was the sole dominant centre of global power/polarity. This unipolar moment is more accurately considered part of a much larger ‘global power moment’.
This global power moment is in reference to the time period mentioned above, which entailed the ability for nations to directly and accurately project their power abroad or outside their region. This ability to project power will presumably but steadily decline in the following decades due to the subsequent decrease in the three core vectors of human development (Demography, Technology and Ideology). When combined, one could argue that the three polar systems allowed for the creation of the global power moment itself. Specifically, that would be from the start of the 19th until the end of the 20th century. Following that line of thought, the future was affected by the three aforementioned pillars somewhat like this:
- Demography: this means having a strongly structured and or growing population, one that allows a nation to act expansively towards other states and use those human resources to achieve its political goals.
- Technology: the rise of scientific innovations, allowing stronger military actions to happen against other nations. To date, it has granted nations the ability to directly project power abroad, which, before this, would have only been able to occur locally or at a regional level.
- Ideology: the third core vector of human development. That means the development of philosophies that justify the creation of a distinct mindset or “zeitgeist” that culturally explains a nation’s actions.
These three core vectors of development are built into a general human trend and assumption of ‘more’, within this great power moment. Existing systems are built into the understanding of more people, more technology development, and more growth, along with possessing generated ideologies that rationalise such actions. What this does, in turn, is help define a linear progression of human history and help develop an understanding of interstate relations.
Existing systems are built into the understanding of more people, more technology development, and more growth, along with possessing generated ideologies that rationalise such actions.
Nevertheless, this understanding is currently considered insufficient; the justification for this is based on developing a fourth vector to help comprehend power distribution. This vector is that of non-polarity, meaning a non-power-centred world structure. From this, the idea or concept of non-polarity is not original. Previously, it was deconstructed by Haass, Manning and Stuenkel, and, in their context, refers to a direct absence of global polarity within any of the Big Three polar systems.
Prior academics have shown that non-polarity is the absence of absolute power being asserted within a place and time but continues to exist within other big three polar systems. The current world diverges from the idea of multipolar in one core way. There are several centres of power, many of which are non-state actors. As a result, power and polarity can be found in many different areas and within many different actors. This argument expands on Strange’s (1996) contributions, who disputed that polarity was transferring from nations to global marketplaces and non-state actors.
A notable example is non-state players who act against more established powers, these can include terrorist and insurgent groups/organisations. Non-polarity itself being “a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power”. From this, a more adequate understanding of non-polarity is required. Additionally, it should be argued that non-polarity is rather a direct lack of centres of power that can exist and arise from nations. Because of this, this feature of non-polarity infers the minimisation of a nation’s ability to meaningfully engage in structural competition, which in turn describes a state of post-polarity realism presenting itself.
Humans are presented with the idea of a ‘non-polar moment’, which comes out of the above-stated direct lack of polarity. The non-polar moment inverts the meaning of the unipolar moment found with the U.S. in the aftermath of the Cold War, which was part of the wider period of Pax Americana (after WWII). This contrasts with the traditional idea: instead of having a singular hegemonic power that dominates power distribution across global politics, there is no direct power source to assert itself within the system. Conceptually, this non-polar moment could be viewed as a system where states are placed into a situation in which they are limited to being able to act outwardly. A reason why they could be limited is the demographic constraints being placed on a nation from being able to strategically influence another nation, alongside maintaining an ideology that allows nations to justify such actions.
The non-polar moment inverts the meaning of the unipolar moment found with the U.S. in the aftermath of the Cold War, which was part of the wider period of Pax Americana.
The outcomes of such a world have not been fully studied, with the global community moving from a system to one without any distributors of power or ability to influence other nations. In fact, assuming these structural conditions, -that nations need to acquire hegemony and are themselves perpetually stunted-, the scenario is similar to having a ladder that is missing its first few steps. From this, one can also see this structural condition as the contrast to a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ situation, with the great power reduction. Because of this, the non-polar moment could symbolise the next, fourth stage for nations to transition to part of a much wider post-polarity form of realism that could develop.
The implications for this highlight a relevant gap within the current literature, the need to examine both the key structural and unit-level conditions that currently are present. This is what it might mean to be part of a wider ‘a global tribe without a leader’, something which a form of post-polarity realism might suggest.
A Global Tribe Without a Leader
To examine the circumstances for which post-polarity realism can occur, one must examine the conditions that define realism itself. Traditionally, for realism, the behaviours of states are as follows:
- States act according to their self-interests;
- States are rational in nature; and
- States pursue power to help ensure their own survival.
What this shows is that there are several structures from within the Big Three polar systems. Kopalyan argues that the world structure transitions between the different stages. This can be shown by moving between interstate relations as bipolar towards multipolar, done by both nations and governments, which allows nations to re-establish themselves in accordance with their structural conditions within the world system. Kopalyan then continues to identify the absence of a consistent conceptualisation of non-polarity. This absence demonstrates a direct need for clarity and structured responses to the question of non-polarity.
As such, the transition between systems to non-polarity, to and from post-polarity will probably occur. The reason for this is the general decline in three core vectors of human development, which are part of complex unit-level structural factors occurring within states. The structural factors themselves are not helpful towards creating or maintaining any of the Big Three world systems. Ultimately, what this represents is a general decline in global stability itself which is occurring. An example of this is the reduction of international intergovernmental organisations across the globe and their inability to adequately manage or solve major structural issues like Climate Change, which affects all nations across the international community.
Firstly, this can be explained demographically because most nations currently live with below-replacement (and sub-replacement) fertility rates. In some cases, they have even entered a state of terminal demographic decline. This is best symbolised in nations like Japan, Russia, and the PRC, which have terminal demographics alongside most of the European continent. The continuation of such outcomes also affects other nations outside of this traditional image, with nations like Thailand and Türkiye suffering similar issues. Contrasted globally, one can compare it to the dramatic inverse fertility rates found within Sub-Saharan Africa.
Secondly, with technology, one can observe a high level of development which has produced a widespread benefit for nations. Nevertheless, it has also contributed to a decline in the preservation of being able to transition between the Big Three systems. Technological developments have produced obstacles to generating coherence between governments and their citizenry. For example, social media allows for the generation of mass misinformation that can be used to create issues within nations from other countries and non-state actors. Additionally, it has meant that nations are placed permanently into a state of insecurity because of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The results mean there can never be any true sense or permanence in the idea of security due to the effects of WMDs and their spillover effects. Subsequently, technological development has placed economic hurdles for nations within the current world order through record levels of debt, which has placed further strain on the validity of the current global economic system in being able to maintain itself.
Technological developments have produced obstacles to generating coherence between governments and their citizenry.
The final core vector of human development is ideology and its decline. This has been shown with a reduction in the growth of new ideologies and philosophies used to understand and address world issues. This is an extension of scholars like Toynbee and Spengler, whose literature has also claimed that ideologically, the world has witnessed a general reduction in abstract thought and problem-solving. This ideological decline has most substantially occurred in the Western World.
The outcomes of the reduction in these human development vectors demonstrate a potential next stage in global restructuring. Unfortunately, only little data can be sourced to explain what a global world order could look like without a proverbial ‘king on the throne’ exists. Nearly all acquired data is built into a ‘traditional’ understanding of a realist world order. This understanding is largely correct. Nevertheless, the core assumption built into our post-WWII consensus is out of date.
This is the concept that we as nations will continue falling back into and transitioning between the traditional Big Three polar systems. This indeed contrasts with moving into a fourth non-polar world structure. Traditionally, states have transitioned between the Big Three world systems. This can only occur when all three vectors of human development are positive, when now, in reality, all three are in decline.
