A little bit of effort goes a long way

I promise this will be the last Substack outing on this particular pointless twitter spat, but it’s worth documenting it just for my own purposes. I’m sure you’re as bored of it as I am.

It took me a little while for the penny to drop, but I can see now what Carl Benjamin’s motive is. He gave the game away by saying “Nobody is asking to be mollycoddled, they are asking you to stop attacking. Attacking is destructive; do something constructive, or you put yourself on mute”.

We’ve already been over this. To assert that I've not been constructive is pure gaslighting, but ultimately this is a demand for me to shut up. That’s the essence of what he’s saying, but it was Donna Rachel’s piece earlier that put the final jigsaw piece into place, illustrated with the following tweet:

Carl Benjamin is gatekeeping for a cult. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t condemn the delusion. Delusion is a very necessary component of politics otherwise nobody would strive to do anything and we’d still be in the EU. There was a time when the very suggestion of leaving the EU was patently absurd. It’s just that Benjamin, in his position as one of the new messiah’s priests, needs to police dissent. Conform or shut up!

A subsequent tweet reveals the psychology: “Stop defending your ego or consign yourself to the enemy side”. Anyone not conforming is “the enemy”. This is cult behaviour bordering on psychopathy (yet I’m supposed to be the abnormal one here).

It also says a lot that the attack is aimed at me rather than responding to the argument - though he again leans on the excuse that Restore is less than three weeks old. But, again, we’ve been over this. It hasn't been less than three weeks.

Restore Britain has existed since June last year when Lowe announced a policy consultation along the lines of the one conducted by GBPAC. I warned against it because a) it was replicated effort and b) it would just lead to members feeding back all the generic right wing talking points they hear on TalkTV and GB News (bonfire of quangos etc). These are all tropes any one of us could rattle off the top of our heads in under a minute. It’s a total waste of time. And the product of all this was... f*ck all.

The task from the outset (as a policy unit and pressure group) was to take all the classic tropes and turn them into actionable, coherent polices in the way that Reform has consistently failed to do - the very issue that precipitated Lowe's departure form Reform. But what have we seen instead? More lazy slop, zero effort, zero care for presentation, and zero thought to message discipline and co-ordination. Just Uncle Rupe sharting out the greatest hits of the slop right. That's what's going to make Restore as much of a cringefest shitshow as Reform. Possibly even worse.

Benjamin wants me to stop attacking it but it deserves to be attacked - especially when all of this could have been attended to with just a little care over the last six months. It wouldn't have taken a Berlin Airlift to do it. Just for one person within Lowe's organisation to have given a toss. The fact that the website in roughly the same state it was in when it launched, with no reports on any of the interesting work Lewis Brackpool has done tells its own story. Many will ask what the hell does this organisation even do? Not everyone interfaces with politics through X.

So it turns out that Benjamin is being totally insincere. What he’s demanding from me is silence and conformity. One is supposed to meekly accept the low effort drivel they serve up and be grateful for it. But here’s the problem. Even if I stop attacking it for being crap, someone else with more clout (probably outright hostile) most certainly will.

I didn't notice Restore is useless because I'm especially gifted. Anyone with eyes can see it's a slop factory. If Benjamin doesn’t understand why that's a problem then he’s even more of a fool than I already took him for. You can put up the walls and pretend I don't exist, and blame me for pointing out the obvious (in the wrong tone), but eventually your excuses will catch up on you. Ultimately all that was needed was a little bit of up-front structured thinking and that would have saved a lot of headaches already. But now, it’s probably too late.

I think, though, something got lost in translation. There's a misconception that I'm calling for verbose policy tracts in infinite detail. I'm not. My own website doesn't even do that. I call for a coherent policy framework - as a starter for ten that the party can build on. It doesn't have to be War and Peace, or even go into technical levels of detail. It just has to be more than a collection of lazy tropes.

To my mind, a good policy first sets out the basic principle that your policy is aiming to fulfil, and outline the problems your policy seeks to address. But it also has to look past the obvious. It must also be innovative, relevant and inspirational.

Take agriculture, for instance. What do we want? We want self-sufficiency, a curated countryside, and a thriving farming sector with the highest possible animal welfare standards. We want farmers to look after the land (as custodians) and we want them to be properly recognised and rewarded for their efforts.

More than that, we want to be innovators, cutting out menial low wage work in favour of agri-botics and state of the art greenhouses, thereby doing away with food imports, contributing to our food security and sustainability.

We also want joined-up policy. I'm quite taken with using small modular nuclear plants for energy but also using them for nuclear desalination for irrigation, and using excess heat for greenhouses. I want Britain to he be a leading agriculture IP innovator and the agri-science laboratory of the world. You calibrate policy to balance the old with the new, according to strategic objectives and moral principles.

We then want to look at the reasons why farmers make so little, and address their input costs. We need to examine how supermarkets and food processors rip farmers off. We want to end the practice of late payers. Policy should be relevant to the farmer and the consumer, and get people excited about the possibilities.

Regular readers will know my shtick about rebooting the meat industry, returning to the pre-EU model of small, local slaughterhouses. We need a policy that helps livestock farmers form co-operative slaughter facilities. We then need to streamline regulation and planning so farmers can diversify.

You could set out a very readable agenda amounting to a thousand words. This has the advantage of forming the basis of all your social media comms, and ensures your spokesmen aren't ad-libbing if they're ever asked to comment on the subject. It also shows that you have a grasp of the issues, and that you're actually serious.

Having then set out your basic policy template, you can then commission researchers, or even approach a think tanks to write a detailed policy according to your executive summary. The detail can come later. All I'm saying is that you have to do better than disjoined generic slogans based on lazy assumptions.

This is what I set out to do with manifestoproject.org, where I set out a basic vision, the values which policy should seek to fulfil, then an outline of the possibilities. In some areas I go further, taking into account the complexities and obstacles, and the kind of opposition we're facing. Some of that analysis brought me to different conclusions - which is why you really shouldn't just shart out the greatest hits talking points. You have to do the basic framework first - otherwise you look like amateurs and you destroy your own reputation for seriousness.

A good policy framework is your ammunition store, and its what gives you the edge. If you have coherent policy, you can attack other partiers from a position of strength. Last week Restore spent the week attacking Reform's foreign policy when they have absolutely nothing approaching a foreign policy on their website. That kind of amateurism gets noticed by the onlooker. There is literally no downside for going the extra mile. So do tell me, why is there such hostility to putting in just a little bit of effort?