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The Riots: a working-class view
Back in the fourteenth century, England’s lowest class enjoyed the greatest piece of luck it has ever had: the arrival of the Black Death. True, most of us were wiped out, but life became so much better for those who survived. Anyone who wanted our labour now had to compete for it and offer more than their competitors did. These inducements (today we call them wages) went up and up because workers had become so scarce. Such was the plight of the working class in those days that it took a lethal disease that wiped out half of humanity to improve our lot; something which should teach us the importance of the size of the labour pool: how the amount of available labour can be balanced to give both sides a fair deal, or skewed one way or the other to cause economic and social disruption.
Since 1997, the year of the coming to power of New Labour, it has been the policy of every government to saturate the British economy with workers from foreign sources, thus greatly expanding the amount of available labour. This means every lower-skilled, less educated, less qualified worker’s bargaining position and job security were jeopardised. It should be obvious that in a free market – in fact in any endeavour where there is competition – there will be rivalry between the contenders. There will be resentment toward challengers who threaten one’s standard of living, or even one’s very capacity to earn a living. Recently this resentment boiled over and numerous riots occurred around the country. They happened because of what has taken place in Britain over decades: the reckless pursuit of profit by means of reducing labour costs at the expense of (and with no concern for) social cohesion. A ruthless, imported form of capitalism has taken over and sacrificed a section of what is supposed to be one nation in order to benefit another part of that nation. The Left of yesteryear called this class conflict, a term which our modern and very bourgeois Left do not care to use these days; they prefer cultural conflict to class conflict, possibly because so many modern Leftists are themselves millionaires and discussions about wealth inequalities would embarrass them. Populists describe the division of the classes as the elite versus the people, and the American Right has enjoyed success with this message, but whichever terminology one prefers, it is clear that here in Britain what was once arguably one nation has now unarguably been cleaved in two.
Although Labour has traditionally been the party of mass immigration, for the last fourteen years immigration ballooned while a Conservative party was in power. The drama of small boats ferrying illegal migrants across the channel was really just a footnote to (and perhaps a distraction from) a large amount of quite legal immigration rubber-stamped by the Tories. The simple truth about immigration is this: enormous numbers of foreign workers come and settle in this country because British politicians want them to. Mass immigration means there is no pressing need to innovate, no need to invest, no need to waste money training or educating British people, no need to worry about productivity: one can merely import cheap ready-mades, and then carry on importing them. It is the easy option and our politicians have been taking it for years. Any economic growth Britain has achieved has been a sham; merely a growth in population. The group which has suffered most is of course the working class, those who are most vulnerable to low-skilled immigration; a working class that these days has little to no political representation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg recently condemned the working-class rioters, saying that such behaviour might be justified in a dictatorship but not in a democracy like Britain, where peaceful protest is permitted. The problem is of course that protesting achieves nothing. In fact, in modern Britain, voting achieves basically nothing. In 2016, during the referendum on our membership of the European Union, the Leave campaign was only put on the path to victory when the focus was changed from important but philosophical arguments about sovereignty to the issue of immigration. After the vote was won, however, a strange thing happened. ‘I never claimed immigration would come down,’ said Daniel Hannan immediately after the electorate had voted to get immigration down. David Davis said that immigrants would be ‘needed for many years’ and Michael Gove praised how immigrants raised educational standards. If one examines the promises made by Brexiteers one sees that they were never promises. They were not even clear statements, merely hints that could be interpreted in different ways. None of the Brexiteers promised to stop immigration. None of them even promised to reduce it. They promised merely to control it. The word ‘control’ is loved by politicians because it means everything and nothing at the same time. Voters took it to mean that immigration would be reduced, but it could just as easily have meant that it would be left as it was. Perhaps, it could mean that it would be increased – which, incredibly, is what happened, despite a majority in the highest turnout for a UK-wide referendum in British electoral history.
With free movement from the EU interrupted, workers were now imported from the rest of the world. Migrants from very distant and very different cultures would come here in increasing numbers; and because these people were from such distant parts of the world they belonged to different races. This meant that unlike the Poles, the Hungarians, the Lithuanians etc., these foreign migrants would be instantly recognisable as such, from a distance, without them having to utter a single foreign-accented word. And so it is that riots which are economic in cause, which are the consequence of choices made by governments, can appear to be purely racist uprisings – and safely dismissed as such by sanctimonious politicians and their media. By these means a truth has been officially established: that the riots were a temporary madness caused by wicked fascists exploiting the gullibility of working-class people.