This is not to take away from realism as a cornerstone theoretical approach to understanding and explaining state behaviour. Realism and its core tenets are still correct on a conceptual and theoretical level and will remain so. Indeed, what unites all branches of realism is this core assumption of civilisation from within the system and that it will directly affect polarity. These structures are assumed to remain in place, presenting one major question. This question is shown upon investigating the current bipolar connection between both major superpowers, in this case, between the U.S. and the PRC. Kissinger argues that “almost as if according to some natural law, in every century, there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system per its own values.” It can be seen in the direct aftermath of the declining U.S., which is moving away from the unipolar moment it found itself in during the 1990s, into a more insecure and complex multipolar present. This present currently defines Sino-U.S. relations and has set the tone for most conversations about the future of global politics. Such a worldview encapsulates how academics have traditionally viewed bipolar strategic competition, with one side winning and the other losing. This bipolarity between these superpowers has often left the question of which will eventually dominate the other. Will the U.S. curtail and contain a rising PRC, or will the PRC come out as the global hegemon overstepping U.S. supremacy?
Realism and its core tenets are still correct on a conceptual and theoretical level and will remain so. Indeed, what unites all branches of realism is this core assumption of civilisation from within the system and that it will directly affect polarity.
Consequently and presently, there remains a distinct possibility that both superpowers could collapse together or separately within a short period of each other. This collapse is regardless of their nation’s relative power or economic interdependence. It could rather be:
- The PRC could easily decline because of several core factors. Demographically, the nation’s one-child policy has dramatically reduced the population. The results could place great strain on the nation’s viability. Politically, there is a very real chance that there could be major internal strife due to competing factional elements within the central government. Economically, housing debt could cause an economic crash to occur.
- For the U.S., this same could occur. The nation has its own economic issues and internal political problems. This, in turn, might also place great pressure on the future viability of the country moving forward.
Still, the implications for both nations remain deeply complex and fluid as to what will ultimately occur. From this, any definite outcomes currently remain unclear and speculative.
Within most traditional Western circles, the conclusion for the bipolar competition will only result in a transition towards either of the two remaining world systems. Either one power becomes hegemonic, resulting in unipolarity, or, in contrast, as nations move into a multipolar system, where several powers vie for security. Nevertheless, this transition cannot currently occur if both superpowers within the bipolar system collapse at the same time. This is regardless of whether their respective collapses are connected or not. As both superpowers are in a relative decline, they themselves contribute to a total decline of power across the world system. From this, with the rise of global interdependence between states, when a superpower collapses, it has long-term implications for the other superpower and those caught in between. If both superpowers collapse, it would give us a world system with no definitive power centre and a global tribe without a leader.
This decline would go beyond being in a state of ‘posthegemony’, where there is a singular or bipolar superpower, the core source of polarity amongst nations, towards that of a non-polar world. This means a transition into a world without the ability to develop an organised world system from a full hegemonic collapse. With the collapse of bipolarity and the inability to transition towards either of the traditional remaining world systems, as previously mentioned, this would be like all nations being perpetually stunted in their ability to develop, like a ladder with the first ten steps missing. All nations would collectively struggle to get up the first few steps back into some form of structural normalcy. It could, for decades, prevent any attempt to transition back into the traditional realm of the Big Three world systems.
With the collapse of bipolarity and the inability to transition towards either of the traditional remaining world systems, as previously mentioned, this would be like all nations being perpetually stunted in their ability to develop, like a ladder with the first ten steps missing.
The result/consequence of any collapse directly caused by a link between economic, demographic and political failings would become a global death spiral, potentially dragging nearly all other nations down with its collapse. That considered another question would arise: if we as an international community structurally face a non-polar moment on a theoretical level, what might the aftermath look like for states and interstate relations?
Rising and Falling Powers
This aspect of how the international community and academia view the international sphere could yield a vital understanding of what may happen within the next few years and likely decades, will need to constantly reassess the core assumptions behind our pre-existing thoughts. One core assumption is that nations are either rising or falling. However, it may be worth remembering that it is entirely possible that both bipolar powers could easily decline significantly at any point, for multiple different reasons and factors. The outcomes would have substantial implications for the world as a whole.
It may be worth remembering that it is entirely possible that both bipolar powers could easily decline significantly at any point, for multiple different reasons and factors.
Ultimately, it implies that the international community will need to reevaluate how issues like polarity are viewed, and continue to explore the possibility of entering a fourth polar world – non-polar – and address the possibility that some form of post-polarity realism might begin to conceptualise. Nations and intergovernmental organisations should, at the least, attempt to consider or acclimatise to the real possibility of transforming into a world without a global hegemon or world order.
This article was originally published in The Defence Horizon Journal, an academic and professional-led journal dedicated to the study of defence and security-related topics. The original post can be read here.
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The Path of Reconstruction
As every British conservative writer, pundit, and academic will tell you, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said:
“The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing.”
How right he was! Having ceased to be a national party in both respects, dispensing with any meaningful concept of the nation and placing all its chips on a concentrated slither of the Grey Vote – a demographic which it’s managed to alienate after a completely avoidable PR disaster – the party is on track to be reduced to nothing come this year’s general election.
Based on recent polling, the Tories are competing for a distant second with the Liberal Democrats, leading many to suggest 2024 is going to be Britain’s equivalent of Canada’s 1993 federal election, in which a centre-left lawyer secures a majority after the unpopular centre-right government, headed by an unlikeable first-of-their-kind Prime Minister, was decimated by a vote-splitting right-wing populist upstart called Reform.
Given this, it is worth considering the possibility of a Canada ’93-style erosion of the Conservative Party over the next five years and what this will mean for the British right, assuming it’s going to be represented by Reform UK or a different party arising from a merger between the two. After all, by his own admission, Farage isn’t trying to win the general election, stating it won’t determine which party enters government (rest assured, it will be Labour) but will determine which party leads the opposition.
The collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party – Canada’s main centre-right party – coincided with the rise of the Reform Party of Canada (RPC); a right-wing populist party founded in the 1980s and led by Preston Manning. The RPC originated as a pressure movement for advancing the interests of Western Canada, whose inhabitants felt increasingly alienated by the central government, especially as constitutional issues increased in salience. The RPC was particularly suspicious of attempts to grant “distinct society” status to Quebec, believing Canada was a federation of similar and equal provinces united by a set of rights and obligations, rather than an essentially multicultural and bilingual state.
As the RPC sought to become a national party, it was required to expand its appeal and therefore its political platform. The party dispensed with its Western-centric agenda and outright rejected calls within its rank-and-file for Western Canadian independence. In its place, the RPC formulated a platform dedicated to shrinking the size of the central government, lowering taxes, making considerable cuts to government spending, pursuing free trade agreements, supporting Christian social values, promoting direct democracy, and advancing political reform.
After its electoral breakthrough in 1993, the RPC continued to broaden its appeal, softening its positions to attract more moderate-minded voters in Canada’s Eastern provinces. Whilst the 1993 manifesto provided an extensive 56 reasons to vote for the party – over half of which dealt with the party’s core concerns, treating areas outside their remit with scarce detail – the party’s 1997 manifesto condensed its list of policies, softened its position on tax-and-spend, made national unity a top priority, and generally provided more thorough proposals. The party also openly disassociated with views which invited accusations of bigotry, intolerance, extremism but retained a focus on family-oriented social conservatism.
In the 1997 federal election, the RPC would increase its vote share and total number of seats, becoming the largest party in opposition and solidifying itself as the main conservative party in Canada. The party held onto its Western support base and managed to strengthen its influence in the Prairies, but still struggled to find support among moderate Atlantic Canadians, many of whom continued to support the PCP, despite its greatly diminished political influence. For the most part, the RPC was still viewed (and still functioned in many ways) as a regional party, seen by many as the Western equivalent of the Bloc Québécois – a party dedicated to the interests of Quebec and another major winner in the 1993 federal election.
To complicate matters further, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien pursued greater financial discipline in order to reduce the national deficit. This occurred during a period of “constitutional fatigue” which tail-ended a turbulent period of controversial proposals for reform. As fiscal conservatism and political reform were the RPC’s core concerns, the party often struggled to oppose government policy despite being the largest party in opposition, simultaneously trying to integrate its newfound responsibilities (and privileges) with its populist background.
