The British political order is circling the drain

This is not a Brexit article, I promise.

Back in the days of Brexit, I campaigned for a staged exit from the EU. The Leave Alliance argued that the EEA could serve as a long term departure lounge where, once we’d sorted out the mechanics of leaving, we could either develop a new role within the European regulatory sphere or gradually diverge using the various mechanisms within the EEA treaty.

At the time it was already apparent that globalisation was going into reverse and that the smart money was on reshoring. It was obvious that, for Britain, Europe would remain an important trade destination, and there would be no great appetite for the free trade fundamentalism of the ERG. The Leave Alliance took the view that technical and regulatory cooperation was a fact of life and radical divergence was unlikely.

In hindsight, in the febrile atmosphere of Article 50, there was no way we were going to win that argument with Brexiteers. After a series of attempts to overthrow the referendum result, the mood was very much for chucking the baby out with the bath water.

As it happens, though, we got the “staged exit” we recommended after all. We may have left the single market but Brexit is now on a long-term pause pending further developments. We remain aligned in most key areas and there hasn’t been any radical divergence. Brexit has been kicked into the long grass.

I’m actually quite sanguine about this. We always argued that Brexit would not be a silver bullet and, in fact, was just the first battle in a long war to reclaim national democracy. The bigger part of the problem is the political establishment here in Britain, and Brexit was not enough to dislodge it. As such, there is a long way to go before we get the political revolution we agitated for.

In a sense it’s a good thing that Brexit was fought to a standstill. The ERG wanted to use Brexit momentum to implement a Singapore on Thames agenda, when the underlying sentiment of Brexit was far more protectionist in nature. It’s taken a war in Ukraine and a pandemic, but the penny has now dropped. In a few short years, we’ve moved on from the radical free trade dogma to the realisation that domestic industry such as steel, manufacturing and agriculture matters a great deal. If anything, Brexit demanded a more traditional left wing approach to trade and industrial policy.

With Brexit now fading into the mists of time, there is now more of a consensus that we need a programme of national renewal, not just to renew our crumbling infrastructure, but also to repair the social fabric. The penny has dropped that mass immigration is not an economic panacea, and causes more problems than it solves.

Meanwhile, we’re now questioning the wisdom of sending our young to rack up debts to obtain valueless qualifications. Trades are now favoured over bogus degrees. It has also been noticed that it wasn’t such a great idea to run down our national defence capabilities. And yes, we still need to talk about housing.

As ever, the penny has not dropped with the political class, and they’re still hellbent on inflicting Net Zero and mass immigration on us. The Tories are bad. Labour will be worse. The message isn’t getting through, and it’s the growing sense of anger and frustration that will reawaken the Brexit spirit. In the meantime we’re powerless spectators to our own decline.

To a point, the politicians have understood that Britain needs a new deal and major economic renewal, which is what they think they’re doing with Net Zero, even though it’s destroying our auto industry and handing every conceivable advantage to China. They’ll work it out eventually that you cannot power a first world economy on windmills alone, and as input costs rise yet again, we’ll see Labour’s wind power ambitions quietly dropped. But then they’ve got to get to grips with why nothing ever gets done in this country, and they’ll face all of the same obstacles. A change of administration is not a change of regime. The problems are systemic.

I remember a few years ago working for a small nuclear consultancy firm, and we had exactly the right people to bid for a contract on Hinkley Point, only we had to have some or other bullshit eco-credential, so we had to bring in a consultant to do an environmental audit of a small office unit near Gloucester, (costing £60,000) which resulted in us having to produce monthly office recycling reports and other such bureaucratic nonsense.

You have to put all this together before you can even bid for a contract, so it's a huge barrier for otherwise nimble start-ups, thus contracts tend to be awarded to the big consultancies who can afford the compliance costs. The whole procurement system is a "pay to play" rigged market. There was then the EU procurement process where any contract worth more than £25k was subject to a Europe-wide tender process, which added considerable delays.

This is why you have infrastructure projects descending into farce, where hundreds of millions are spend on bullshit paperwork exercises that nobody will ever read. Then there's all the wildlife and biodiversity red tape (Habitats Directive), and further local authority bylaws put in place to comply with their statutory zero carbon obligations. You can spend a billion quid before the first JCB reports to site.

When politicians say an energy infrastructure project will create thousands of jobs, this is not a good thing. It means there will be more people producing complex spreadsheets to monitor the carbon footprint of the stationery cupboard than actual engineers (most of whom we had to poach from France). It makes for a lucrative side hustle for useless IT contractors such as myself, but that's no way to run national infrastructure.