The truth however is that in this democracy which Jacob Rees-Mogg believes we live in; the working class are not allowed to vote in their economic interest. Their voice and their interests are repressed. In any general election in the UK there are only ever two parties that have a chance of being elected: the Labour Party, which enthusiastically believes in immigration, and the Conservative Party which believes in it with equal enthusiasm but pretends not to. There has been a convergence of self-interest. First, the greed of a Conservative Party that cares only about its enrichment and which despite its reputed belief in “faith, flag and family” is happy to see the British natural environment, British culture, British traditions, British family life, British history, British ownership, British democracy, British self-respect and the British working class all ruined, each of them being sacrificed in the scramble for quick profit at any cost. And then there is the greed of the Labour Party. This party is, in material terms, as rich and privileged as the Conservatives but is greedy too for moral glory. It wants to be loved by people who matter (educated, cultured people of taste) and so it haughtily condemns the primitive rage of the uneducated people with ugly lives and values who live below. By the magic of media, the material self-interest of the privileged becomes a noble cause. The expansion of the labour pool and the crippling of the bargaining position of British workers is shown as a moral crusade; the pursuit of diversity, the bringing about of a glossy-eyed, handholding, multi-coloured, multi-lingual paradise in which the elite are ‘enriched’ by other cultures while the ferocious competition for jobs pauperises the working class.
Democracy is more than just a word. It is the most efficient way of organising a society ever devised. It balances competing interests by making them visible and enabling them to negotiate. It vents the pressures that create conflict. What the people would have wanted, and would have accepted had anybody in our alleged democracy bothered to ask them, was a moderate level of immigration that would have benefited a moderated capitalism; a capitalist system in which those enjoying extreme levels of wealth and those suffering extreme levels of hardship were both pulled back toward a civilised mean; a more cohesive, moderately patriotic Britain in which all get a just share of everything; in which those who do more and achieve more rightly get more, but not an immoral amount more. In other words, a Britain that was one nation – not the theatre of tribal warfare it is today.
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’.
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.
Kino
Britain’s Fifth Column
A fifth column is “a group within a country at war who are sympathetic to or working for its enemies.”
We have a problem that is acknowledged but gets little to no serious attention in the official political or media spheres; the growing Islamic base that has been imported into this country. Given the above definition, it might seem absurd to imply that these people are a fifth column, seeing as we don’t appear to be directly at war, but we are. I would not call this a cold war as there are many thousands of victims of its adherents living among us in Britain currently. To do so would be to diminish their experience, something our traitorous state has done more than enough of.
Islam is its own self-contained religion and civilisational structure. By allowing this population to grow, we are fostering an ideology that will only seek to grow and supplant our society because that is what their god demands. Islam has been allowed to run parallel to our society by our cowardly state permitting Sharia courts, turning a blind eye to polygamous marriages, and generally leaving these guests to their own devices as they overtake British cities. While deplorable and deeply distressing, this has so far been contained, not so much any more. The Islamic community is breaking out, it’s establishing a significant voting bloc and this heralds a dark omen for things to come. In a great twist of irony, it seems Labour will be the first to fall foul of this new political development.
Contrary to their minority position, the Islamic community in Britain has a relatively tight grasp on small businesses in corner shops, barbers, hot food takeaways, off-licences, and petrol stations. They’ve also got an increasingly large share in drug dealing, likely facilitated by these interconnect, all hours, businesses, where cash is king and electronic fraud is missed. HMRC doesn’t have the resources to deal with such matters effectively, often fearing accusations of bigotry and being threatened with violence whenever they try to conduct their investigations. This is where Mohammed Hijab’s (a real name I’m told) bizarre TV comments about blasphemy against Islam not being tolerated by “Muslim gangsters” likely come from. We’ve seen this before, from the murder of Kris Donald to the grooming gangs. The community sheltering the vile perpetrators, in my mind, damns them. The religious extremists and the cultural criminals go hand in hand.
