Politics: treading water

I hope you’ll forgive my short absence over the last few days. It’s Sod’s law that I start up a new Substack and then I’m immediately stricken with writer’s block. I am prone to occasional bouts of this when there’s nothing much new to say.

That much can be said of a number of issues at the moment. Just this afternoon I caught Julia Hartley Brewer on the radio rehearsing the many reasons why decarbonising the grid simply isn’t going to work. There was a time when this was quite a niche subject and public debate was far, far behind. But now it seems the cat is out of the bag. There’s now a small army of national grid watchers bringing light to this subject. My work here is done, I guess. For now anyway.

I appreciate that repetition is part of the job as a blogger, but even so, there are only so many times I can write a variation of the same article rehearsing the many reasons why Net Zero is catastrophically stupid.

So now I go in search of other issues. But very rapidly I bump into the same problem. I’ve been following the transgender debate for quite a long time and it looks like the radical gender ideologues are losing comprehensively. As it happens, public debate resolved the trans issue some time ago. “Gender” is nonsense, biological sex is real, and you can't change sex. Puberty blockers are harmful and cause irreversible damage. There are no "trans kids". There is no such thing as "trans". "Gender affirming care" is monstrous. Trans ideology has no place in our society.

So, like Net Zero, we are still waiting for politicians to get with the programme. Public debate successfully resolves issues, but our politics does not. We’ve seen this with the immigration debate. We know that multiculturalism has been an abject failure. We know that mass immigration is terrible for social cohesion and is bad for the economy. But nothing's going to change because our politics is unresponsive.

The list of issues, where the facts are clear and irrefutable, is now extensive, but we're going to be having the exact same tedious, bitter and unproductive debates about them for the next decade or more.

These are all issues a nominally conservative party should have used the last term to address, but instead, the Tory party has sat on its hands to the point where it no longer has the time to fix anything (even if it had the will). Rightly, they are to be chucked out of office, but now we have to put up with Starmer’s clan of mouthbreathers who’ll make everything a magnitude worse. Just when you think they couldn't get any worse, they set a whole new standard for ignorance and depravity.

As such, our politics simply isn’t working. It’s little wonder I have such troubles finding the motivation to write something every day when political debate is so utterly fruitless. This churn provides endless fodder for the GB News consumer base but it doesn’t get us anywhere.

It is precisely this disconnect that sees so many people tuning out of politics entirely. Nobody expects the Tories to do anything useful, and Labour has nothing much to say for itself, save for reheated green economy slogans and the usual convoy of woke bandwagons. The best thing Rishi Sunak could do for the country now is call an election just so we can get this nightmare over and done with.

Thinking ahead to the election, I think it’ll be one of those elections that’s worth staying up all night for, just for the entertainment value of watching Tories lose their seats. The amusement, however, will be short-lived since the influx of Labour replacements are wokelings and faceless clones of Rachel Reeves. This does not bode well.

It is perhaps that dynamic that will make the next election closer than conventional wisdom would have it. The polls suggest a Tory wipeout but Labour doesn’t present as a credible alternative. It offers more of the same, but worse. Trans activism on the left stands to alienate a lot of women voters, and the party’s dalliance with wokery stands to lose them the “traditional values” minority ethnic vote. Due to Labour’s schizophrenic policy on Israel, the Muslim bloc vote can’t be taken for granted either.

It’s conceivable that Labour could win by a landslide, but only by way of total disaffection on the right, where Labour MPs will as much owe their seats to low turnouts as anything else. Labour may win a majority, but will not have a popular mandate. Starmer is no Blair.

As it happens, though, it won’t be domestic politics that shapes policy direction over the next term. It is reasonable to assume Donald Trump will return to the White House, spelling the death of the Paris Agreement, while the next Euro elections will see the populist right sweeping centre-left parties off the electoral map. The EU will be forced to revisit the full raft of climate measures, which will set the tone for politics in Britain. Starmer may be forced to abandon the EV rollout if nobody’s keen on making them. Meanwhile, we learn the wheels are already falling off the flagship heat pump policy since few people actually want one.

It seems that fate will decide most of the big questions. Labour may be keen on renewable energy but the entire industry looks to be going belly up, and the Tories have already conceded that we need more gas-fired electricity plant if we’re going to keep the lights on. As to Labour’s social agenda, we can expect the worst excesses to be nixed by the House of Lords on legality grounds. Labour will find they’re no more capable of radical policies than the Tories. They will coast into oblivion the exact same way, for the exact same reasons.

In that regard, Labour might not be as bad as anyone expects it to be. But that brings us back to the original question. Is anybody actually in control? Is this system any longer capable of producing coherent government able to exert its will on policy? Are the people we elect merely passive spectators? From the way they talk you’d certainly think so.

The one issue that will not go away, or resolve itself, is immigration. It will be the defining issue of the next parliament and beyond. We are likely to see more *actual* far right activity. The populist drumbeat will grow louder. The Tory party can’t afford to ignore it again if it wants to survive. Similarly Labour has to address the issues if it wants to stay in power. Ironically, Labour could end up being more robust on immigration than any of the last five prime ministers. Not that it would take much doing.

The next five years will be marked by further unrest on the streets, more far-left extremism, and a further collapse of standards in our institutions - not least the civil service and the police which have fallen under the spell of identity politics and social justice dogma. Though this “mind virus” is on the wane, you can always depend on lumbering bureaucracies to pick these ideas up and run with them just as everyone else is giving them up. It’s clear now that there is no path to prosperity unless and until we see a root and branch reform of the institutions. Only national conservatism can arrest the decline.

Should the Tories at any point reconnect with conservatism then there is a path back to power, but they have a long way to go before anyone is likely to trust them again. There can be no marriage of convenience with an oaf like Johnson again, nor can they afford ineffable lightweights like Truss or Badenoch. Unless they can come up with the real deal, conservative voters will continue to search for alternatives. Considering the current Tory party thinks Penny “trans women are women” Mordaunt is a viable leadership proposition, they could be out in the wilderness a long time.

In any case, something big was set in motion in 2016. That something has yet to be resolved or properly answered. It was not placated by the administrative Brexit we got, and it can’t be suppressed. That sentiment will continue to stalk politics for as long as we have a decaying political establishment dedicated to upholding a decrepit status quo. When mainstream politics has so little to say for itself, the extremes on both sides will prosper. We can be absolutely sure that the next election is the beginning of a long sorting out process, and soon enough, Labour will find its victory tastes as bitter as defeat.