Concluding it needed to broaden its appeal even more, the RPC merged with several provincial wings of the PCP into a new right-wing party: The Canadian Alliance.
Similar to the RPC, the party continued to adapt its image, refine its positions, and broaden its platform. However, unlike the RPC’s 1997 manifesto, which largely homed-in on the party’s approach to its core issues, the CA’s 2000 manifesto paid greater attention to issues beyond the RPC’s traditional remit, such as international affairs, environmental conservation, and technological change, all whilst carrying over RPC policy on tax-and-spend, decentralization, and family values.
Alas, despite these efforts, the Canadian Alliance (CA) was short-lived, existing for less than half-a-decade, and was widely viewed as the RPC under a different name. The party would place second in the 2000 federal election, increasing its share of the vote and its number of seats as the RPC had done in 1997, but not before playing host to a major change in the Canadian political landscape: the end of Preston Manning’s leadership. For most members, a new party required new management, so the bookish Manning was ousted in favour of the clean-cut (but also gaffe-prone) Stockwell Day, whose outspoken evangelical views often contrasted his own party’s efforts at moderation.
The Canadian right would remain out of power until 2006, in which the newly founded Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), led by Stephen Harper, a former policy advisor to Preston Manning, defeated the incumbent Liberal Party and formed a minority government. Founded in 2003, the CPC was created from a full and official merger of the CA and the PCP. Combining policies and aspects of their intellectual traditions, the merger reinvigorated the centrality of fiscal conservatism in the Canadian centre-right, and united Canada’s once-divided right-leaning voters under one national banner.
Although courting the Christian right, Harper displaced the last remnants of the RPC’s populistic social conservatism to the party’s periphery, entrenching economic liberalism as the backbone of the CPC’s electoral coalition whilst formulating stances on a variety of issues, from immigration to arts and culture, from constitutional reform to public transit, from foreign policy to affordable housing, from international trade to social justice.
As it took roughly five years and two election cycles for the RPC to destroy and absorb the PCP, it’s possible that Farage is banking on achieving something similar. However, what this implies is that Farage intends to oversee the destruction of the Conservative Party, but not the reconstruction of Reform UK – at least, not in a frontline capacity. Once the Conservative Party has been sufficiently diminished, a relatively younger and less controversial candidate will take the reins and transform it into a political force which can continue to fight national elections and possibly form a government; someone to move the party away from ‘negativistic’ anti-establishment populism – primarily acting as a vessel for discontent at the insufficient (if not outright treacherous) nature of recent Conservative Party policy – and fully towards ‘positivistic’ solution-oriented policymaking and coalition-building.
Assuming this is Reform UK’s plan, seeking to replace the Tories after beating them into the ground over the course of a five-year period, Reformers must internalise a major precondition for success; besides, of course, overcoming the perennial task of finding someone who can actually replace Farage when he stands aside.
In admittedly generic terms, just as the RPC/CA had to find support outside of Albertan farmers, Reform UK (or the hypothetical post-merger party) will need to find support outside of its core base of Leave-voting pensioners in East Anglia.
At some point, Britain’s populist right must become accustomed to acknowledging and grappling with issues it instinctively prefers to shy away from and keep light on the details; issues which remain important to much of the electorate and remain relevant to governing: the environment, technological change, the minutiae of economic policy, tangible health and welfare reform, foreign policy and international trade, food and energy security, the prospects of young people, broader concerns regarding economic inequality and social injustice, so on and so forth.
If this sounds similar to the criticism directed at the liberal-left’s aversion to immigration, demographics, traditional culture, and crime in a way that befits public concern and the national interest, that’s because it is.
There are many issues one could use to convey this point, but the environment is undoubtedly the best example. According to regularly updated polling from YouGov, the environment is a priority for roughly 20% of the electorate; only the economy, immigration, and healthcare are classed as more important by the general public, and housing, crime, and national security are considered just as important. Young voters emphasise the environment more than older voters. From the get-go, it’s clear that an environmental policy will be an unavoidable component of any national party and certainly one with a future.
Compare this to Reform UK’s recently released ‘Contract with the People’, which does not possess a subsection dedicated to the environment. Rather, it has a section dedicated to Net Zero and its abolition. On the whole, the subject is dealt with in a negativist manner, merely undoing existing measures, replacing them with nothing, all without reframing the issue at hand. At best, one can find some commitments to tree-planting and cutting down on single-use plastics. As most should have surmised by now, parties can’t afford to be meagre with environmental propositions – go big or go home!
Of course, none of this is surprising. After all, according to Richard Tice, Chairman of Reform UK, concerns about climate change are misguided because the climate has always been changing; it’s a process which can’t be stopped, but it’s OK because carbon dioxide is “plant food” anyway. It’s not happening, and that’s why it’s a good thing.
Indeed, leftists look stupid when they insinuate a similarity between a depoliticised process of post-war mass immigration to the Norman Conquest, so what does the British right have to gain by comparing manmade carbon emissions to the K-Pg extinction event? If not out of strong environmentalist convictions, any force eager to replace the Tories as the primary right-leaning party in Britain must be realise such issues cannot be left untouched – even those issues one might say the Tories have embraced too much or in ways which aren’t in the national interest.
As we look to other right-wing populist upstarts across the Western world, it’s clear that such a realisation is not optional, but a precondition for transforming fringe organisations into national parties.
Consider this in relation to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, perhaps the most successful party to make such a transition, evidenced by the party’s unprecedented success in the recent EU elections and their gradual but near-total displacement of the Republicans, France’s official centre-right party.
Similar to the RPC, the National Rally’s evolution has involved more than a name change and moderating its less-than-palatable elements. Instead, it has retained its central issues whilst diversifying its platform.
Although Le Pen has undoubtedly been a key driving force behind readjustments to the party’s priorities and image, distancing itself from its origins and so on, much of this process stems from the influence of Jordan Bardella: the party’s young president and the current favourite to become the next Prime Minister of France.
Contrary to suggestions made by Britain’s vibes-oriented commentariat, who attribute Bardella’s relative popularity with young voters and the broader French electorate to the mere act of using TikTok, Bardella has gone to considerable effort in his capacity as president to identify and address issues which are important to voters, not just issues which are important to the National Rally, and incorporate them into the party’s platform; issues other than immigration which similarly influence much of the public, such as the environment, which Bardella views it as one of the three main challenges facing the younger generation (the others being demographic and technological change). Indeed, a far-throw from the perpetual handwringing over young, know-nothing eco-zealots which homogenises right-leaning boiler room commentary in Britain.
“France, no matter what they say, is the cleanest country in the world. But it is up to us to do even better.”
– Jordan Bardella (@jordanbardella on TikTok)
Going beyond criticism of existing policies, which is often connected to the party’s support for French farmers and poorer voters in provincial areas, Bardella encourages the party to take up the environmentalist mantle and formulate solutions in step with its own intellectual history:
“Our political family would be making a big mistake if it behaved as blindly on the environmental issue as the left has done on immigration for the past 30 years. We can no longer afford to deny it.”
– Jordan Bardella, Interview with Valeurs Actuelles (24/11/22)
Along with this readjusted approach, Bardella has also made very specific appointments in his capacity as president, such as promoting ideas put forward by Hervé Juvin, MEP and former ecological advisor, and appointing Pierre-Romain Thionnet as director of the National Rally’s youth movement, briefly described in Le Monde as:
“…a reader of the late Catholic integral environmental journal Limite and quotes the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton…”
The National Rally typically views climate change through its longstanding endeavour of protectionism, noting free trade results in offshoring the sources of pollution, rather than getting rid of them altogether. As such, not only does France relinquish its industrial capabilities, it pushes pollution beyond its political control; offshoring depoliticises pollution, a process which is worsened by the logistical chains required to ship products made on the other side of the world, nevermind in other localities of the same country or continent.