The more odious elements of Islam in Britain claim they have conquered Britain – that is, being imported by our traitorous elite and living off welfare. Make no mistake, this is not Mohammed taking Mecca from the pagans, these people are arrogant welfare queens that the state protects and cajoles at every opportunity. Where is this arrogance coming from? Is it their status beyond criticism? The enshrining of Islamophobia as an ultimate crime against “Modern British Values” is certainly a problem. We have Muslim MPs almost brought to tears in Parliament for mean words while White children up and down the country are groomed and raped by adherents of their ideology and culture, fanatic or otherwise; crocodile tears from a vile community that not-so-secretly laughs about the modern woes of the native British.
Muslim gaslighting doesn’t end in Parliament. Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed put out a bizarre video a few years ago in which National Front types went door to door ethnically cleansing Muslims from England. I thought this to be a particularly bizarre thing to do when you consider the terrorism rate, per capita, of the Islamic vs British community. To me this was a tell in his thinking, it acknowledges that fundamentally they are at war with us. Riz also starred in the film Four Lions, which follows a hapless Jihadi’s attempt to carry out a terror attack in the UK. The film, while amusing, does paint these men (other than the grossly unsympathetic White convert) as sympathetic in their idiocy, with Ahmed’s character leading his less bright friends astray. Outside the context of the film, I find this portrayal to be unrealistic. The average second-gen or third-gen Muslim youth sincerely hates Britain, its history, and its people. They’ll prioritise and take the side of foreign conflicts over any domestic issue concerning the British nation. The most they’ll interact with British culture is through the superficiality of sport.
Moreover, there is a bizarre Africanisation of British Muslim culture, Ali G was a send-up of this, but Cohen seemed to back away from this obvious interpretation for whatever reason. Drug culture, speaking in a pseudo-Jamaican patois (to steal from Starkey) mixed with Muslim conventions, producing a particularly unpleasant and idiotic-sounding dialect. A glorification of crime, violence, and importantly terrorism pervades this culture. We’ve seen this play out across the pro-Palestine demonstrations happening over recent months. To quickly touch on drug culture, cannabis is a major drug among this group. People like Peter Hitchens get the relationship twisted. They assume that cannabis is the cause of terror, not that these people engage in drug culture because they are themselves a criminal and subversive element in society. Do drugs exacerbate their hatred? I wouldn’t doubt it, but the hatred is before the imbibing of wicked poisons.
This is all an incredibly dangerous mix that the state and security services seem to barely be able to keep a lid on. Despite their protestations that right-wing terrorism is the biggest threat, this is clearly nonsense. Islamic terror threats outstrip right-wing ones by miles, even with the vast population difference. This can also be seen in the police’s reluctance to police the entrenched Muslim community. What are they so afraid of? My guess is terroristic violence. To cow in the face of such a threat is basically to guarantee you will hand the country to Islamists.
What is to be done about this? Ideas have been floated about banning certain aspects of the religion to encourage them to self-deport but again, this relies on enforcement by the state which it is both unwilling and incapable of doing. I would propose a ban on the production, import, and sale of ritualistically slaughtered meat as that would be the easiest to enforce without confrontation. Businesses would be shuttered, products would be impounded at customs, and we would stand firmly on the side of animal rights. It’s reprehensible to me that Britain should take a step backward in this regard to placate alien desert religions. Naturally, this ban would affect the Jewish community, but that’s a sacrifice we will need to make for the future of Britain. The Jewish community is particularly robust and progressive when it comes to issues of wrestling with God, and I’m sure they’d find a way around our new law.
Less practical solutions have been offered; recently I’ve seen people saying that public prayer should be banned in response to mass Islamic worship in London. This is a nonsense approach that would only affect our beleaguered Christian community and would likely not be enforced fairly. Some have suggested banning cousin marriages. Whilst well-intentioned, the main thrust of my objection to such a policy is that we haven’t had to ban it for it to no longer be practised in this country (outside the Muslim community and presumable other outliers). Simply put, we’d be creating a nationwide law for an imported subset of the population. It’s not the thin end of the wedge of tyranny, but it does point to the ridiculous codification of a multiracial society.
Groups are so vastly different in outlook and disposition that you need to make the detrimental illegal for it to appear to function. Perhaps we should take it as a sign that people who willingly marry their cousins and as such have the largest disabled community in Britain shouldn’t be living among us. Britain does not exist to serve as a eugenic uplift scheme for foreign people who cleave to a religion that orders them to supplant us. On an entirely different and less targeted front, the deportation of economic net negatives would substantially reduce the Islamic population of Britain, but the problem of Islam would remain, albeit at perpetual minority levels.
