Politics: The Great Worsening

I’m far from alone in having nobody to vote for at the next election. I’m not taken with the Tory party for obvious reasons, and I don’t think much of the Reform party. Richard Tice is an intellectual lightweight and the party isn’t built on a philosophical foundation. They are populist opportunists, and they’re not very good at it. This clan doesn’t strike me as a solution to the crisis of competence in British politics. There is still a gap in the market for something new.

The problem, however, is that we’re in a new age of politics where traditional party politics doesn’t work the way it once did, if at all. It’s harder than ever to organise and build a new political movement. We’ve seen online movements growing but they’re unable to exert any real power or break through at the ballot box.

UKIP was probably the very last genuine grassroots political movement in the UK. It rose to prominence by building locally, but was able to force its way into national politics by winning at euro elections. This cannot be repeated thanks to Brexit. It’s ironic, perhaps tragic, that an attempt to reassert national democracy has made it harder than ever to break the Westminster cartel.

Almost everyone on the right recognises the need for something new that will take a robust stance on immigration and anti-democratic schemes such as Net Zero, but there’s no way to break into the mainstream. If it can be done, you need big money. More than ever, British politics is a pay to play system - and those who have the money don’t know how to usefully spend it.

Even the old local strategies no longer work. The Lib Dems maintained their presence in national politics by having a strong local presence, but local politics has died a death, not least because of mass immigration, but also because local politics was killed off through the effective abolition of local government. Throughout the country, councils have been merged into regional development quangos run by highly remunerated officials, who exist to implement political agendas from above. They’re legally obliged to implement policies to meet targets set by Whitehall with a view to meeting international climate goals. It is not answerable to us. Local democracy is dead. 

Consequently, there are growing numbers of us who are effectively disenfranchised. We have no say in what is done to us. And we have no hope.

This marks a dangerous new era in British politics. Those of us who voted for Brexit may have had different ideas of what it was supposed to achieve, but all of us hoped it would be a watershed moment, when the message from the electorate would be heard. But that didn’t last. Very rapidly, the political establishment reverted to its usual habits, Brexit was been kicked into the long grass. The lessons on immigration have been completely ignored. The Tory party caves into the left on every substantive issue. As a result, there is growing political disaffection, and the Labour party, arguably in its worst incarnation yet, is set to inherit power by an accident of numbers on the back of voter dismay.

With Labour at odds with itself, about as much as the Tory party, it is no more fit to govern than the Tories. The Labour front bench is made up of low calibre individuals who leap on every virtue-signalling bandwagon going, while Keir Starmer has a full time job keeping lid on the divisions. He’ll be fighting for his political life from day one.

Anyone who’s even halfway politically astute now knows that the whole system is decrepit, wrecked and broken beyond repair. The parties no longer reflect divisions within the country. They barely even represent this reality. On everything that matters, from the rule of law, immigration, defence, energy, agriculture and the rest, establishment politics is failing us, while there’s a growing sense that the people we elect aren’t in control of anything.

The next election will not solve anything. It will not bring solutions to bear on any of the problems we face, and a novice Labour Party, with no concept of how anything works in the real world, will make just about everything worse. You can chug along with this level of ineptitude for a long time, and the country keeps surprising us with its resilience, but eventually things start to break down. Imperceptibly at first, then dramatically. I think we’re getting to that point.

The next parliamentary term will be dogged by crisis after crisis, many of which will be of a technical nature that go beyond the comprehension of the average MP. Most of us are dismayed by the low calibre of our politicians, but the next influx of Labour activist politicians is set to be a magnitude worse, thus we are unlikely to see anything resolved. The next parliament will be The Great Worsening. Arguably, the best thing that can happen at the next election is a hung parliament to ensure we don’t have to endure a full five years of it.

The view on the right is that the only way out is through, and optimistically believes something will emerge to fill the void. I do not share this optimism. There is no mechanism by which it can happen.

If the Tories lose, the party will be in a state of civil war, between the “one nation” faction and the right wing, now styling themselves as “popular conservatism”. But neither of these factions is capable of winning an election. The left of the party will do everything possible to alienate conservative voters, while the right will walk into every ambush set for them (as they did with Lee Anderson) - unless it’s unashamedly populist, in which case they face competition from Reform. There is no basis upon which to trust the Tories.

It seems there is no way back for them short of a similar implosion of the Labour Party, but either way, we’re still in a deadlock of mediocrities, with nobody else able to break through. Despite the online noise made by Reform, there is no burgeoning populist movement on the right, and there is no real world sign of this mythical far right. The view that things will get better eventually is a cope. The only way anything at all is going to get better is if a government stumbles on a policy that works by accident.

For the foreseeable future, we’re going to see government by emergency patches, responding to entirely avoidable problems. Just this morning we learn from Rishi Sunak, writing in The Telegraph, that Britain is to embark on a programme of life extensions for existing gas power plants and a series of new gas power stations in order to keep the lights on.

This, ultimately, is an admission that renewables cannot replace baseload power generation, and in effect, we need two power generation estates; one for when the wind is blowing, and one for when it isn’t. All the same, this won’t stop Labour or the Tories pumping billions into useless renewable energy. Meanwhile, the programme of small modular reactors is still bogged down in red tape and legal challenges that neither party shows any interest in overcoming. We’ll just about keep the lights on, but we’ll keep paying for the vanity and stupidity of our politicians.

The only good news is that reality is set to intrude on the worst aspects of Net Zero, where even the EU will be forced to rethink the transition to EVs, but an enormous amount of damage will have been inflicted on the European auto industry by the time the u-turn arrives.

Meanwhile, we see no encouraging signs that the government will get its Rwanda plan off the ground, and no sign that Labour has any solutions to the dingy crisis short of a general amnesty. Both parties have shown us that they’re unable and unwilling to take radical action, and there is also a conspiracy of silence around Islamic extremism. The issue can’t even be debated without a diversionary moral panic about Islamophobia.

Not only will our political class go to extended lengths to ensure they don’t debate it, they will take steps to ensure we don’t either. The jailing of Sam Melia over his “racist” sticker campaign is intended as a warning that certain topics, particularly demographic replacement, are off limits. Far-leftists and Islamists will remain at liberty to mob synagogues and chant genocidal slogans, but politicians will focus on the phantom menace of the “far right”. As such, the gulf between the electorate and the ruling class is set only to widen.

Though politicians believe they can suppress the debate, ably assisted by Elon Musk, the immigration issue is not going away, and since there are no means of usefully expressing discontent at the ballot box, we can expect to see more frequent anti-immigration demonstrations and “hate crimes” directed at mosques. The Home Office has just announced £117 million over the next four years to boost security for mosques, faith schools and community centres. “We will always ensure that UK Muslim communities feel safe, confident and reassured” they said.

Though this has been met with outrage, it strikes me as a reasonable precaution for a government that does not intend to act on the worst excesses of Islamism. They’re just going to keep on ignoring the problem - and they know it.

The upshot of this is continuing disaffection with politics, particularly as energy costs rise, the economy shrinks, and social cohesion goes into reverse. Meanwhile, bankrupt councils close more libraries and swimming pools, and cut back on park maintenance, road gritting and pothole filling.

This makes for unhappy times when we’re lumbered with a political class we can’t get rid of, that wouldn’t act even if it could. I do not expect a revolution in politics, but I do expect a sea change in the public mood. Politics is set to become nastier and more dangerous. A fate they have surely brought upon themselves.