To his credit, Farage has hinted on some occasions at something similar in the form of reshoring emissions, and whilst this is a step in the right direction, it remains an underdeveloped afterthought in Britain’s right-wing, which (in the words of Dominic Cummings) remains mired in the “SW1 pro/anti Net Zero spectrum.”
At the same time, the National Rally engages in more universally recognised forms of environmentalism which aren’t predicated on immigration restriction, euroscepticism, or protectionism, especially at the level of local government; from tree-planting campaigns to ‘eco-grazing’ to installing LED lightbulbs.
“People feel that we have to get out of the fact that there’s only the issue of immigration.”
Hervé Juvin, as quoted in The New York Times
As a result, the National Rally maintains a monopoly on its bread-and-butter issues and claims ownership of issues which are not traditionally associated with the French right. Consequently, the French centre and left struggle to maintain control of the narrative surrounding their own key issues and remain stubbornly averse to the concerns of voters living outside the Parisian bubble.
Returning to the British political landscape, Reform UK can most likely afford to hammer its wedge issue of immigration into the Tories’ base at this election, possibly felling the party’s influence once and for all. However, as 2024 fades into the rear-view mirror, it will need to grow something in its place. The gains which once felt exhilarating will begin to flatline and seem anaemic if the party doesn’t aggressively pursue diversification (not the tokenistic kind, mind you). As the reality of living in a Labour-dominated one-party state sets in, many will begin to resent Reform UK unless it makes a concerted effort to adapt; the initial collapse of the right’s remit into the concentrated set issues it sought to politicise must be expanded as the issues which gave birth to its populist phase are moved from the periphery to the centre, and from thereon out, integrated alongside others to ensure their long-term electoral viability.
If it succeeds, it or it’s successor may very well replace the Tories as the main party of the centre-right. If it does not, the election and its aftermath is unlikely to follow the course of Canada 1993 or anything resembling it; the Tory Party may very well make a resurgence comparable to Labour’s post-2019 comeback. Nobody can afford to botch a murder, least of all in politics. Reform UK can’t stop at knocking the Tories down and it can’t be content with knocking the Tories out; it needs to smother the party to death with its own handkerchief and raid its carcass, pocketing both its right-wing and centre-right voters, even those who don’t have immigration as their number one priority and then-some.
At the same time, it needs to stay true to the promise of a nationalist approach to immigration, law-making, culture, and identity; at least, if it wants to avoid the same fate as the Conservative Party.
As various groups eye-up the collapse of the Conservative Party, looking for a chance to muscle-in and establish themselves as the dominant tendency of the right, it’s imperative that nation-first conservatism comes out on top. This will be particularly important as (unlike Manning, who wrote an entire book explaining his ideology) the specifics of Farage’s politics remain more ambigious than many would suspect; it’s entirely reasonable to suspect factions will claim him as their forebearer and themselves as his pure and true successors.
In my view, the right-wing cannot encumber itself with regurgitations of its past, whether it’s a form of neo-Thatcherism, which subordinates and uses socionational issues to reinforce a revealed priority for technical refinement and economic liberalisation, a misguided rehash of Cameronite centrism, which scarcely thinks about such matters in a conservative manner at all, or citizenist post-liberal projects, the artificial soldarities of which are unravelling in real-time. The right has already squandered one revolution, best not to squander another.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done, but it’s OK… Nothing Happens!
Relatability and Envy
At the Sky News Q&A, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were asked to reveal something about themselves that would show the real them. Starmer was also accused of being a robot by a voter. Sunak waffled on about his love of sugary food. Starmer basically went on autopilot.
Did it work? No. Both just looked stupid.
It was an unfortunate question really. The problem is that politicians have become obsessed with being relatable. They’ll shed their political image like a snake in order to win a few votes. It can be talking about TV shows, playing sports or just mentioning something from popular culture. They have to look like they’re one of us.
It also ties in with a politics of envy. A number of politicians who are wealthy or come from good families play down their backgrounds or hide from it. The idea that someone from a privileged background can reach the level that they do without envy or scorn is somehow unrealistic in today’s society.
It’s All About the PR
For decades, politics has been a PR game. Who would you have a drink with? Who seems nicest? Who has the best family values? Who is funniest? Policies are put aside in favour of a good photo op and a one-liner that does the rounds on social media.
We’ve seen that in this election, particularly from Sir Ed Davey. He’s had fun going paddle boarding and riding roller coasters. There is no substancing in his messaging, despite the fact that he could make gains from the two major parties collapsing. Whilst the Lib Dems do have a manifesto and probably actual policies, it’s overshadowed by Davey’s antics.
It’s not new either. Even Margaret Thatcher was not immune to it. Aides had her hold a calf for photographers, the poor thing died not long later. David Cameron hugged huskies in snow. Neil Kinnock walked down the beach with his wife. Tony Blair met with Noel Gallagher. Everyone has a gimmick.
The problem is that it is clearly not authentic. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t an animal cuddler. David Cameron isn’t a fan of huskies. Neil Kinnock probably doesn’t do long walks on the beach. Tony Blair doesn’t listen to Oasis. Voters don’t want to see their politicians being hip and cool. They want to see them tackling the issues that we elect them to do.
We all know that the Prime Minister has a job to do. They oversee wars, economic crises, terrorist attacks and natural disasters among other things. The real test of a PM is their response to said issues. Nobody cares about what their favourite book or TV show is when such issues arise. Interviewers often like to throw in a soft question, just like a backbench Member of Parliament mentions a new animal sanctuary in their constituency. It just doesn’t fit.
It also assumes that every politician is one of us. Who cares if they don’t watch much TV? Who cares if they speak Latin or Greek? Boris Johnson, a man with a great love of the classics, would often recite Ancient Greek, but he also showed an affability and relaxed nature that hid this. Meanwhile, David Cameron struggled to look authentic when he wanted to ‘hug a hoodie.’ One lasted six years in office, the other three.
Rich or Poor?
This brings me nicely to my next point. Our nation, or at least the media, seems to not particularly like politicians being open about their privilege. If a politician came from a wealthy family or went to a private school, they are expected to flex their working class credentials.
Take Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Sunak is the son-in-law of a billionaire and wears very expensive items, and is thus wealthy. When asked about this, he points to the fact that his father was a GP and his mother a pharmacist, two respectable middle class professions. Starmer waxes lyrical about the fact that his father was a toolmaker (cue laughter) and his mother a nurse. What he fails to mention is that his father apparently owned the factory and he attended a private school, though through a bursary.
David Cameron suffered from a similar image problem, as did Boris Johnson in some quarters. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher was proud of being a grocer’s daughter and John Major left school at sixteen. Clement Attlee came from a comfortable background, attending a private school and Oxford. James Callaghan came from a working class family and did not attend university. Each of them have varied reputations as politicians.
Contrast this with that of America. Whilst Americans love the idea of the American Dream and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, they also don’t care as much about class, whether upper or lower. Donald Trump has not once hid that he’s from a rich family, and yet he does not see shame from voters over this.
I frankly do not care if a politician came from a northern council estate like Angela Rayner or was the grandson of a duke like Winston Churchill. I don’t care if they went to a comprehensive or Eton, just as I don’t begrudge a parent for wanting to send their child to a grammar or private school. If they can afford private healthcare, then good for them.
If a politician from a comfortable background is asked about this, they should not downplay it. Instead, they should simply say that their parents worked hard and that they want all people to have the same opportunity.
That is not to say that I think the country would be a perfect place if every MP went to Eton and Oxford. I don’t think it would be perfect if every MP went to a normal school and didn’t go to university. We’ve had good politicians from all backgrounds, and we’ve had bad politicians from all backgrounds.