Approaching last Christmas, we saw the usual warning of terror attacks rolled out for many festive markets and events that are happening across the country. If you attend any of these markets, you will likely notice the ethnic make-up of the security and the broken English with which they communicate. It’s not lost on me that many of these men are of African, non-Muslim, extraction however many are of Muslim origin and I find it entirely insane that threats from Islamic terrorism would be policed by fresh off-the-boat Muslims. We have a growing force of non-white imported security, increasingly used by businesses because they are cheap and a state which seeks to enforce anti-white laws, which is worrying. Their conduct is poor, and their obvious biases and unfamiliarity with Britain can’t be ignored.
In a recent clip, a piano player is aggressively harassed by foreign security. Is the proliferation of such people across the UK security sector related to the housing of fighting aged illegals now being overseen by two of the biggest private security companies Serco and G4S? It’s certainly a question worth asking. It is not without reason that it could be expected for such people to end up in the official police forces of Britain eventually. Standards in policing have been dropping for decades, if things are not reversed, I imagine we will start seeing these people transition into the force within the decade.
To me, this is all part of the plan, the expansion of the police state. Contrary to Telegraph hacks, the police state is already here. This great panopticon of Modern Britain, with its pervasive speech laws coupled with the new ‘diverse’ religiosity, forms a tyranny of leftists and racial mafias over the native population. As with everything in Modern Britain, the “elite” have made a vast miscalculation. Creating such a system will be subverted and controlled by the most vocal, violent, and united community. Without a doubt, that community is the Islamic one. While they are still a minority, they will increasingly wield disproportionate, anti-democratic, power over us all. It’s a horrific reverse colonialism where we, the native British, have been entangled in a web of increasingly complex and restrictive laws that all but guarantee our disempowerment. The Tories are utter traitors and completely politically spent for not seeing this and not doing anything about it for their fourteen years in power. Hopefully, they’ll be destroyed at the next election and a new, vigorous, and unapologetically nationalist force can rise to lift us out of this predicament decades of political incompetence and deliberate malice have brought us to.
I do not believe Islam will take over Britain is guaranteed, I do not believe that things are too far gone. Britain is broken and while Islam is germinating in this environment it’s entirely imported. For the most part, the White British converts we see are the most broken of outsiders, with fringe academics constituting a bizarre exception. Most people in Britain look at the Islamic community with rightful derision. They may not express it openly but in their hearts, they see it as a thuggish religion of petty criminals and child rapists. This is the version of Islam that the immigrants have brought to our shores, the blame is squarely on themselves and they alone shame their Ummah. Indeed, Arab Muslims in states like the UAE or Saudi often wonder why we have let such people settle in our lands, a favour they do not permit to their “brothers and sisters.”
In order to prevent this growing Islamic problem in Britain, we must acknowledge the interconnected nature of this religion, from how drug dealers and home office employees are all working together to advance their faith and racial groups within that overarching religion. We are constantly told to take people on an individual basis, but time and time again in Modern Britain this has shown to be dangerously faulty reasoning. It’s outdated and only conceivably worked when the country was homogenous and dwelt under a Christian understanding. Those days are gone. In an irreligious and deracinated Britain, we are at the mercy of monolithic minorities who use the law to cudgel each other and especially the native population.
I had said in a previous piece that I was unsure of the civilisational war proposed by the counter-jihad movement, and I still hold that belief. I do not believe in siding with foreign interests outside of Europe that seek to interfere in the Islamic world instead of focusing on problems at home. The priority is removing Islam from Britain and more broadly Europe, not fighting Israel’s wars or throwing our lot in with Zionists. The European and Islamic civilisations should be separate and distinct.
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.
Featured
Nigel Farage is Britain’s unofficial ambassador to the United States
On Saturday, late British time, former President Trump and presumptive nominee to be the Republican candidate for November, survived assassination by mere millimetres. A bullet, fired from an AR-15, aimed at Donald Trump’s head grazed his ear instead, thanks to an unbelievably lucky turn of the head as Trump looked at the graph on immigration statistics behind him.
A shooter on the roof of a nearby building, missed through a toxic combination of incompetence and lack of coordination between security forces, shot at the former President several times before being taken down by the security forces. The forces who, it has come to light, had the shooter in their sites for several minutes before he began shooting. Arguments have erupted over whether the threat should have been neutralised sooner, or by who, but in reality he should never have gotten that close. The entire security service should hang its head in shame.
