The British right has lost its marbles
I was almost tempted to write a lengthy analysis of Kemi Badenoch’s Policy Exchange press conference yesterday but it wasn’t anything new on anything she was saying last June. She waffled a bit about separatism, telling us what we already know, to then call for a plan. She told us she has assembled a policy commission to come up with a policy repose, but stopped far short of giving us any real clue what might be in it.
I'm sure her policy commission will turn up some interesting proposals, but technocratic assimilation measures are unlikely to succeed when you're dealing with Islamic settler colonists who don't want to assimilate and don't like or respect British values or British culture. There is no undoing four decades of policy neglect. Badenoch is in cloud cuckoo land. If her policy does not include remigration measures of some kind then she just hasn't understood the scale of the problem.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one who isn’t all that interested in anything Badenoch has to say. Her speech attracted on 614 likes on X which is pretty pathetic for the leader of HM opposition. One of my long form “rants” will usually do twice that. The lady’s talking, but nobody’s listening. The debate is happening without her.
That is not to say anyone else on the right is saying anything particularly interesting either. Anything Farage might have to say has a half-life of about three days, while Rupert Lowe appears to have handed his X account over to a raccoon on methamphetamines.
The danger here is that the right, having ensconced itself into an echo-chamber on X, is losing touch. None of them are saying anything especially relevant to people’s lives right now. I did note Hannah Spencer’s victory speech from Gorton and Denton where she spoke about how work no longer pays and made reference to the cost of living, while the right is having arcane debates about who is really British, legalising pepper spray, and some nebulous notion of assimilation.
This contrast came into stark focus for me today when I saw my car insurance renewal bill and the spiking price of gas. I also note that a tub or Lurpak is up to £5. We are heading up shit creek and nobody seems to have noticed that we don’t have a paddle. If the right keeps up this bickering and navel-gazing, I would not be the least bit surprised if the wider public loses interest.
Though I don’t deny that immigration is still a hot topic, I simply do not buy the idea that it has become an all-consuming issue for the whole of the country. When it comes down to it, people still care about hospital waiting lists, the state of the roads, and price of butter. Those who have to work a real job (as opposed to pontificating about politics on X) simply don’t have the time or the energy to form an opinion on what’s going on in Iran - but they are worried about what it will do to the price of petrol.
On the subject of Iran, I find it especially comedic that the right is noisily posturing against any kind of intervention when Britain is not presently in a position even to intervene in a fishing dispute of the coast of Great Yarmouth.
This could be what kills any chance of victory in 2029. Ideologues lack the ability to make their policies useful to people who don’t share their obsessions, and their obsessions are becoming increasingly detached from reality.