One old Cameronite howler was that economic questions could be separated from cultural ones. This was one of the project’s many ‘realist’ conceits. If the British Right could be persuaded to adjourn these issues, then it would be left alone to manage the Brownite welfare state a little better.
This was the implicit bargain, and it has been a total failure. A series of ideological concessions on climate change, on diversity and inclusion, and on the devolution of power from the elected parliament, has left Britain with a raft of legislation that keeps our economy stagnant and backward.
During the 2010s this legislation, like Theresa May’s salary audits, could be sustained as an extra cost of doing business. It was another annoyance to be handled by the legal department – if you could afford one. This was the stuff of water cooler jibes. But by 2023 the laughter has died down. This legislation has started to cannibalize its host, and will ensure that the living standards of the 2010s never return. The symbol of HS2, whatever its virtues, is a potent one. Watch it inch northwards in agony, harried on every side by litigation from the pettiest of petty tyrant local authorities.
The Conservative Party’s self-styled pragmatic wing cannot ignore this any longer. Pleas for backbenchers to forego the “culture war” for quiet economic management now only ring hollow. The former keeps making the latter next to impossible.
Liz Truss’s timely intervention late last week makes her the first major British politician to recognise how inextricable these two things are. Truss led with the lowest-hanging economic fruit – shale – which is not being exploited for reasons that will one day seem like obscurantism on par with the old Victorian fear of “railway madness”. Truss also took aim at the growth of ESG regulation, which steadily chips away at firms too small to afford the costs of compliance.
However, Truss’s breach with these dogmas is still not as total as one might hope. There was no criticism of the principle of Net Zero in her speech. Absent also was any reference to mass immigration. Her failure in this area as prime minister was perhaps a fatal one. In the heady days of the mini-budget, Truss lost critical support from Suella Braverman and her circle over plans to accelerate migration from outside the EU – a policy that does not benefit the exchequer, and is only pursued out of hoary old ‘Brotherhood of Man’ romanticism. If migration really were about economic pragmatism, then what we would have is a guest worker scheme, rigorously enforced, not a pathway to citizenship. In 2023, those who want even the feeblest of economic liberalisms put themselves on a collision course with a national and global establishment. They cannot afford to alienate voters in places like Kent, Essex, and Lincolnshire – the natural social base of such a program – by repeating the tired migration cliches of the 2010s.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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Rather like Jean-Luc Picard, he had to be almost completely assimilated by the Borg in order to break it…
Things have to get a whole lot worse before they start getting better.
Buckle up, folks, it’s gonna get rough.
Mass immigration is and has always been about destroying the homogeneity and ‘philia’ of nations. It is sold as being about openness and kindness, but really it is rooted in hatred. I could weep for what has been lost forever to future generations.
It’s not hard to see why Truss was swiftly removed.
It is down to conservatives everywhere to not only swiftly remove but to electorally decimate this fake Conservative Party in 2024 if conservatism is to survive.
Give the left a finger, and it soon wants your whole hand.
The Cultural issues were and now have visibly become the feared slippery slope, as depicted in an image I recently shared here: it started with the on the face of it to most people reasonable demand for non-discrimination of homosexuals by allowing their civil marriage, and went via trying to force the baker to bake a cake for it, to canceling people for stating what a woman really is, was and always will be, for stating the truth that trans people are primarily mentally ill and should be kept away from children instead of being allowed to enter womens bathrooms or sports competitions, to suing people for refusing to participate in all these lies via their pronoun craze.
The cowardish embrace of Net Zero and other pseudo-green issues solely for globalist herd membership and domestic electoral reasons, to prevent the Green party from gaining traction in the UK (which would actually have hurt Labour and helped the Tories) and to woo younger (gullible) voters instead of vigorously exposing them as a con, hoax and racket and fighting against them, is in the process of failing spectacularly for the party, not to speak of the country, homeowners, drivers and working people (civil servants by definition excluded from that group and term).
Your correct observation, that the parasites are now starting to kill their hosts, and the sadly successful coup against the only half-heartedly fighting back Truss shows, that it is probably too late now, and that we, like all Western countries, are therefore on our way towards the culminating catastrophe and bankruptcy (imo most likely via hyperinflation) instead.
The only question is how long the ‘gradually’ can be drawn out before the ‘suddenly’ hits.
And then, the big question, challenge and ray of hope is the rebuild along libertarian principles. Our role now is to sow those seeds ever more, as Ron Paul remarks in his latest. The ground is becoming more and more fertile for them.
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/april/17/will-the-end-of-the-petrodollar-end-the-us-empire/
Reality will only break out when the population is sitting in the dark, no Internet, hungry because there is little food and no jobs.
Truss got a lot right.
She wobbled when she fired her Chancellor and could have been stronger on ending ECHR and Euro interference.
The globalist mafia decided she couldn’t stay because she wanted to get fracking, push Brexit and I also think the possibility of moving the Embassy to Jerusalem angered them.
In Sunak, Hunt and Partners we now have a full blown globalist cabal. Even thenso called Brexiteers like Heaton Harris have been bought off, probably with a knighthood. Braverwoman is good but they keep undermining her.
“unless we win the culture war, the UK is doomed to economic stagnation.”
Let me just correct the headline synopsis:
“unless we win the culture war the UK is doomed.”
We’re already doomed: it’s far, far too late to change course, given that all our institutions belong to Lucifer and the sheep show little sign of rejecting tyranny. .
I agree as I am sure you will realise from my posting history. I used the word ‘culture’ in a rather all-encompassing manner.
There is no cultural hegemony there is a decline of spirit and morale, belief and purpose. You don’t hear any of these clowns talking about these vitally important things and that is the point.You can’t even argue for their competency from a management perspective. That we are ruled by the least amongst us is the necessary logical final outcome. Ours was a society based upon contract and credit. Interesting the total subversion of the notion of credit by the ‘zero trust’ architecture that will be built into the coming system. You cannot defeat this evil without a return to the realm of the spirit.
Meanwhile, the so-out-of-touch bean counter in No.10 thinks the solution to all our problems is to lecture us about our attitude to maths and make all 16-18 yr olds study maths for an extra two years.
This is the man who authorised the printing of £billions in order to shut down the economy for 18 months, and is now attempting to kill the inflation genie he let out of the bottle.
I seriously think he’s gas lighting us.
Conservatism can only prosper if the Conservative Party is utterly destroyed in 2024. It is to that end that we should apply all our energies. They abandoned conservatism in 1992 and in every election campaign since then it has indulged in deceits to its loyal supporters. Let this wretched party go the same way as the mighty Liberal Party that abandoned (classical) Liberalism and headed off down the road of socialism.