No light at the end of the tunnel

I’ve not made myself very popular in X over the last couple of weeks. My engagement is down considerably and I’ve lost around a thousand followers (though I probably blocked half of them for being abusive). Not a small number of them were just complaints over the length of my posts. There is a strange corelation between those who say I don’t contribute anything positive and those who don’t read any of my work at all.

None of this surprises me. We’re dealing with a cohort of people who feel betrayed many times over, and they don’t want me pouring buckets of cold water on the last great white hope. But it’s also the case that X simply isn’t the platform for long-form posts, which is why I’ve pivoted back to Substack.

As much as anything, X is increasingly useless for debate, especially around policy when you’re dealing with people who think policy is entirely superfluous. The incentives on X are skewed towards low information, low effort slop, and the rewards go to those who most conform to the groupthink. I’m effectively shadow-banned now.

There’s one other factor, though, that I’m acutely aware of. There’s no getting around it. A lot of what I’m saying is boring, and a lot of it is not what anybody wants to hear. Nobody wants to be told that things might be more complicated than they appear, and nobody really wants to think through second order consequences.

I noted this with the ECHR debate. So far as I’m aware, I’m one of the only people to even attempt to think through the political ramifications and obstacles to leaving. Most of the complications are glossed over, even by the people who are supposed to be good at this stuff. I’ve been surprised and disappointed how little uptake there is for such a pivotal debate.

Insofar as there is a debate on X, it’s more of the usual suspects going round in circles, rehashing the same debates about nationality and identity, increasingly preaching to the converted, covering no new ground, and telling each other what they already know. They are as boring to me as I am to them.

As such, it’s just as well I’m not flavour of the month because I’m happy to tune it out and look at other important issues, not least defence. We’ve seen this dynamic before with the gender wars which spawned a cottage industry of pundits churning over the same debate for the better part of a decade. I could go to Mars for five years and come back to find there’s been little to no progression.

Meanwhile, my experiences in the Homeland Party gives me a good indication of how Restore will play out. Around the fringes there’s a lot of the same thoroughly dishonourable and toxic behaviour and infighting. I couldn’t be bothered with it last year and I can’t be bothered with it now. They have no concept of what it looks like to the outsider. They believe they’re at the cutting edge of the influencer sphere, legends in their own lunchtime, but they’re doing a grand old job of repelling anybody remotely normal.

My great sin in all this is to notice too early, but I think the pennies are already dropping that this is a pretty noxious bunch with the reverse Midas touch. It’s already taken some of the shine off their leading lights.

What unites them is the belief that the old smears don’t really work anymore and you can abandon any notion of self-discipline and let it all hang out, and that there’s no penalty for that. That leads them to be far less inhibited in showing the world who they really are. They conflate moving the Overton Window with shitting the bed.

They are also people who mistake social media engagement for tangible growth. Worse still, they’re deceiving themselves that they have unprecedented growth. They’ll find out in due course how meaningless that is. They can put on rallies and get lots of people to turn up and even raise substantial sums of money, but you’re still dealing with a crowd of people who fall in behind one messiah after another, expecting someone else to do the hard yards.

Ultimately, protest wins by-elections. Organisation wins general elections. There is no possibility of building a national organisation on the back of an online movement with no real experience, and too many prima donnas massaging their own personal brand. This is when you start to see the internal conflict as one faction demands a harder line while others call for a softening of rhetoric, and a war breaks out for the soul of the party, with the leader oblivious to the war within his own ranks, and unwilling to provide any solid direction to settle it.

The correct approach here is to dial down the slop tweeting and hold a private conference among party operatives and spokesmen to agree a basic party definition, a party lexicon, an outline of values, and a policy framework - then publish it, and hold yourself to it. You then use that as the basis for all future party comms and campaigns, while committing to building a serious policy base that will inform all other activities, ensuring that policy is stress-tested and research based as opposed to "old man yells at cloud" stuff, then force the leader to learn his own policy and stop making things up on the fly.

Once you have your policy base, you appoint spokesmen who will campaign on their designated issue, promoting their own policy hard, measuring the failures of the government against what you would do with power. You put the emphasis on building a reputation for seriousness as opposed to slop tweeting to harvest social media engagement, recognising that the job of a political party is to turn public sentiment into actionable plans, not least so you can criticise your opponents from a position of strength and gravitas, also insulating yourselves from avoidable errors.