While the world rushed to condemn – or, in the particularly nasty and degenerate corners of the internet, celebrate – the 20-year old shooter, the leader of the Reform party and newly-sworn in MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, announced that he would imminently be travelling to the US to visit his friend and fellow traveller on the populist right, to lend his support.
The necessity of this move can be debated. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has already rung Trump and offered his wishes, and the 78 year old Republican is already out and about, back on the campaign trail and preparing for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week. This is without even mentioning the fact that, after being shot, Trump got back to his feet, raised his fist in defiance and chanted “fight!”
Some rushed to decry Farage’s decision, pointing to his responsibility as an MP, and no doubt using this as an example of his unprofessionalism and self-aggrandisement. Others said that there is no real need, and Farage should focus on issues closer to home, especially as the King’s Speech is on Wednesday – though Farage did say he would not go before the speech.
Such reactions ignore the humanity of this situation. A man nearly lost his life, and while Farage’s medical credentials are certainly questionable in this instance, the value of having a friend speak to you and visit you after such a shocking moment can be invaluable. And while there is a world of difference between the projectiles, Farage is almost certainly fearful that one day a milkshake might be something closer to what Trump faced. Never forget that Andy Ngo once had to attend the ER in America after a milkshake thrown over him was found to have concrete mixed in.
Moreover, Farage was more than likely going to attend the RNC in Milwaukee this week anyway; this simply makes his visit more personal.
Yet, whether you agree with his politics or not, Farage’s very close relationship with the once-and-probably-future President of the most powerful nation in the world should not be sniffed at. Farage, like him or not, is going to be an asset should Trump return to the White House in January 2025 – a prospect that, more than ever, seems likely.
Rather than criticising Farage for making a decision which, it must be remembered, is entirely his prerogative – senior Conservatives visited America during the election campaign, and Lisa Nandy was in Germany for the Euros final this weekend, and rightly so – the British government should recognise Farage’s value in the special relationship.
This is not even to mention the fact that many populist parties in Europe look to the architect of Brexit with great admiration, Nigel Farage’s international profile is greater than some members of the cabinet, and is certainly more amenable to some foreign political parties.
Nigel Farage’s role in the coming parliament is likely to be one of unofficial ambassador – to the United States, certainly, and more than likely many other nations. It would be a mistake to undervalue and underestimate that.
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.
Little England: Bekonscot, Le Corbusier and the Housing Crisis
The Morris men stand, hankies aloft, in the same pose they’ve held for decades. The little girl tugs at her father’s sleeve.
“Who are they, daddy?”
Her father pauses for a moment, scratches his chin and ventures a guess.
“They’re Irish dancers.” He says, “I think.”
The girl looks confused.
“I mean, I don’t know why they’re wearing lederhosen.”
Puzzled, he contemplates the scene further. I walk on.
BEKONSCOT
In 1927 Roland Callingham’s wife, tiring of her husband’s toy railway, insisted that he take his trains outside. Callingham, a well-to-do city accountant, purchased four acres of land on the outskirts of the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield and, with the assistance of his gardener, W.A. Berry, began work on a model village, complete with a high street, church and railway, each constructed at the scale of one inch to one foot. Callingham dubbed his creation ‘Bekonscot’.
Originally intended as a private diversion, Bekonscot opened to the public in 1929, and soon became a popular tourist attraction, incorporating, in time, seven model villages. Initially, Bekonscot kept pace with the changing architectural styles of the times. However, a reactionary purge in the 1990s saw most modern buildings removed and the villages returned to a thirties aesthetic. Thus, what was originally conceived as a chance to see the everyday world in miniature, is increasingly a museum of a bygone Britain. Notably, the villages’ high streets are devoid of the vape shops and Turkish barbers that lend colour to the contemporary streetscape. Today, concessions to modernity are confined to a handsome Art Deco tube station, a few authentically drab office buildings and some token Arts and Crafts houses.
‘THE BEAUTIFUL’
The week before I visited Bekonscot, the government, determined to accelerate the rate of housebuilding across Britain, announced plans to build 300,000 new homes annually. Earlier in the summer, Angela Rayner announced plans to drop a requirement that new houses be ‘beautiful’, dismissing the old rules as ‘ridiculous’. ‘Beautiful’ explained Rayner ‘means nothing, really.’