It does not serve us well to be envious of the rich, or assume that all working class people are good ol’ folk. We should not be desperate for a politician to be a big fan of Game of Thrones or like the same sweets as we do. Politicians should not pretend to be something they are not. I’m not voting for a person’s school or their favourite beverage. I’m voting for who I think has the best ideas.
Which, to be frank, seems to be none of them. Hey, at least I know that Rishi Sunak loves Haribo.
The Impossible as Motivation
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
– Antonio Gramsci
Like all disaffected individuals who supported the Conservatives in 2019, I too find solace in the work of a certain Italian Marxist philosopher and his insights. The simplicity of that quote often speaks to a dormant impulse in the human condition, the belief that things really can change; that, when everything is said and done, we will win. We must, as President Trump once said: “…treat the word ‘impossible’ as motivation.”
In the history of Great Britain, this nation has faced many challenges and many dark days. Those dark days still lay ahead, for that can be assured. Those obstacles within our national politics seem numerous: civil servants, fifth columnists, various media establishments and even entire political parties which claim to represent the interests of the country. Out of this election, it is plain as day. Labour will win, through sheer dullness and the fact that Sunak has clearly given up and not even attempted to try during this race for his own premiership. The reason why people do not like Sunak is because, at his core, he represents ultimately why people do not like Conservatives or politicians in general. They are mostly losers who want to be liked and be seen as important by others; they want to be winner but have never fought truly for anything in their lives. It is for this reason, they are not worthy of any votes or seats. It is not because they have fought and failed, it is that they have never even tried or put up a fight.
From this, the only cure that needs to be given is that of Zero Votes and Zero Seats. Vote Reform now, Cummings later. This can be summarised as voting Reform now to give the Conservatives zero seats, thus ending them (at least, as much as possible) as a political force within Great Britain. Out of this, we should unite around a different right-wing party, one that genuinely seeks to change the direction of the country and prepared to ask and answer the questions that matter. Why are we having these problems? Why are people struggling to buy a house? Why is this country declining?
Following on from this, it is clear that Farage is here to stay and can become a massive nuisance for the administrative state, the state that is allergic to change and remains prestige-orientated. As such, Farage is not the man who will do these things; he is a media personality, not someone who is interested in the nitty gritty of continuing (starting with Brexit) a decade-long (if not century-long) process of fixing the foundational issues of this country. Farage is an Einstein in an Oppenheimer world, it would seem.
Farage understands the need for generating a new excitement around a political issue, he understands that nothing is impossible, even that the mere usage of the word should be taken as motivation. Indeed, his lifelong struggle to get Britain to leave the EU is one such endeavour which, even at the best of times, felt like an ultimately impossible task until it wasn’t. This is not dissimilar to Trump, a figure who isn’t sensitive to the nuance of details, but fundamentally understands the broad picture, why things needs to change, and how to go about doing it.
As such, one hopes that if Reform becomes akin to UKIP, they can become a political force that asks the big questions that the majority of the population want asked. Additionally, Reform should be able to shift the Overton window on a series of issues, bringing them to the forefront of politics from outside of the mainstream political parties. These should range from immigration, the economy, the housing crisis, and the need to dismantle the administrative state.
This being said, like UKIP and the Brexit Party before, when Reform has kicked through the door, it should again vanish. By the end of the decade, Reform should be as important as UKIP is in 2024. Reform should not be here to stay in the long term. Now that it seems possible that Reform will replace the Conservatives, just as the Labour replaced the Liberals throughout the 1920s, allowing them to fully turn their guns on Labour, exposing them as being no better. Of course, Labour is not up to the task of governing and will almost certainly do damage to Britain. Given that Starmer is a wet lettuce of a man, unlikely to last long in post, they’ll have plenty of material to work with.
From this, Reform can generate space for something to be built for the 21st Century, something with real long term vision and purpose. Insert “assorted weirdos” reference here. Indeed, it is rather fitting that the two individuals that are attempting to offer real alternatives to the current issues facing this country are the same two which brought Brexit home (twice if you count the 2019 general election). Now we could realistically see this occur again. Farage’s media personality pushing the core issues into the forefront of British political life, while Cummings dominates the nitty gritty of how to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and securing the real victories. Additionally, both men want the complete destruction of the gate keeping Conservatives and are radically anti-establishment and Westminster, something the vast majority of the electorate share.
Although Cummings has modelled his work on Singapore’s People’s Action Party (I would encourage all to read ‘From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000’), and its stewardship under Lee Kuan Yew, it is another Southeast Asian leader that he should also look at too. Ho Chi Minh (hear me out), and his leadership of North Vietnam, can be summarised as that of revolutionary self-belief and determination. The clinical and principled nature of Singapore, combined with the zealous optimism of Vietnam, would propel the country back into a forward-thinking, functioning 21st Century nation state. It should be hoped that, when Cumming’s Party is ready and the door has been blown open by Farage’s Reform, it too should move into place. A tech-focused, big tent, anti-establishment party that seeks to radically fix the core issues within the country. Radically reduce immigration, tackle the wealth disparity and tax avoidance, and dismantle the permanent administrative state.
In conclusion, Politics is Never Over. Things have returned to being interesting – we could witness another realignment in our national discourse. This should be motivating for people like Farage and Cummings. We can smell blood right now on both Starmer and Sunak, so we must take this chance to end the declinist duopoly once and for all, and scramble to build something in its place thereafter. As Farage stated in a mere four words: “We’re just getting started.”
The Century of Steel
Imagine a world in which there is no central structure, imagine a world where both the United States and China have fallen from a state of global hegemony to struggling to maintain any internal resemblance of order. This could occur independently of the other nation’s collapse or in tandem with it. What would the world look like? Would another world order emerge or would complete anarchy befall the world writ large? If there isn’t the time or conditions for another unipolar nation to fill this void, in part or in full, we must look for a more divided and unstable world structure. This core concept can be understood as non-polarity, where states cannot order themselves according to any traditional structure. Out of this concept, we could be entering a world of widespread turmoil and interstate violence. This can be understood as the Century of Steel (CoS), a term to help describe and articulate what we could be going through.
In order to understand the CoS, we first must look at Italian politics in the postwar years. The Years of Lead refers to a period of widespread social and political instability and violence in Italy. This period saw terrorism and assassinations become normalised from the 1960s to 1980s, the outcome of which saw government forces triumph and various far-right and far-left organisations disbanded. Notable and symbolic examples of this period include the Bologna Bombing in 1980 and the assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. A lengthy explanation of this period can be found here.
Now, imagine a globalised version of the Italian Years of Lead taking place through a deglobalising world. Widespread interstate turmoil across nearly all regions of the world could occur. Following this, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen the rise of old tensions occur once more from across the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East. From the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine to the thinning of the Palestinian herd by Israel. The outcomes of this will look like Russia beating Ukraine, with them annexing half the country, followed by Israel becoming a pariah within the Middle East again, ending decades of peace efforts. With the collapse of the current ‘rules-based’ world order and the potential joint collapse of both major superpowers in the not-so-distant future, another avenue of what could happen needs to be explored.
One of the most underrated academics currently working is that of Yi Fuxian, who has contributed considerably to the topic of demography, especially within the context of the Asia-Pacific. In a recent Diplomat article, Yi argued that any conflict will only exacerbate the ongoing demographic issues between the aforementioned warring nations. As noted with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, both nations have seen their respective fertility rates drop substantially. Likewise, if war were to break out between China and Taiwan (both nations are in considerably worse demographic situations), this would have disastrous consequences for both nations, regardless of the outcome of the conflict.
“If a Taiwan war breaks out, it will hasten these trends, leading to global instability and even the collapse of the U.S.-led world order… Time is not on the side of China or Taiwan, nor on the side of the United States. The three parties need to show sufficient wisdom and courage to achieve permanent peace across the Taiwan Strait – and avoid dropping off a demographic cliff.”
