The political class is pushing its luck
By Pete North - December 6, 2021
It’s been a little while since I last checked on what was going on north of the border. Twitter’s one saving grace was the ability to mute keywords so I’ve lived in a blissful little universe where the words SNP and Scottish independence are simply not in my vocabulary. There are few things in the galaxy more tedious and even fewer that are less important.
The last time I looked in on Scotland, Sturgeon had got into a dyke-off with Joanna Cherry, dressing even more like a butch lesbian than usual, presumably as a means to cleave off the Glasgow queer vote alienated by Cherry by way of her supposedly “transphobic views”.
For reasons I’ve not been bothered to establish, middle class Glasgow youth culture has gone very much the way of the blue haired wokester, wearing the badge of queerness and anticapitalism, and Sturgeon clearly thinks this cohort is vital electoral real estate. Millennials raised on Harry Potter seem to have disproportionate political influence.
It’s certainly the case that Scottish politics has taken a turn for the weird. It seems to have turned into a blood feud between Scotland’s premier lesbians. Being that children can vote in Scottish elections, the calculous perhaps suggests Sturgeon can’t afford to lose them. Who knows? Who cares?
Meanwhile, Wales doesn’t fare much better under devolution. Devolution was supposed to be an enhancement of democracy but all it has done is remove the safeguards against petty tribal authoritarianism. Covid has become the smokescreen for curtain twitchers to install a draconian regime of officialdom.
I’m not going to say that devolution has failed. It looks to be working exactly as intended. Just enough power and just enough enough room on the gravy train to placate separatists enough so that they never get serious about independence. It just means the broader public have to put up with more incursions into their private lives. It Wales it means not falling foul of Covid inspectors, but in Scotland, you’re under the watchful gaze of political commissars who’ll snatch your child away if they don’t show up for drag queen story hour. The Scottish Nonce Party has taken a peculiarly obsessive interest in the development of sexuality in children.
It seems to be a feature of our so-called democracies that you get more of what you don’t want and less of what you do regardless of who you vote for, and the worse they get the more determined any opposition is to double down on the nightmarish incompetence of the incumbents. Even now with the Tories performing at their all time worst, the alternative is still too horrifying for most to even contemplate. Meanwhile, if any party does offer to give people what they actually want, they barely register on the electoral radar.
I remain to be convinced that electoral reform is the way to go. Scotland’s mixed system doesn’t produce better politicians or better, more representative decisions. Whatever the voting system you sill end up with a politician, and we should have learned by now, drawing on experience from all over the world, that there is just something psychologically wrong with anyone who wants to become a politician and the very last thing we should do is put them all in one room and give them power over our lives.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that measure, we have decades of evidence that representative democracy is the living definition of insane. Nobody born today would invent it. Nobody would say “let’s take all our sexually incontinent, narcissistic, greedy wastrels, make them obscenely rich, put them all up in houses in the largest city, and let them slug it out while we completely ignore them”. That would be suicidal. Yet that’s what we’re lumbered with and we accept is as normal.
The system as it stands actively discourages particpation. Lord knows, there is are fewer higher risk and low reward occupations than trying to influence our politicians. Twitter, for instance, is the worst from of schoolyard bullying and adolescent popularity contests among in groups. Most decent people don’t have the stomach for it, leaving only the worst of the virtue signalling sociopaths with the ear of politicians, reinforcing the bubble dynamic.
If there were functioning public supervision of the system then wokery would never have got as far as it did and we certainly wouldn’t be putting rapists in women’s prisons. The argument for having a degree of supreme power to overrule the public within a constitutional framework is to protect the whole from the sadistic impulses of the unforgiving mob, but that is taken to mean giving supreme authority to those least likely to reflect public sentiment, and those most insulated from the consequences of political decisions. It won’t be their sister or daughter sharing a cell with a six foot strapping bloke calling himself Lauren.
Similarly, every poll suggests the vast majority does not take kindly to the invasion of dinghies at Dover, yet it’s the NGOcracy and progressive think tankery calling the shots. Apparently it’s racist to think that our immigration policy ought to be informed by the array of difficult and dangerous social problems we’ve imported, and none of the London set are keen to explain why feral machete gangs and industrial scale child grooming qualifies as strengthening diversity. Though I think we can guess with a degree of accuracy.
Course, one can get into trouble by suggesting that our ruling class like to paddle in the shallow waters. We now know that the insults are only allowed to travel one way and it’s not in their direction. If you’ve got the power and the money, you can decide who can say what and when. That’s the whole name of the game. To obtain and maintain access to power, and ensure nobody else is heard – by any means necessary. It’s an ugly business.
That game, mind you, has a natural end point, and I think we’re creeping in that direction. For sure they can elbow their political opponents out of the way to install whatever deranged depravity takes their fancy, but at the end of the day they still have to find a way to impose on on an uncooperative public. The energy outlook suggests their Net Zero delusions won’t get out of the starting gate, and the harder the Scottish Nonce Party pushes their gender voodoo through the education system, the more likely they are to see a backlash at the school gates. It’s not wise to mistake public tolerance for indifference. The British people are slow to act but they do act eventually.
The same I expect, is true of the migration crisis. The British capacity for compassion is vast but it’s balanced by an equally firm sense of fairness. When the equation no longer resolves, and the scales tip, against a backdrop of rising homeless, energy poverty and food inflation, no force on earth can paper over those cracks. If the politicians think there isn’t a price to pay, they are deeply mistaken.