The promise of privatisation was that the private sector wouldn't tolerate the kind of non-jobbery we see in the public sector, but then along came environmental accreditations and emissions rules. The nation probably needs a data centre the size of the Isle of Wight just to store the climate impact assessments of toilet rolls and traffic cones used in the (non)production of HS2.

This is why nothing gets done in Britain, and this is why China can build a thousand miles of high speed rail in the time it takes us to agree the wind resistance specifications of the bicycle shed. And that's before the lawyers get stuck into planning challenges. But even the suggestion of deregulation has "civil society organisations" and green NGOs going into overdrive (Another hive of useless people doing useless jobs).

Essentially nothing is going to change until we take on the blob. That won’t be Labour because Labour pretty much is the blob, and most of its new intake will be activist children marinated in climate dogma. Moreover, taking on the blob is no small feat. It is deeply entrenched in our constitution. Most of the malign organisations holding us back are directly funded by government. We’re going to have to take a wrecking ball to “civil society”.

The kind of deregulation necessary to get Britain building is likely to face a wave of activist opposition. Much of what existed prior to Brexit was to comply with EU law, but now it remains in order to comply with international obligations and non-regression clauses in the TCA. It may even be that we need to walk away from it.

Essentially, Brexit was the easy bit, but restoring a functioning state in Britain against implacable opposition and vested interests will prove far more difficult. Moreover, it’s not going to happen soon because nobody seems to understand the scale of the task.

As to repairing the social fabric of Britain, Dame Sara Khan DBE, Independent Adviser to the UK Government for Social Cohesion and Resilience, recommends the creation of an independent Office for Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience (OSCDR). She would, wouldn’t she?

We'd be a lot further along if we just admitted who and what the problem is. The problem with "social cohesion" is enclaves of garbage immigration; usually third worlders who cannot and will not integrate. Successive governments have run Britain as an economic zone rather than a homeland, using immigration as a quick fix to structural economic problems, ignoring the long term problems we introduced with mass immigration, and disregarding any notion of consent.

Again we’re going to have to be uncompromising. Either we clear them out because they shouldn't be here, or we take the necessary measures to force integration, not least banning the burka and shuttering backstreet mosques. The message should be clear: leave your third world baggage in the third world and join the twenty first century. As to "Democratic Resilience", this is specifically to do with electoral corruption regarding the Muslim bloc vote. Most of the problem goes away if postal voting is restricted to serving military personnel. The last thing we need is another useless quango stuffed with academic grifters.

As such, if any party is serious about taking on the blob, then it is essentially declaring war on the politico-media establishment, and will be regarded by them as “far right”. This is why the culture wars will keep raging.

There’s a reason leftist parties are keen on censorship. They know they’ve lost the argument. Moreover, they know what we know. There are no moderate solutions to the mess we’re in. We will have to wage a total war on the entire stack of international laws and treaties. We’re going to have to dump the ECHR, the Paris Agreement, the TCA and the Northern Ireland Protocol, scrap Net Zero, shutter half the universities, scrap most of our foreign aid, ban LGBT propaganda, close the borders, and deport at least a million people. As a starter for ten.

Back in the days of Brexit, I argued against a “no deal” Brexit, and I stand by that. It was not the right approach for the time, but the extremism of the establishment since, in pushing Net Zero and further liberalising immigration, has changed the game. Our response needs to be equally extreme. What use is a trade deal if the cost of energy is so high we can’t afford to make anything? What use are ECHR rights when the political class is replacing us and we’re to even allowed to debate it?

Brexit has been something of a let down for many, myself included. But I think it will be viewed by future historians as a marker point when the tide of history turned. Nationally, globally, the political order of the post-war world is collapsing, along with globalisation and global technocracy. Net Zero was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The great unravelling has begun.

As you’re probably aware I am not optimistic for the interim. The radical right in Britain is lazy, incompetent and disorganised, and led by opportunists who are more concerned with nurturing their media careers. The actual “far right” is virtually non-existent. I do not see a white knight riding to the rescue, and I don’t see a turning point. But there is a sense of inevitability to all this, just as there was with leaving the EU. It’s a matter of when, not if. The tide is going out on liberalism and external political events are more likely to influence policy than domestic politics.

The next election solves nothing and the result will tell us nothing, other than the establishment is moribund, and cannot deliver for Britain. The new administration, whoever that is, will flounder within weeks. Politics is only going to become more divided and fractious, and our contempt for them will only grow stronger. Whether they know it or not, their order is living on borrowed time, and won’t survive what’s coming.