British politics needs a Great Reset

By Pete North - July 23, 2022

Rishi Sunak is under fire from the right of the party for his Covid money printing. They’re trying to pin the blame on him for our inflation problem.

Not wishing to defend Sunak, but what else could he have done? Pandemics cost money. Everybody’s wise after the fact, but it was a public decision to go into hiding, and any government is politically obliged to support that decision. What sort of mess would we be in had we allowed families to fold financially and let small businesses collapse? Would any British government have done anything differently? Lockdowns went on far longer than they should have, but that was a public health decision, not an economic one – and that wasn’t Sunak’s decision.

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Brexit. Nobody forced the Tories to cut negotiations short and walk away with a piss weak FTA. Nobody forced them to blow up power stations and replace them with non-dispatchable “renewable” energy. Then there are a number factors beyond our control, not least mineral shortages which began before Brexit. China has been cornering markets and hoarding. The global automotive industry was entering recession even in 2016.

We can play with policies to mitigate what was done during Covid, but there is no Thatcherite revolution to be had in tax policy. Scrapping green levies on energy might be impossible (contracts have been made) and cutting back the size of the state is just an empty Tory trope. We’ve been doing that for the last twenty years, centralising the functions of state and “streamlining” to the point where the basics barely work anymore. Where are the extra spending cuts coming from? I can’t see us cutting back on police budgets or defence. Politically, welfare is untouchable right now, nothing will be allowed to threaten eco-boondoggles, and local government can’t take much more of a hit. You can’t tell the working class voters of Rotherham and Rochdale that their social services department is bloated. NHS cuts? Forget it.

It seems to be an article of faith on the right that the state does too much and could be sorted out in an afternoon with a red marker pen, deleting all the “useless” civil servants and “woke non-jobbers” but it’s always more difficult than that with a lot of hard trade-offs, many of which are political non-starters. A lightweight like Truss won’t have the first idea where to attack the problem. Better brains than hers have tried and failed. We haven’t cracked waste in government procurement in eighty years of trying. So what is funding these tax cuts? They can go at cuts with a machete rather than a scalpel, but that loses you all the red wall seats.

Crucially, though, neither Sunak nor Truss measure up to Thatcher in that she wasn’t afraid to make politically unpopular decisions. She had a sense of purpose and drive and she relished a fight with the public sector blob. Fast forward to today and the embedded blobs are NGO lobbyists with slicker PR than the Tory machine, and readily deployable rent-a-mobs.

The modern Tory party demonstrates virtually every week that it’s afraid of its own shadow when it comes to taking on embedded leftwing lobbys. They could have solved wokery in Johnson’s first year (and be cheered to the rafters), but the Tories are too timid to fall foul of the rainbow flag mafia. They won’t take on the green blob or the open borders blob for the same reason. Truss won’t. Sunak definitely won’t. Since the country doesn’t have credible leadership I just don’t see a route out of our economic malaise, and since our political system is a cartel, the public has no means of removing the dross – so the dizzying heights of Liz Truss is about as much as we can hope for.

That has me wondering how long we can go on like this. As I remarked yesterday, our system of so-called democracy means that government only thinks as far as winning the next election which rules out any long term thinking. With the Tories still afraid of being labelled the nasty party, they’ll continue to pander to left wing agendas and will continue to accept that nothing can be done about anything. International law and the law of treaties remains their go-to excuse for inaction.

There has to be a point at which the public is no longer willing to tolerate government that coasts from one crisis to the next without addressing any of the fundamentals. Brexit was supposed to be that moment but it hasn’t worked. As we said at the time, the EU is only part of the problem and now we face the second “coffin lid”. There must come a point when democracy (and necessity) asserts itself over climate targets and human rights dogma which has turned our country into a technocratic dictatorship where it doesn’t matter who resides in Number Ten.

When such a leader comes along, the progressives will call it the rise of fascism, as they did with Brexit, (which is why neither of the Tory leadership candidates dare do anything spicy). For now we’re stuck with grinding mediocrity as immigration, energy etc continues to deteriorate.

But then leadership qualities without competence is probably just as bad. It’s all very well slashing and burning but if you’re going to do something like quit the ECHR, for example, you need to have a decent idea of what you’re going to replace it with. If you’re going to put EU regulations in the bin, you need to be able to say which ones, what you’ll replace them with, and be able to demonstrate that it’s worth it being that divergence creates difficulty for exporters. You can pledge to dismantle every last wind turbine, but how do you do that without finding yourself up to your neck in court cases? You can abandon treaty targets but a contract is a contract. What happens to foreign investment if we no longer respect commercial contracts?

Any great leader needs a plan, and that’s something our political apparatus is no longer capable of. As we discovered throughout the course of Brexit, British think tankery is a self-referential conformity bubble that recycles ages old tropes and is overrun by Oxbridge/LSE clones, most of whom are servants of the prevailing liberal orthodoxies. Or worse. As with Brexit, I’ll again find myself between a rock and a hard place, between the technocratic spreadsheet sociopaths and Tory free trade radicals.

It occurs to me that the reason Brexit became the unsatisfying deadlock that it is, is because neither side could win outright and neither side deserved to. We had to leave the EU but the Singapore on Thames brigade had to be put back in its box. We may have edged closer to democracy, but we’re still a long way off, until something or someone is capable of breaking the deadlock and finding a new direction.

I’ve recently seen it said that the reason we have such mediocre politicians is that sensible and capable people don’t go into politics. I think this is partly true, but it’s nothing to do with the remuneration. I happen to think that this corps of capable and sensible people doesn’t actually exists. We learned during Brexit that the captains of industry have no better understanding of trade and governance than the average quarterwit MP. The top tiers of society are dominated by privileged privately educated nitwits who simply can’t turn themselves toward the issues that matter to people because they live in such a different world – and do not have to endure the consequences of the choices they make. It won’t be their streets truning into lawless ethnic slums. They won’t have to compete for health provisions or school places.

In that respect, I think I have more in common with the old left than the mainstream right. Conservatives notionally believe in meritocracy, but social mobility in the last three decades has gradually collapsed. The top jobs in media, politics, law and policy are reserved domains. They are a class apart.

I always used to regard this kind of talk as the politics of envy, and it was certainly true that the working class had more values in common with the Tory aristocracy than the bourgeois middle class, but the Tory aristocracy these days is not that far removed from the liberal middle classes and the forces that captured the National trust, the Church of England and even the Royal family. The chumocracy runs right through the system and politicians are evaluated on the basis of whether they’re jolly good chaps or not, as opposed to whether they’re they’re remotely capable or competent.

I’ve often spoken of the need to restore polytechnics and dismantle politics departments, but I’m starting to think the Oxbridge disease can only be cured with a bulldozer. We do need a “great reset” but not the one our elites had in mind.