-Yi Fuxian, The Demographic Costs of a War Over Taiwan, The Diplomat (10/04/2024)
With most of the world now residing in a ‘post-fertile’ world, being below replacement level, there are fewer ‘new’ people entering into this increasingly conflictual world. What a lot of nations have now in terms of manpower is all they will have for many years to come, and when it goes, it goes. If you choose to spend it on conflict, you must accept the fact you will most likely not have anyone to replace them, creating various problems down the line. Moreover, the potential conflicts will only further perpetuate the conditions that caused states to fall into such a demographic rut in the first place.
If we are indeed becoming truly deglobalised, we could see the emergence of a new epoch. Just as the Cold War defined much of the 20th Century, the CoS may define much of the 21st. A ‘century’ of no centralised control being exerted within the world, incapable of regulating and mediating beyond a very narrow and constricted sphere of influence. This will only compound the ongoing issues being faced across the planet. We are entering very dangerous and complex times ahead for every single individual in the world and more conflicts will most likely arise in the following years as a result.
A Brief History of US Student Politics
‘Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’
These chants outside of the White House haunted Lyndon B. Johnson throughout his presidency. He would sit in the Oval Office with his head in his hands as the chants wafted through the walls. When his son-in-law Charles Robb sent in a tape from Vietnam, Johnson buckled against the table and looked as though he was in tears. For the loud Southern Jackson, who took great pleasure in towering over and intimidating others, this seemed like quite a big deal.
This is not about Johnson, however. This is about the students who protested him and the Vietnam War. This is about the students who protest now and any time.
An American Education
Harvard University was founded in 1636 and is classed by many as the oldest institute of higher education in the United States. Throughout history, the Ivy League colleges (Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell) have been considered the most elite, though others have made quite the showing. Between them, the Ivy League colleges have educated fifteen US presidents. They’ve also educated many Supreme Court Justices, Governors and members of Congress.
Throughout early American history, the Ivy League and other elite colleges were almost exclusively for white, wealthy men. Colleges for women did exist, such as the female equivalent of the Ivies, the Seven Sisters, though they came far later. Colleges for African-Americans also came later, such as Howard and Tuskegee.
Cornell began to accept women in 1870, but it took until 1983 for all of them to admit women, with Columbia being the last.
Minority men were able to attend earlier and more frequently, with Yale being the last to accept black students in 1964.
Despite more diversity in terms of the student body, Ivy League colleges see students of the wealthy 1% overrepresented. One in six Ivy students have parents from the top 1%, and they are 34% more likely to be accepted than students with the same scores but from less wealthy backgrounds. The children of these parents are also more than twice as likely to attend elite universities- the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Chicago.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Whilst protests and activism were not unknown prior, the 1960s saw an explosion in it.
The decade was one of great social change, perhaps the greatest since the 1860s. Firstly, there was more of a focus on youth. TV, radio and movies began to cater to teenagers. Bands like the wholesome Beach Boys and sassy Beatles saw teenage screaming along. As incomes expanded, college enrollment doubled between 1945 and 1960, doubling once again by 1970.
There was also less social and cultural hegemony than before, something that Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority sought to exploit. The Civil Rights movement was at an apex as students sat at segregated café counters and took integrated buses to register African-American voters in the Deep South. Second-wave feminism saw women demand access to birth control, abortion and equality in the workplace. As students moved away from their generally conservative homes, many became embroiled in a more progressive political atmosphere.
Perhaps most impactful in terms of lives was the Vietnam War. Action in the Asian nation had significantly escalated, particularly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.
Students in particular were opposed to the draft. College students could receive deferments, but they were in the target conscription demographic of being young and healthy and unmarried, though the marriage deferment ended in summer 1965. One of the most notable forms of protests saw students burning their draft cards.
They were also active in the protest movement as a whole. College campuses became hotbeds of political activity. Students also joined protests and demonstrations.
There were varied reasons as to why students in particular were opposed to the war. Some echoed the popular sentiment of many that it was war thousands of miles away that did not have anything to do with America. Others believed that American soldiers were killing innocent civilians. Some thought that the money would be better spent elsewhere or that war in general was wrong.
One college that became a centre of counterculture politics was UC Berkeley. The California university became a hub of activism and protests regarding Civil Rights, free speech and Vietnam.
Most of the decade saw passionate but peaceful protests in the area, but this changed. In April 1969, students at Berkeley set up an informal encampment in People’s Park, scuppering a plan to turn it into a public space. On the 15th May 1969, police arrived to turf the squatters out. This, combined with a nearby college protest, saw around 6,000 people turn out at the park. The police eventually opened fire, killing San Jose resident James Rector as he watched from the roof. Many others were injured; one man was blinded. California Governor Ronald Reagan called in the California National Guard.
There had been a notable protest at New York’s Columbia University a year before. Black student protestors had asked white protestors to protest separately, which they did, segregating it on racial lines. Some of the students occupied the administrative Hamilton Hall, holding Acting Dean Henry S. Coleman hostage.
In another protest that year, students at Morehouse in Atlanta held the board of trustees. One of those students was a young Samuel L. Jackson.
Sixties Assassinations
Adding to the students’ cynicism were the assassinations of four famous men, all of whom were generally admired by students.
The first was John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Kennedy had been a proponent of college education and had been a point of fascination for young people, mainly due to his relative youth compared to other politicians.
The second was Malcolm X, the firebrand minister for the Nation of Islam and advocate of civil rights. He was slain in February 1965.
The third was Martin Luther King Jr, the well-known minister who advocated for civil rights via peaceful means. He was killed in April 1968.
The fourth and final one was Robert Kennedy in June 1968. He had entered the Democratic race for president as an anti-war and liberal alternative to unpopular incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson.
Death At Kent State
One of the most tragic events of the student protest movement came in May 1970.
The Sixties was over and new president Richard Nixon had promised law and order. Meanwhile, America was expanding military operations in Vietnam by entering neighbouring Cambodia. This caused immediate controversy in the anti-war movement. Several hundred students at Kent State in Ohio were protesting this. Residents and police officers had been concerned about potential repercussions in the community, and the Ohio National Guard was called.
The National Guard attempted to disperse the crowd through tear gas and other means, but this failed. Protestors began to throw rocks and other projectiles at them before being herded away. Near a hill, some of the officers started to open fire. Four students- two men and two women- were killed. Nine others were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralysed.
Images of the event, including the famous picture of a horrified teenager standing over one of the bodies, caused even more riots and protests across the nation. 100,000 people marched on Washington a few days later, leading to Richard Nixon famously talking to protestors in the middle of the night at the Lincoln Memorial.
Post-Sixties
Whilst the chaos of the 1960s gave way to a relatively more peaceful 20th century, activism and protests still remained. College Democrats and College Republicans have both been popular hubs for the partisan-minded students. Politicians regularly attend speeches and rallies, especially when they’re supported by the students.
As a rule, colleges tend to be on the left of the spectrum, in both faculty and students. Exceptions to this tend to be religious institutions like Bob Jones and Liberty University.
Issues that have arisen include the Iraq War, climate change, school shootings, race, gender, sexual assault and rape and military engagement in general.
The Current Protests
On the 7th October 2023, Israel was surprised by an attack by Hamas. People were murdered, missiles were fired and civilians taken hostage. In response, Israel had gone all out on Hamas. As a result, there have been numerous deaths and injuries in Palestine. Many people have been made homeless or have needed to evacuate from their homes. Some have flooded into neighbouring Egypt. Neither Palestine or Israel are safe.
Sympathy for the deaths of innocents have been widespread, but there is a huge difference in opinion regarding Israel. Protests have happened in major cities across the world, with the pro-Palestine side occupying most of that space. London for example has seen weekly protests since October.
The issue has become a massive one in America. Historically, the American government has been a strong supporter of Israel. Joe Biden has given assistance to Israel, but seems to want incumbent Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu out. Internally, there is debate amongst the legislative branch. Pro-Palestine and anti-interventionist politicians have come together to stop aid to Israel. Others wish to help it more.
