Politics: No cause for optimism

Response to my interview with British Thought Leaders has been overwhelmingly positive. There is, though, one recurrent criticism that continues to irk me; that I’m overly pessimistic and I never talk about solutions.

It’s true I’m pessimistic. There is nothing on the horizon that gives me hope. Our decaying political system will continue to linger on and there’s nothing much to challenge it. The right just can’t get its act together and seems to be pegging its hopes on a Farage comeback tour. That’s apparently the best we can do.

This doesn’t enthuse me at all. The Reform party is a rudderless entity comprised of lazy, incompetent populists who don’t think seriously about policy, and in fact, don’t know how to. It’s not good enough.

If you’ve done any serious thinking about what ails Britain, you know that tinkering with disparate policy areas won’t cut it. That’s part of the problem we have now; politicians who are incapable of joined-up thinking, who don’t see how one policy area affects the next. They talk about energy and Net Zero independently of “the economy”, failing to recognise that energy is the economy.

If you want to stimulate more manufacturing and exports you need low cost energy. If you want to run public amenities like libraries and swimming pools, you need low cost energy. If you want affordable food, you need low cost energy. Most of our economic problems can be traced back to destructive environmental interventions.

Reform has at least worked that much out, but it’s not enough just to call time on Net Zero. Net Zero is a symptom of a broader political malaise - and that’s the problem we really need to solve. We need a constitutional overhaul.

You would think that a party calling itself “Reform” would’ve recognised this and would be popularising a comprehensive reform agenda. Instead, what we get is much the same as what we got from Farage era UKIP. Ideas plucked out of a tombola with no underlying philosophy.

What we need is a movement for National Democracy as an antidote to the prevailing “international rules based order” mentality that infects our politics and our institutions. It is the belief that the nation state, and our parliament, is subordinate in a hierarchy of law, and that illegitimate and obsolete “international law” is somehow sacrosanct, and must be obeyed even if it is to our own detriment. (This is the current schism within the Tory party).

Net Zero and the asylum crisis are two examples of this dysfunction. Net Zero is very much the implementation of the Paris Agreement, meanwhile we’re still unable to deport economic migrants because we’re wedded to the ECHR. Part of the reason Brexit is a damp squib is because the EU was just one of the problems on that front.

Reform says to scrap Net Zero and leave the ECHR, which is all well and good, but we need to go further than that by completely overturning Blair’s constitutional vandalism. We need to reunify the country by abolishing devolution and resorting proper local democracy. We need an entirely new constitution that reinforces national democracy, centred on the sovereignty of the people, underpinned by the principle of consent. Politicians have no business signing us up to binding international commitments without a referendum. Britain doesn’t just need a new government. We need an entirely new compact.

I argued throughout Brexit that it would end up being shunted down a siding unless there was a plan and a coherent set of objectives by which it could be measured. I’m not in the least bit surprised that without such a plan we got an administrative Brexit that successive administrations have swept under the carpet. As such, very little has been resolved by Brexit and the sentiment behind it is still bubbling under the surface. It will come back to the fore of our politics, but if it is again led by an incompetent rabble without a coherent agenda, it will again be defeated.

The thing about political parties that don’t have a driving mission is that they rapidly descend into infighting when they can’t agree what should be done. This was true of the Tories and it will be equally true of Labour. Any democratic revolution has to persuade the electorate to vote for a very specific intellectual product, and as such, its elected members will be duty bound to implement it.

A protest party like Reform could come to power and quit the ECHR on day one, but for the purposes of legal continuity, we’d have to do much the same as we did with Brexit, by retaining all the pertinent rulings and offshoots entrenched in our own laws. We’d then have to set about replacing the system with a bill of rights, but that’s easier said than done. There are larger debates to be had as to what it should contain - particularly with reference to immigration. The ECHR is not a bolt-on to our constitution. It is deeply enmeshed in it. We should anticipate much the same levels of opposition from within the apparatus of government.

Much of what ails Britain stems from the centralisation of power, and the gradual erosion of democracy. Rebooting our constitution to return powers to the people is a necessary step, but in doing so we’d be departing from the primacy of international technocracy, which no doubt has ramifications for our international relationships. On matters of more technical policy, we’d be heading for a confrontation with the EU on non-regression grounds. Dumping the TCA and the NI protocol might very well be necessary, but that then raises big questions about international trade policy and relations with Ireland. We’re talking about a revolution in British governance that’s far bigger than Brexit in scope and consequence.

As such, I see no evidence of this kind of systemic thinking, thus there is no-one on the fringes who can ever gain my confidence. Fringe parties provide a protest outlet but they do not offer an alternative. They do not offer a remedy to the competency crisis we face. They have vague ideas about what they’d like to happen, but no clue how it would actually get done. Necessary to winning is being able to persuade doubters you know what you’re doing. If we’d managed to do that during the Brexit referendum, we might well have secured a far larger mandate to go further.

Britain is a disunited country with growing divisions between the rulers and the ruled, between the counties and the capital. Prior to Brexit we had a constitutional settlement, albeit an unpopular one, but we have yet to find a national resolution in response to the Brexit vote. The political class believes that Brexit was a result of austerity and the answer to it is “levelling up” which ultimately results in the same old top-down initiatives such as the green economy, where the state directs economic activity. Being that there never was an economic benefit to Net Zero, we are also seeing the levelling up agenda fall apart.

While the politicians fixate on madcap green energy plans it’s harder to conceal the fact that our infrastructure is crumbling, and for all the money we chuck at it, nothing ever gets done. Everything is held up in planning and compliance and the bills keep soaring. We are in desperate need of deregulation and decentralisation to get the economy moving. But a focus on the economy doesn’t solve the deep rooted social malaise in the country.

Though there are deep division in the country, just about everyone can agree that our politics isn’t working and that the future looks bleaker for every new generation. Mass immigration has undermined any sense of national belonging and there are far too many people here who should not be here, don’t integrate, can’t integrate, and contribute nothing. Any new movement needs to reassert Britain as a homeland and not merely an economic grazing strip. As such, it will face united establishment and media opposition and will no doubt be dubbed “far right”. Any party craving establishment respectability such as Reform will lose its best people to media assassination.

Ultimately, I’m not going to hold my breath for a new movement to come along and rescue us. As a nation we’ve forgotten how to do politics, and there is no way that I can see for a credible alternative to break through. Though there are solutions to our many problems, I don’t see a solution to the main problem that the game is rigged and we’re not a democracy in any meaningful sense. If the regime is to be toppled, it won’t be through the ballot box.