For our deputy prime minister; her mind addled, like most of her generation, by postmodernism; ‘beautiful’ is a concept too subtle to be reduced to simple language, and as such, is essentially meaningless. For the modern liberal, ‘beauty’ can be filed alongside ‘female’ and ‘nation’ as terms too slippery to contain meaning.
This does not mean that the Angela Rayners of the world fail to recognise beauty (or, for that matter, ugliness) when they see it. It is rather that they have taught themselves to disregard the evidence of their eyes and dismiss all aesthetic judgments as purely subjective. But how smart must one be to understand that the average street in Salisbury, say, or Stratford-upon-Avon, is more beautiful than its equivalent in Salford or South Croydon? This is a truth that I am sure even Angela Rayner would acknowledge, if pushed.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
Why, among those less sophisticated than the average Labour cabinet minister, is ‘modern’ often a synonym for ‘ugly’? There is no reason why contemporary buildings should not be beautiful. Modern architects can do ‘spectacular’ well – witness London’s ‘objects’ – the statement buildings that litter the City and Docklands. But such edifices, no matter how impressive, do not belong to any regional or national tradition. The Gherkin would not look out of place in Los Angeles, say, or Lagos. Further, every ‘object’ is an experiment, and if it fails to pay off, a city must live in its shadow.
By contrast, tradition makes for attractive architecture. Ugliness is seldom worth repeating and does not endure. In aesthetics, as in politics, however, the liberal distrusts tradition, preferring theory. In our enlightened age, it is not enough for a building or artwork to be beautiful, rather it has to satisfy certain theoretical criteria. One only needs eyes to judge how a building looks. It requires an education to understand what a building means.
Only an architectural theorist of Le Corbusier’s brilliance could have built a city as inhuman as Chandigarh. By contrast, the numberless attractive villages that dot the British countryside were built, in the main, by unlettered craftsmen, men who would have found modern architectural theory incomprehensible. The vernacular architectural styles immortalised in Bekonscot evolved across centuries and were to inform the styles of suburban housing into the immediate post-war era.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw the defeat of tradition and the victory of theory, in politics, in art, and in architecture. Just as, for the political utopian, one solution (the common ownership of the means of production, for example, or the disappearance of the state and the triumph of the market) is sufficient to meet the needs of all human societies, so, for Le Corbusier, the principle of ‘form following function’ was a universal maxim. The great brutalist dreamed of a world remade in concrete and glass. Le Corbusier spoke of architecture when he maintained that ‘[In] Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same…’ but the sentiment is echoed throughout radical literature.
The Le Corbusiers of the post-war era have left Britain an uglier place. I am confident that, by the time Labour leaves office, many of Britain’s towns will be uglier still.
Britain needs new houses, of course. Would I feel the same sense of trepidation if acres of countryside were to disappear beneath dozens of (full-scale) Bekonscots? No. But, alas, the philistines hold power and are intent on despoiling our countryside with more of the soulless Legolands that litter the outskirts of our towns.
In Bekonscot, of course, it is forever 1933. Were things really better then? Life today is undoubtedly easier, but in many respects, Britain is a less pleasant place in which to live, with the cultural and economic revolutions of the post-war era having eroded social solidarity and trust. This decline finds a strange parallel in the quality of our built environment, as the reins of power passed to those less concerned with ensuring that England looked like England.
Tellingly, overseas visitors to Bekonscot seem to be having a great time. Perhaps Bekonscot looks more like the England they hoped to see than whatever they have found outside.
THE LAST DANCE
This is the future we have chosen, or at least, the future that was chosen for us. We could choose another. Conservatives should reject the mistaken idea that the cultural, social (and yes architectural) changes we are living through are inexorable and unalterable.
Which brings me back to the incident with the Morris dancers.
By the late nineteenth century, Morris was all but dead. A small band of Victorian enthusiasts recognised the tradition’s value and fought to ensure it did not die. Folk dance has never been fashionable, much less ‘useful’ (I should imagine that it would be difficult to convince Angela Rayner of its value) but England would be that little bit poorer if it were to disappear.
Likewise, the antique crafts required to build cottages and cathedrals were passed down across generations and are largely lost now. We are poorer for their being lost. But they could be revived. It only requires will.
Bekonscot’s brochure describes a ‘little piece of history that is forever England.’ There is no reason why the full-size England outside of Bekonscot’s walls should not remain forever England also. Traditions are only truly lost if we stop fighting for them
Photo Credit.