Onwards and upwards

Not wishing to congratulate myself, but my recent posts have been interesting and informative - to me at least. I learned things, and I have some more lines of inquiry to follow up on. The more I understand about the policy landscape, the scale of the task in repairing it, and the dilemmas therein, the more I’m convinced that the British right is absolutely hopeless, and wouldn’t succeed in government. They’d be learning on the job, the hard way, by which time it’s going to be too late.

This has been my general assumption for some time now, which brought me to the conclusion that if there is to be an alternative party them it simply cannot be a populist derivative of Ukip. But now the field is crowded with dross, there is no bandwidth for a new party, and the right will all pile in behind Rupert Lowe just to be led up the garden path again.

As such, the only hope for even a vaguely competent party capable of forming a functioning government, whether I like it or not, is the Tory party, but the old rule still applies. Never trust a Tory. This only reinforces my view that we’re not voting our way out of this - not any time soon, anyway.

But this causes me something of a problem. I’ve tailored much of my content to the dissident right, essentially because I’m still of that ilk, but I’ve managed to alienate just about everybody by saying in less than refined terms that all of the current enterprises on the right are, in fact, a big pile of horse manure.

It doesn’t help either that I’m an obsessive bore who writes at a rate faster than my readers have the bandwidth for, meaning the harder I work, the smaller my audience, thus the smaller my income. I’ve lost seven paying subscribers in the last three weeks.

That said, I make no apology for it. It’s who I am. I’m not famed for my finesse or my capacity to suffer fools, and I stand firmly by my conclusions. Even my detractors will privately admit I’ve got a point. That’s why I’m going to keep saying what I say and doing what I do whether anyone wants to hear it or not. I have every confidence I will again be vindicated, sadly.

As such, that makes you, dear reader, one of the dwindling few with the stamina and patience to keep up with my thinking, so you obviously do see some value in what I do. On that basis, I would like you to consider a paid subscription to this Substack, because at a mere £6 a month, you’re getting more policy ideas and analysis in a month than all of the alternative parties combined over the course of a year - and as we creep closer to the general election, it’s only going to get better. I’d call that a bargain.

A subscription will support further developments to manifestoproject.org. It’s been in the doldrums for a few months because I like to step away from it now and then to let the issues percolate, but it’s now due for a substantial re-write, developing some of the weaker policies such as welfare and tax reform. I still plan on some supporting video content while I’m still relatively young and beautiful. To those of you who still subscribe, you have my sincerest thanks.