The Great Unravelling

I’ve been feeling strangely liberated in the last couple of weeks. I have reached certain conclusions about the political parties of the right, to the extent that I have no real interest in, or preference for, the outcome of the next election.

The smartest ones among you already know that we aren't voting our way out of this. To prevent a collapse on several fronts would have required intelligent policy with a lead time of ten years, and we're not even started yet. The collapse of the National Grid is now a matter of when rather than if, as is a national debt crisis, and the unravelling of the social fabric in dangerous and unpredictable ways - not least when the country can no longer sustain its welfare burden.

As such, the party political shenanigans are little more than soap opera. I need some persuading that elections matter at all now. Nobody is coming to save us - and even the ones who want to fix things lack the skill and political capital. Sleazy populists aren't going to fix it.

One way or another, we are sleepwalking into a major constitutional crisis, without sufficient social and cultural cohesion to repair it or agree on a successor. This is failed state territory. We are living in a pre-revolutionary era, and most of us will now live to see a political collapse and a subsequent collapse of living standards - exacerbated by a political/academic/media class that has no idea what is happening - or why.

This is what sees a further slide towards authoritarianism and anarcho-tyranny. Change through voting becomes ever less plausible, and our political disputes will play out on the streets. There is little, if anything, stopping it from becoming a low grade civil war, and even less chance of the stater being able to contain it - especially with such demoralised policy and armed forces who are just as likely to switch sides.

My money is on there being one or two election cycles remaining. I don't think the regime is going to roll over and allow a populist movement to win, and if there's a hung parliament, we will see a blocking alliance to preserve regime power. Democracy as we know it is probably already dead - and even if a party like Reform somehow wins, it will be undone by its own incompetence and corruption, and will probably be brought down by a concerted effort from within the government apparatus.

What makes this dangerous is that the regime will probably take us to the brink of war with Russia as a distraction. Not for nothing are they toying with the idea of conscription and calling up retired reserves. As such, one of the last remaining uses of the vote is to ensure the likes of Tom Tugendhat and other warmongers are kept out of office. In the meantime, it is advisable to tell any loved ones you may have who are serving in the armed forces to quit.

Meanwhile, it is for the rest of us to look at means of becoming ungovernable, even if that means withholding council tax payments/water bills, and protesting wherever possible. We're going to have to be much more creative and develop means by which ordinary people are empowered to take risks. We must show the regime that democracy can and does manifest by means other than voting. There is only one certainty now, and it's that a return to stability and prosperity is not happening any time soon, and probably not even in my lifetime. The die is cast. It’s time to prepare accordingly.

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The serious political thinking on the right should be around street protests and the interface layer with a political party - working on the presumption that a successor movement will be needed to replace Reform sooner or later - and it will need to be a magnitude hostile. I say this because the Reform experiment WILL fail. That much is now a forgone conclusion.

There are three basic scenarios.

A first where Farage is knocked out of the game, leading to a messy succession process that results in a badly mauled party with an unlikeable leader, and/or the party is kept at bay by coordinated tactical voting, after which it loses momentum and is forced into a deal with the Tories - and may still lose.

But with politics being as volatile and unreadable as it is, with the landscape changing on a weekly basis, and two or three era defining incidents to come, Reform could scrape a majority to become an inexperienced, unpopular, sleazy and incompetent government comprised of chancers, novices and treacherous saboteurs (the Montgomerie tendency).

That government doesn't last long. It won’t be a government of all the talents. It will be a government of all the cronies the party picked up after the huge cash injection - just like we saw with Boris Johnson. It will be no more than eighteen months before a leadership crisis and a major political scandal, coupled with manoeuvres from inside the government apparatus. Like Starmer and Sunak, the subsequent leader will limp from one crisis to the next, with limited political capital and no real power. This leads to complete political paralysis by 2034 - and a complete collapse of voter confidence.

These are the conditions in which outliers can come out of the blue, either from the left or the right, probably rooted in a street movement - and it can win if it has a functional organisation behind it and a halfway serious plan to fix things. Less a government as a troubleshooting rescue squad. This is perhaps the last window for a political solution - if there is one at all.

You don't need to be Nostradamus to see this coming. Just look at the top of Reform and the culture around the leader. Populism without technical ability just makes for incompetence and corruption - especially if it isn't accountable to (or financed by) its own members. As such, for the serious thinkers on the right, the job is to game what Britain looks like in this eventuality, and put something together that can pick up the pieces. It can't be another slop party like Restore. The hard part will be finding serious people in a country that no longer produces them.

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The reason I’m quite certain that any party of the right will crash and burn is because I don’t see the sort of foresight that is necessary to properly get a grip on things. As I’ve outlined previously, Northern Ireland will be the thorn in the paw of any right wing government.

I think you have to live in Northern Ireland to fully grasp the political dynamics on the ground, but I still keep half an eye on it. If you have any greater insight then please chime in, but I certainly get the impression that local tensions are rising, and while it does follow the conventional divide, there's more to it that would it seem.

The reason I keep an eye on it is because all three parties on the right believe they're going to be able to casually rewrite the GFA rights framework on the fly in order to quit the ECHR. They are also set to make manifesto promises on housing and welfare that fly in the face of the Article 50 agreement and the Windsor Framework.

My gut feeling is that it is something we should leave well alone for the time being because if it again becomes centre stage then it will chew up the entire bandwidth of any right wing government.

We have yet to see any formal policy posture as regards Northern Ireland, but it is likely that there are influences in Reform that would walk away from the Article 50 agreement and the TCA, without proper regard for the economic and diplomatic consequences.

On that basis, whatever they think they might save by terminating housing and benefit entitlements they are going to lose in trade, while potentially uncorking a new wave of unrest and violence in the province - not forgetting that immigration tensions are also heating up.

Some will argue with some justification that any serious reform programme will eventually bump up against the TCA and any government will have to cut its cloth accordingly, but there's a very serious risk in all this that the absolutists will happily collapse the TCA, essentially resetting UK-EU relations to WTO terms - re-opening the entire Brexit debacle and resurrecting all the tedious and dismal politics that goes with it.

My question to them is... is this how you really want to spend your limited first term political capital, and if so, how do you fancy your chances of being re-elected? If the answer is no, then any party of the right needs to stop making certain claims or they're setting themselves up for a u-turn, unable to deliver on big promises. That has a cost.

Regular readers will know I recycle a version of this particular point at least once every three months or so, but that's because it is the Achilles heel of any future right wing agenda, and there is no hint of acknowledgment. There are still no answers to very serious questions and that brings their credibility into question. It really does beg the question... do they have the first idea what they're doing? I really don't think they do. That’s why it’s all so certain to unravel very rapidly.