It’s also been dynamite for college campuses. Coast to coast, north to south, university students have been protesting non-stop since October. The Ivy League colleges have been the centre of the protests, but other elite and notable colleges such as Stanford, Berkeley, Northeastern, NYU, Ohio State, and Emerson have seen student activism.
Students have been calling for an immediate ceasefire in the area. Regarding their own colleges, they ask for the institutions to break all ties to Israel, especially regarding financial gifts.
The protests themselves have been controversial. The shouting of ‘from the river to the sea’ is seen as a call to action against Jews, as well as the calling of a global intifada. Flickers of anti-semitism have allegedly been seen in these protests, despite the bulk of participants proclaiming they oppose Zionism, not Jews. Some Jewish students have participated in the protests, whilst others feel unsafe. Classes have been called off and students have been forced to study online.
Encampments have been put up on several campuses. Some have been cleared by police whilst others remain. These encampments are made up of tents, donated food and other communal activities, all of which are subject to rules. Whilst the protests remain mainly about Israel and Palestine, they tend to bend towards anti-capitalism and progressive ideology.
New York’s Columbia University has been the establishment most in the news. On the 17th April, a number of Columbia students started an encampment. Whilst the encampment was torn down by police the next day, it was rebuilt and protests continue. Students report difficulty getting to class. Arrests and suspensions have also been made.
Student Kyhmani James became the subject of media attention following comments regarding the murder of Zionists. He filmed a video of himself talking to the administration in an attempt to get his views across. Unfortunately for Mr. James, he has been kicked out of Columbia.
The Response
America’s 1st Amendment is very strict on the freedom of speech and assembly. That being said, law enforcement and university officials are more than a little tired of it. Students have been arrested, suspended and even expelled. Three college presidents have sat before Congress- Mary Magill of UPenn, Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Claudia Gay of Harvard. Magill resigned in December 2023, and Gay followed in January 2024 after a plagiarism scandal.
Some presidents have been tough. The University of Florida sent out a very clear letter to protestors telling them which behaviour was appropriate and what would get them kicked out. Florida State turned on the sprinklers. Northeastern University got the police to clear the encampment, saying that the use of ‘Kill the Jews’ crossed the line. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised to expel any protestors who joined mobs. Even Columbia, the home of the most infamous protests, allowed the police in to tear down the encampment.
It doesn’t look like this is going to go away anytime soon. What some call a win for free speech is what others call going ‘too far’. As parents look away from the Ivy League to less elite but still reputable universities, one wonders if it’s a case of rich kids with too much time on their hands and no problems of their own. Is it that or a genuine example of solidarity with Palestine? Whatever the case, America’s campuses remain on metaphorical fire.
The War on Pubs, Part I: Taylor’s Conquest
The war on British pubs is as old as the British pub itself, so much so it can barely be classed as an emerging tendency. The government’s dislike of the pub is a fact of life and measures to undermine its prosperity and role in society are widely disliked but are rarely contextualised in political commentary beyond the Covid pandemic, relatively recent demographic changes, and the last fourteen years of government.
After the end of WW2, Britain seemed to be largely self-sufficient when it came to producing ingredients for beer, something it hadn’t achieved for the best part of a century. Protectionist measures enabled near-autarkic levels of barley production whilst wartime reserves of hops were sold for cheap on the domestic market. Of course, post-war economic pressures made investments more necessary and demanding, whilst imports (especially from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland) were set to become more frequent. Nevertheless, an end to rationing, combined with the implementation of tax cuts in the mid-to-late 50s, one of the few helping hands to pubs since the birth of Modern Britain, which contribute to an increase in beer production and consumption. All things being far from perfect, Britain’s pubs could’ve expected much worse coming out of the most destructive war in history.
Indeed, Britain’s flourishing post-war beer market hadn’t escaped the notice of Edward Plunket Taylor. Famously a breeder of racehorses, coming to be recognised as a major force behind the development of the Canadian horse-racing industry, the tycoon’s family also owned Brading, a brewery in Ottawa founded in 1867. Using the loosely coinciding repeals of prohibition throughout various parts of the US and Canada as a springboard, Taylor merged Brading with another Canadian brewery to form Canadian Breweries in 1930. In pursuit of sheer scale, Taylor consolidated several smaller plants into a handful of larger plants and standardised his line of products, whittling his number of brands down from roughly 100 to six. By 1950, Canadian Breweries controlled 50% of Ontario’s beer market. Having subdued most competition at home, Taylor was well-positioned to turn his focus to foreign conquest.
Being well over 200 years old at this point in history, criticisms of the tie system weren’t new, and they weren’t to vanish in the coming decades, but it did provide an initial barrier to Taylor’s imperial aspirations. As pubs could only sell beer produced by the brewery they were tied to, Taylor realised he’d have to infiltrate Britain’s breweries before he could infiltrate its beer market. Aiming to acquire a 25% stake in every publicly traded brewery in Britain, Taylor sought to gain a foothold in the same way he had come to dominate the Canadian market: through the purchase and merging of smaller and unprofitable breweries. In 1967, Taylor merged Bass Brewery and Charrington United to form Bass Charrington, then the largest brewery in Britain with 19% of the beer market.
Taylor’s aspirations and manifesting success sparked a merging frenzy not seen since the relaxation of beerhouse regulations in the late 19th century and the emergent ‘Beerage’, leading to the rise of ‘The Big Six’, Britain’s six largest brewing companies: Allied Breweries, Bass Charrington, Courage, Scottish and Newcastle, Watney Mann (also known as Grand Metropolitan), and Whitbread.
Whilst Taylor had managed to upend Britain’s brewing market, the tie system continued to incentivise against territorial trespassing between brewers. As such, the mergers occurred largely (albeit far from exclusively) along geographic lines. Allied Breweries and Bass Charrington were more concentrated in the Midlands and the North, both having central breweries in Burton-upon-Trent. Courage originated in Southwark with properties across the South, whilst Watney Mann originated in London with clusters in and around the capital. Fittingly, Scottish and Newcastle were based in Scotland and the Northeast, especially Edinburgh and Newcastle, whilst Whitbread originated in central London, maintaining a sizeable presence in the West End, stretching off into the southwest and much of Wales.
Counterbalancing the instinctual desire to compare The Big Six to feudal barons, their pubs were more clustered than rigidly delineated. Indeed, each brewer was a national entity and desired to expand their control of the overall market. Still, it was the emergence of these large-scale brewers which sparked concerns among small business of a cartelised industry, one in which independent brewers were fighting for an increasingly austere slice of the market.
Initial attempts to curtail the growth of these large brewers lacked momentum. Both with the government and most of the public considering the size of these brewers to be a non-issue. At the very least, it was ‘small beer’ compared to other matters which directly affected pubs and breweries in more gruesome ways. A survey carried out by the Consumers Association showed only 1% of consumers factored in beer prices when it came down to choosing a pub. Simply put, pubs were (and remain to be) more than economic hubs of rational decision-making, but markers of communal identity which provide a sense of place and evoke a sense of loyalty; something to support in a period of inept and lacklustre political leadership.
As for pub owners, many valued The Big Six (and the tie system more generally) as a way of ensuring a steady supply of beer, business, and a livelihood. Far from a barrier to entry, it was seen as the exact opposite, acting as an extension of the quasi-paternalist system which had existed prior to Taylor’s landing on English shores.
Nevertheless, the fears of independent brewers were far from unfounded. By the 1970s, roughly 80% of Britain’s beer supply was controlled by The Big Six, along with roughly 75% of brewer-owned retail, and 85% of ‘loan ties’ – arrangements in which pubs that aren’t directly owned by a Big Six brewer exclusively stock their products and other supplies for discounts and loans. By 1989, the top five best-selling beers had 20% of the total market whilst the top ten had a comfortable 30%.
