Why right wing parties will never get serious
I want to put something on the record. There’s a lot of people on X who say the reason I’m so scathing about Restore Britain is because they turned down an offer from me to write policy, and it’s all just sour grapes. They’re saying a number of malicious things about me because I don’t lavish praise on the new messiah.
For the record, I have not approached Restore Britain about writing policy for them. I wouldn’t waste my time producing policy for a party that doesn’t have the first idea how to use it (and wouldn’t bother to learn it). I’ve just made the case that they could and should be further along than they are with the resources and time they’ve had, and my own sketch over at manifestoproject.org is an example of what can be done in a short space of time on a limited budget. I don’t see that they have any excuse for not having developed an intellectual foundation.
My second point is that they really should do this kind of work just to game the consequences of populist tropes, otherwise you can end up digging a hole for yourself. They run the risk of promising policy they simply cannot implement which contributes to the persistent feeling of betrayal. Moreover, as we keep seeing from Reform, they contradict each other an almost daily basis precisely because they don’t have a policy framework or a definition.
When Rupert Lowe said he was launching a party, I was initially quite enthusiastic. Lowe’s launch video set out the base marker for what the party was about and it was in the right ballpark. Following that, I expected Lowe would shift up a gear rather than firing off pub bore rants on X all day. Only he’s got worse by the day and even his own employees think he’s ridiculous. Consequently, the party has has already beached itself on the rocks of populism.
The problem with a party that starts off with witless unresearched pub rants is that it can never evolve any further because its own supporters won't let it. It's permanently locked into all of its dumbest tropes (“bonfire of quangos” etc), and any attempt at intelligent interrogation of the issues will be treated as a betrayal by the online right. The right will tightly police its own stupidity and purity spiral into irrelevance.
That is not to say that a retard-right platform won’t be massively popular, but unless it can evolve there’s an inherent electoral ceiling to this kind of populism. To my great surprise Reform eventually learned this, but now the entire online right has turned on them. Still, though, even Reform can only go so far and it’s now obliged to attempt a number of highly questionable policies with zero chance of succeeding. As such, they’re not getting re-elected even if they do win in 2029.
The other problem is X. Lowbrow shitposting is fun, popular and profitable. Thinking is not. Thinking takes time and patience, and if you suggest to the online right that you might want to a apply a bit of strategic nous to their activities, they will throw their toys out of the pram. This is precisely what we saw with Brexit when it was suggested that some sort of plan would be a good idea. They’re not just unwilling to do the work, they are actively hostile to any kind of thinking.
As much as anything, I don’t see any room for intelligent evolution for Restore because Lowe and Farage are remarkably similar people. Restore policy is as much a surprise to his own staffers as it is everyone else. Policy is whatever Rupert Lowe tweets - and he’s tweeting generic Thatcherite Tory right tropes. Consequently, his policy writers have to backfill detail on what wasn’t properly thought through to begin with. Their job is now to put lipstick on pigs.
Given how Rupert Lowe is a boilerplate economic libertarian Tory and trad-authoritarian on everything else, his views on the NHS are likely to be 90% predictable which will result in wildly unpopular slash-and-burn policy that’s an electoral liability.
The thing about libertarianism is that it’s a fantastic off-the-shelf framework to avoid any thinking at all. You can abolish things on ideological grounds and leave everything to some nebulous notion of market forces. It’s also infused with a streak of nihilism where everything is too broken to fix, necessitating a scorch earth approach - rather than climbing in and understanding what is going wrong and where. Fundamentally, the right is intellectually bone ide.
As such, Lowe’s staffers can hurriedly knock out a stream of policy papers padded out with whatever filler they can find, but the chances of them developing a serious joined-up policy prospectus are somewhere close to zero. Lowe, much like Farage, will junk it on a whim if the situation calls for it. Consequently, it’s now impossible to escape the conclusion that we aren’t voting our way out of this mess. Maybe the right can win in 2029 or beyond, but the pathological amateurism is incurable.