Rupert Lowe set the benchmark when he said of Reform "I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power". That is the criteria by which he and his party will be judged. We already have a lazy slop party in the shape of Reform. I won’t be the only one to ask why do we need another?

But that’s not what’s going to happen. Just as Nigel Farage equates polling success with progress, Rupert Lowe mistakes social media engagement for tangible growth. So long as the numbers look good, there’s no problem - and if there’s no problem, you don’t need to listen to the counsel of naysayers. Already Restore is falling into familiar patterns, echoing Reform (and Ukip) in viscerally attacking critics.

Meanwhile, we will see more avoidable errors, getting into arcane and intractable debates about English ethnic identity, wasting airtime and missing opportunities to set out a positive vision of what Britain looks like under their stewardship.

When it comes down to it, I find myself without a dog in the fight. I’m not just thinking about what it takes to win in 2029. I’m also thinking about what not to do, so you don’t end up a lame duck in your first year, and kicked out in 2034. That puts a whole different light on things, especially when it comes to policy pledges. I look at Reform and Restore and I don’t see either of them forming a viable, competent or serious government.

Every time they post a generic right wing trope in place of policy, they're telling us that they don't care enough to apply any real thought, they don't know how the system works, and they're too lazy to find out. Why then should we trust they’re capable of running the country?

On that basis, I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. The most the right can hope for in 2029 is a dysfunctional coalition of Reform and the Tories with one or two Restore cranks on the fringes, every bit as divided as the Tories in 2019, and probably more useless. Desperately short of ministerial and parliamentary experience, they will lean heavily on the policy infrastructure of the Tory party, then once again the same people will cry betrayal. It would be comical if it weren’t so depressing.

But even if I am being “too negative”, and I’m completely wrong about this, even if we did have a competent right wing government, turning the ship around is not going to be a walk in the park. I don’t see that there are any quick wins or magic wands.

Just looking at the energy situation, exacerbated by the war in Iran, we’re in a serious mess. We can criticise Labour for shuffling the burden of energy prices into different parts of the economy, especially since they've done everything possible to make it worse, but we're reaching a crunch point now where that's pretty much all we can do for the next decade or so. High energy prices are locked in for at least a decade by my reckoning - and that's my optimistic scenario.

We can safely assume that we're pretty much screwed at least until 2029 because we have Miliband in charge, but supposing a party of the right wins, pruning the planning a regulatory phase for new infrastructure, we're still looking at a minimum of two years before the first digger can get to work, and a further five years before anything is operational - and it will still be some time before we see any normalisation of energy bills - even if we cut green taxes.

Even then, bills might not come down at all, because all the new kit has to be paid for, and we'll be choosing to do it when everything is at its most expensive, not forgetting there is major global competition for metals and devices, and Britain is at the back of the queue having closed down much of its industrial base to save the planet.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right is chanting "drill baby drill" but even with all the stops pulled out, that's going to take a minimum of five years to see any results, if at all. Not forgetting that a lot of our power generation plant is reaching the end of its service life and there's a whole load of nuclear decommissioning in the pipeline. We're going to be more dependent on interconnectors than ever.

As such, it is not good enough for policymakers to simply pledge to scrap Net Zero and make wishlists of power plant they would build. We need an interim strategy to prevent the entire economy going belly up. For sure, that means emergency life extensions, but we also need an exist strategy for renewables that doesn't burn the very companies we're asking to build new infrastructure.

This is all going to have a profoundly negative impact on Britain as a whole. Just-about-managing households will have to think about ways to keep warm in winter that doesn't involve switching the heating on, while industry shrinks and opportunities dry up for young peope. This will no doubt contribute to the brain drain. This does not bode well for any party seeking re-election.

Meanwhile, service industries that use low wage migrant labour will evaporate because they're all convenience industries contingent on disposable income. That means we’ll have a surplus of redundant foreign males. Unless you get deporting them fast, we're either stuck paying for their welfare or paying for the externalities of organised crime. This is why it's so urgent to reverse the Boriswave - but that’s politically problematic - and it won’t happen quickly. The only upside to this is that economic migrants might leave of their own accord because there are simply no economic opportunities here. A lot of Polish people are already considering their options.

One thing's for sure: Something's got to give. We are running out of road. But looking at the entire spectrum of political parties, I don’t see any of them being up to the job. The time to make the kind of strategic choices to avoid national bankruptcy was twenty years ago. Consequently, it may be a very long time before Britain sees stable competent government. Perhaps even never.