Also, it became increasingly clear to many pubs that large, cut-throat corporations were not spiritual successors to small, local, historically rooted breweries. The sense of mutual dependency which existed between pubs and the latter was practically non-existent between pubs and the former. Needless to say, an individual pub had more to lose from being untied than any one of The Big Six.
Inflated beer prices were a direct consequence of this arrangement. Between 1979 and 1989, beer prices increased by 15% above the retails’ price index and the tax cuts of the immediate post-war period had long been offset by some of the highest beer duties in Europe. Even if the price of beer was comparatively less important to consumers than the social element of pubs, the financial pressure on customers to buy beer from their local’s tied brewer was far from ideal in a period of stagnating wages and rising inflation.
Pubs which weren’t tied to The Big Six were also routinely shafted by predatory pricing, in which the major brewers would temporarily lower their prices to undercut and destroy independent establishments before increasing their prices to consolidate their financial dominance in particular area. This practice was especially harmful to rural pubs, which were more likely to be independent and less economically secure than urban pubs, courtesy of a continuing trend of rural depopulation.
However, whilst the cost of beer wasn’t a pivotal concern, the wavering quality of beer was a growing source of frustration for pubgoers. Practically impervious to market forces, The Big Six were able to push less-than-appealing products onto the consumer through advertising backed by a steady and plentiful flow of cash. Courtesy of organisations like CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), Watney’s Red Barrel became shorthand for the extortionately priced yet wholly unremarkable (if not always terrible) concoctions one could expect from companies perceived as too big to care about the quality of their products.
Overall, the relationship between breweries and pubs was less comparable to ‘aristocratic’ noblesse oblige and more akin to the terror of mobsters and strongmen, whose promise of security wore thin as they threatened pub owners with financial ruin should they defy their heavy-handed demands. In Hobbesian terms, they were demanding obedience from people they were increasingly disinterested in protecting. This state of affairs created a seismic reaction which would change the trajectory of Britain’s pub and brewing industry, albeit not necessarily for the better; a reaction not from the market, but from the state.
Victims, Aren’t We All?
Following Donald Trump’s recent announcement concerning returning to Butler, Pennsylvania just over a month after an assassination attempt was made on his life there, there are many things to reflect on.
One of them is one of the few bright spots from the fallout of that event: that being much of the left finally getting a taste of their own medicine for once when it came to cancel culture. Many of those who attempted to downplay and mock the horror, alongside those who expressed disappointment that the would-be killer didn’t hit his target, felt the full wrath of the Frankenstein’s monster they had developed for decades. The parody band Tenacious D and streamer Destiny were the biggest casualties of this, all the while many others were targeted also, from school administrators and Home Depot employees, with the popular X account LibsofTikTok being the witchfinder general on that end.
Despite such an atmosphere and such scalps, many objected to such behaviour, out of some well-intentioned (if ultimately misguided) commitment to principle against cancel culture as a whole. As expected, many centrist commentators (like Triggernomtrey’s Konstantin Kisin and satirist Andrew Doyle) echoed this point, but more surprising were prominent right-wing accounts, often seen as ‘dissidents’ of the movement, the sort of type expected to appear on Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast.
In particular, anon X accounts, like Peachy Keegan and Posts by Feds came to the defence of those being cancelled, especially when it came to the aforementioned Home Depot employee, who they felt didn’t deserve such vitriol.
All of these are undoubtedly pleasant and well-meaning sentiments, and not without some legitimacy. Indeed, the right shouldn’t perhaps get too carried away with such attitudes when the wind blows in our direction – as Nietzsche once noted, ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.’
Despite this, I can’t help but feel that such attitude overall is not the best for this moment or any like it when we can finally use these tools against the left.
Firstly, it is true that every society has boundaries on what is acceptable and what isn’t. As far as not wanting a political opponent dead goes – especially just after an assassination attempt – that is perhaps a pretty good standard for what isn’t acceptable in a free society to advocate for, all the while being a pretty low bar to meet in a democratic society.
Add to that how politically volatile much of the United States is in right now, any attempt to raise the temperature in such a way to make the tinderbox more likely to explode is beyond reckless and reprehensible. Wanting to stem and cull those who attempt to do so, whether they be well-known celebs or simple custodians, is something perfectly legitimate and sensible to want to do.
This is especially true in Trump’s case. This is a man who has already had much vilification against him to the point whereby his possible death seemed to be something much of the mainstream was happy to egg on, including the several calls for his murder by celebrities, and the Beeb going as far as to air a documentary sympathetic to a previous attempted Trump assassin in Michael Sandford (therefore, the swift backlash to maintaining that atmosphere is an improvement from years past). Given that, alongside the increased political violence against the right across the West (including the attempt against former Slovakian PM Robert Fico), any attempt to further normalise such attitudes is definitely not good for any body politic, let alone the divisive one we have now.
Secondly, the left has cancelled several people on the right for far less over the years, and no-one was safe from that. One many lament Tenacious D being dropped from their talent agency but joking about the assassin missing Trump is objectively far worse than what Winston Marshall did to be chased out his own band Mumford and Sons or what Morrissey did to be effectively shunned by much of the music world that once adored him. Their crimes? The former praised Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy while the latter supported unpopular political parties and criticised much of the UK political class.
Many fans of Destiny may be irritated that he can no longer be monetised on several platforms, but that is nothing compared to YouTuber Felix Kjellberg (better known by his ‘PewDiePie’ alias) being fired from his Maker Studios agency after a smear campaign by the Wall Street Journal to portray him (falsely) as antisemitic over edgy jokes, let alone the lawfare against YouTubers Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and 6oodFella over similar social media edgy jokes.
One may feel sorry for the Home Depot cashier, but many other custodians were thrown under the bus to little attention. Take Brian Leach, a disabled Asda worker who was fired for sharing a Billy Connelly joke seen as ‘anti-Islamic’ by colleagues. Or Beverly Lockwood, a woman fired from Arc Engineers for being a member of dissident political organisations. Or Gillian Phillips, a children’s author fired from HarperCollins for supporting J. K. Rowling and had to retrain as an HGV driver to make ends meet. Or William Kelly, a Virginian police officer, who was fired for financially supporting Kyle Rittenhouse in his 2021 trial. And the worst part is that this is by no means exhaustive, with these links providing more comprehensive lists to that regard.
That leads me to my final point. We are in a culture war. One side is taking it very seriously, using their power and influence to silence those it doesn’t like for banal reasons – the recent culling of the anti-mass immigration website VDare by lawfare is a good example of this. If the other side isn’t willing to fight back in a similar matter because of some so-called principle, it will not win and doesn’t deserve to.
I for one would love nothing more than a return to the idea of having an equilibrium with the left about not cancelling anyone. For that to work however, there must be one in the first place – something impossible when one side is hopelessly unbalanced. Until the right can wield some scalps and cancel its opponents on its own reasonable terms – such as not wanting the death of a much-maligned political enemy – then there is nothing to be gained from being high and mighty while accomplishing precisely diddly squat, an albatross the right has borne around our necks for far too long. The equilibrium can only emerge once we win, and the left has to agree to our terms of peace.
So do not weep for those on the left who are cancelled. At best pity them, but no more. In fact, I would suggest this: when they happily laugh and wallow in glee as VDare is shut down or they grin as the recent wave of rioters in Britain are jailed for holding sticks or naughty social media posts, revel in similar behaviour when the shoe is on the other foot, whether it be against the unemployed Home Depot colleague or in support of the hefty sentences for the midwit extremists of Just Stop Oil they are so in dismay of.
Until there is victory, there can be no honour. While we wait, we might as well take advantage for when the roles are reversed as best we can, to hopefully end this once and for all. Or to quote the villainous Derrick Lynch from Namco’s Crisis Zone arcade game: ‘So you will understand and fear, your own foolish mistakes’.
Photo Credit.