UK politics: grim prospects

Three posts in one today. Probably the most off-putting thing about the Tory party is the absolute unquestioning devotion to sustaining the Ukraine war. It's most prevalent in a number of midwit Tory backbenchers whose depth of understanding is wafer thin. They think this all started in 2022, and there is no moral or political complexity to it. Nobody is looking at the longer term geo-strategic national interest. As Britain sleepwalks into a food and energy crisis, nobody is looking for the off ramp.

For Europe, there is a collective interest at stake here. We have Turkey (a NATO member) seeking to replace Iran as the powerbroker in the Islamic world, an unresolvable predicament in Iran, and heightened tensions with China. Europe needs Russia as a third party intermediary, but all we're doing right now by giving Ukraine deep strike capabilities, is feeding the war of attrition that is cannibalising European energy and food infrastructure while driving Russia into the arms of China.

None of this factors into the thinking of the centre-right who continue to align with the EU neighbourhood policy of bringing Ukraine into the Western fold, even though EU members will veto membership and NATO membership is a long way off. Neither is likely to happen unless either or both organisations ignore their own accession rules, in which case serious questions have to be asked about their viability and credibility.

Instead of looking for a viable off ramp, the Westminster consensus is that there are no consequences for facilitating the escalation of the conflict, thereby dragging Britain into a hybrid war without even passing comment on it, let alone holding a debate about it.

The thinking in the Tory party appears to be no more sophisticated than “Ukraine good, Putin bad”. While you can reduce it to such simplistic terms, there is still the matter Britain's own interests, none of which are served by setting us up for a new cold war than demands defence spending we can ill afford. We can act to safeguard the territorial sovereignty of the Baltics, while ensuring Ukraine has the means to defend its own lines, but turning this war into a de facto proxy war is insanity - especially over a scrap of ethnic-Russian wasteland.

Regardless of your view of this conflict, it ought to be a matter of concern that HM opposition is not asking even basic questions about government policy towards Ukraine, particularly as Burnham struts around LARPing statesman while the British economy circles the drain, and Labour continues to dismantle our own armed forces.

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Reform's housing muddle

Housing policy, probably more than any other policy area, gives you an insight into the economic philosophy of any party. You would expect to see a commitment to massively expand social housing from the Labour Party and parties like the Lib Dems and SDP. To then see a similar proposition from Reform, while everything else in their threadbare policy stack points to low tax, small government conservatism (the Kruger tendency), suggests that the party has no coherent philosphy. What you're looking at is a purebred populist party.

There's a lot wrong with Reform's housing policy, not least the lack of vision. The last thing I want to see is yet more sprawling newbuild housing estates, and especially not built to some disjointed notion of affordability. That's pretty much a continuation of the last twenty years or more, which sees more land gobbled up by identikit shoeboxes without local amenities - which still aren't affordable - and you wouldn't want to live in them even if you could afford one. And that's leaving aside the fact that Reform's numbers don't stack up at all.

An actual conservative party would focus more on removing the the barriers to housebuilding and removing market distortions. Instead they're introducing more. Social housing in itself is a market distortion. For me, the entire concept is obnoxious - and that's leaving aside the fact that the cost of bricks and materials is only going to go up.

Moreover, Reform is setting eye-catching arbitrary targets, the same as any other party, when all other parties have failed for a myriad of complex reasons. It makes no sense to set yourself up for failure, especially when nobody serious believes you can do what you say you will.

As such, it is reasonable to deduce that there is no serious thinking going on inside Reform, there isn't a coherent economic philosophy, and like the the parties, are punting half-baked ideas that simply aren't credible. As such, Reform loses any right to claim they are a radical alternative. It's more of the same scattergun policymaking without a strategy - and the results would be much the same.

A poll yesterday has Reform backsliding by two points, putting the Tories only one point behind them. They are all over the place this week, with announcements, press conferences and “policies”, and no one seems to be listening to them. They are not making waves. While it seems to have sunk in that a political party probably ought to have policies, the point of policies is not to have a stock of chum to throw in the water. It is to provide purpose, consistency and direction to all party activities.

As a piece from the Great British Think Tank puts is, "The problem isn’t simply that government taxes too much, spends too much, regulates too much or gets individual decisions wrong. It is that government increasingly seems incapable of seeing the economy as a system. Policies are designed vertically, in silos. One department solves its problem, another department solves another, the Treasury finds some revenue and another minister announces an intervention. Each can be defended independently. Then they all collide horizontally in the real economy, and nobody appears responsible for the collision".

This entirely describes the intellectual muddle Reform is in. There is no concept of joined-up policy or effects-based policy strategy. everything is done in silos for immediate electioneering purposes. Nothing they announce conforms to any kind of plan and half of what they announce will be walked back when nobody is looking. Reform announced yesterday that people forced to wait over 30 minutes on the phone to HMRC will receive £30 in tax credit at the end of the tax year. Nobody told Jenrick about the Cobra Effect. But more importantly, how does this square with Kruger's ambition to gut the civil service?

While Reform devotees assure us that Reform is professionalising and that it has very clever people working on policy, it actually looks like nothing has changed and, in some respects, the party is regressing. The idea that Reform would be any less shambolic than “the establishment” is laughable.

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Clouston departs

Elsewhere in politics, many on X are reeling from the sudden resignation of William Clouston, leader of the SDP. A man of great integrity and wisdom. One of the reasons I never joined the SDP, apart from having a couple of pretty major philosophical disagreements with the party, is that there is only so much bandwidth for alternative parties, and the media is only interested in them if they're threatening or a source of drama. The SDP is neither. Its only option was/is to build slowly and locally, according to a long term plan - and even then, the prospects are limited.

For the most part, the political landscape is dominated by what is essentially a civil war on the right as it fragments between three equally dysfunctional parties. That is the main source of drama and entertainment for media and social media punditry - among people who are more interested in gossip than policy and outcomes.

On that basis, I don't blame Clouston for bowing out. A man can't be expected to keep giving of himself in the knowledge that his efforts are increasingly futile. For as long as the Slop Right are hogging all of the political bandwidth, and while there is no market demand for anything serious, you are well advised to find something more profitable to do with your time. There's not much point in building an alternative when people don't want an alternative. For the most part, they are entirely satisfied with slop. They do not expect or demand better, and lavishly reward those who produce it.