Politics: decline and fall

By Pete North - July 18, 2022

I couldn’t bring myself to watch all of the ITV leadership debate. The take-home point for me is that none of them will commit to a general election once they’ve stitched it up between themselves. They each believe their own respective visions (if we can call them that) have a mandate… and that simply cannot be true. It’s the same old horseshit but no actual details.

The latest ConHome survey puts Kemi Badenoch in front, but that’s a very online constituency whereas more nuanced polling shows that the Tory membership is about as split as the party. All the same, the only thing standing between the Tories and an election washout is what the UKIP wing does on polling day. If they stay home, the Tories are in trouble.

They may be impressed with Badenoch, who said she will do “whatever it takes” to deal with illegal Channel crossings, but we’ve heard all this before from Patel. And they loved her once too. Whoever takes the crown will have to deliver results fast. And I suspect that won’t happen. The frontrunners are middle of the road candidates and even if they had a Damascene conversion to the right, they’ll find as Patel has, that getting things done is easier said than done.

The Tories have a lot to do if they want to keep their foot soldiers on side. If the leadership contest ends up being a stitch-up and members find themselves having no clear choice, MPs may find they have to deliver their own leaflets come the election.

Insofar as the leadership debates have touched on the economy, we’ve only seen bickering about marginal tax cuts, but there are too many moving parts for any one solution to work. The Tories have to get serious about energy and perhaps start using land for food production instead of solar panels and claustrophobic Barratt houses. They’re going to have to decide if Net Zero is sustainable when all signs point to it quietly collapsing.

Meanwhile, the media is starting to notice that the war in Ukraine is causing problems. Some are calling for the West to step up military aid to defeat Russia once and for all, while others think Ukraine has to strike a deal. Either way, the longer this goes on, the more dangerous it is. I’m in the latter camp but we can all agree that now is the time to shit or get off the pot. Another winter of rising bills and a fresh wave of migration from the global south threatens to destabilise European politics.

Ukraine, however, isn’t the only headache. Inflation was already a growing problem even before Covid. Globalisation as we have known it has collapsed. The era of mass produced cheap Chinese consumer goods and electronics is over. The global chip shortage is affecting production globally while demand is soaring. As to keeping labour costs down, any government contemplating immigration as a solution is committing electoral suicide.

Furthermore, any economic measures taken by government must be careful not to suppress a long overdue correction in the economy after two decades of high migration and cheap money. Britain is becoming a poorer country, we’ve been masking the decline for a very long time, and more of the same could make matters worse in the long run.

This is where typical Tory shtick hits the rocks. Tax cuts are going to mean cuts to already collapsing front line services. It’s difficult to see where more cuts can be made, particularly when demands on the welfare system are set to rise, and there is broad agreement that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to completely run down our armed forces and flog off our defence industry to America. The Tories are also going to have to spend to prevent the total collapse of the criminal justice system. There is low hanging fruit such as green levies on energy bills, but the green blob isn’t going to let them abandon the renewable energy scam. They could look again at the Dementia Tax, but it cost Theresa May a majority.

To be fair to the Tory leadership contenders, this would be a problematic predicament even if they weren’t sub-mediocre. There are bullets to be bitten and there are no easy answers. There are trade-offs to every action and nobody knows for sure what will happen if certain levers are pulled. Even the most qualified economists are guessing. They don’t know if British banks can withstand an interest rate hike, or what the ripple effects would be. We may just be damned either way.

There is then that elephant in the room that you can’t expect the Tories to address. Brexit. Tory soothsayers would have it that Brexit has been an economic non-event, and no Tory dare say otherwise because to do so would be to provoke the ire of Tory brexiteers and lose the support of the rank and file. And the Tories aren’t going to admit that the dog’s dinner of a trade deal they voted for is threadbare. The weakness of the TCA is causing real problems for agriculture and SMEs in the real economy, but nobody wants to talk about it.

For now they can get away with ignoring the elephant in the room because Europe’s energy woes, causing the slow implosion of German manufacturing, puts Britain in a slightly better position, but sooner or later the more tangible impacts of Brexit will be unequivocally apparent. The Tories cannot stay in a state of denial forever or the splits will widen.

The economy, though, is just one problem among many. The march of wokery through the institutions is eroding confidence in the arms of the state (the police especially), and powerful blobs are preventing meaningful change. There is a growing resentment and a sense of resignation gripping the country. There is zero chance of a genuine conservative party taking the leadership, while the opposition has nothing to offer but more of the same and there is no viable third option.

Though the “revolt on the right” is collapsing electorally, there are growing demographic anxieties and a growing sense of powerlessness. Social media gives us many platforms through which to speak, but there is no way to be heard by a tone deaf establishment and the censors do the rest. Our politics is in terminal decline. The leadership debates illustrate better than anything how the concerns of ordinary people barely register in the top ranks of politics. Trust in politicians has collapsed and with it any hope that things can get better.

The self-indulgent bickering of the Tory party has not gripped the nation this time around. We may be rid of a feckless oaf, but a change of management doesn’t fix what’s wrong. Our politicians are incapable of breaking from the social democratic consensus because half of them are afraid to, and the other half just don’t want to. But still, too many keep falling for the same con tricks.

We can’t go on like this. This can’t go on forever, Something has to give. Around Europe and in the USA we’re seeing outbreaks of protests and disorder, and one gets a sense this is only the beginning as Europe’s political establishments double down on dangerously ill-conceived climate policies. Britain can’t be far behind as the media ramps up climate histrionics that bear no relation to what is happening in the real world, and doesn’t speak to the everyday concerns of voters.

Politicians can bribe us with our own money so we can heat our homes this winter, but it’s a one shot deal. The piper has to be paid eventually. If then, our political class still refuses to change tack, we’ll be sitting on a political time bomb that’ll make Brexit look like a cordial disagreement. Our politico-media class wants a war with Russia, but the people may yet work out where the real enemy resides.