Ask an insider from any one of the major political parties what kind of person his or her ideal candidate in 2024 would be, and you will probably get some version of the following:
He or she should be a stout local hero with experience outside of Westminster – preferably in regional government or in regional enterprise. He or she should have an everyman’s ambivalence on social issues, with views on economics that are a pleasing muddle – though he or she should be fiercely devoted to things like the NHS. His or her entry into Westminster should be done gingerly; he or she should, in some way, stand above the din of party, and should not come across as a natural politico. Above all, these people should be ciphers for a community, and should take up office less to legislate than to bring local grievances to the seat of Government – petitioner style.
It’s difficult to exaggerate how seriously Britain’s governing class takes this archetype, this local everyman done good. Through the 2010s, the ready solution to populism and, before that, ‘Trust in Politics’ was to load Parliament up with these community heroes. The age of svelte parachute candidates like David Cameron would end, and would give way to a new politics of local populism; indeed, this project has had no greater sponsor than Cameron himself. Even dissident figures like Dominic Cummings can’t resist the siren call of the brassy Midlands matron. He has called for one to head up the Labour Party, or even his new Startup Party.
The arrival of these figures en masse was designed, not so much to overturn the Westminster consensus, but to spread it out across a wider area. It was always a meagre concession. It did not offer any real change of course, only representation in the abstract. It pulled up new seats at the same table.
And nor have these community worthies done much, after all, to shore up the status quo. People are deeply unhappy with the existing order of things, and they do not care whether its local enforcer went to school with them or not. Still, the need to broaden the base of Britain’s governing class in this way is something that’s now taken for granted in Westminster.
George Galloway, the new MP for Rochdale, and Lee Anderson, the member for Ashfield, both fit this bill in all the ways that matter. Galloway and his Worker’s Party of Great Britain really does embody the ‘fiscally Left, socially Right’ formula that – as we are so often told by pollsters, think tanks and party operatives – would sweep the country if given the chance. Galloway is a royalist (he opted for the full-fat Parliamentary oath), and he revels in multiculturalism: his Britain will forever be the Britain of steel drums, anti-Apartheid sit-ins and the Greater London Council. His only seriously heterodox opinions in 2024 are about Israel-Palestine; in other words foreign policy – that most rarefied and abstract domain of politics. Gallowayism, further, is the bona fide politics of community engagement that Westminster keeps telling us it likes so much. Although Galloway’s career in public life has been an itinerant one, it has always been couched in particular communities and their interests; he has indeed courted controversy for being a little too willing to play to the local crowd.
Lee Anderson, too, trades in a bumptious localism. Anderson sees himself not so much as a politician who happens to believe in the death penalty and action on small boats, but as the avatar of a place: the Red Wall, or simply, Not London. The title of his Friday night GB News show – The Real World – speaks to this idea; for Anderson, politics is less about taking over Westminster than administering a brute lesson in the people and places that it’s forgotten about.
Galloway and Anderson are, in other words, exactly what Westminster has been claiming to want and need for the past decade and a half. And yet both have now been made political outlaws for patently obscure reasons. George Galloway has been marked as an enemy of democracy for having strong views on a far off war to which Britain is not a co-belligerent. Lee Anderson warns of Islamism and extremism, sure. But this is simply the boilerplate of David Cameron and Angela Merkel circa 2011 – only this time directed at the Mayor of London, rather than at schoolchildren.
These are strange grounds for proscription. As Barack Obama once said of Ukraine, neither of these things are “core interests”. But getting more people like Galloway and Anderson into politics apparently was. That the two find themselves picked off for trifles, then, is surely telling. We can only take it as a contortion, or a spasm.
What it reveals is a British governing class that can no longer think clearly about which parts of the status quo it values, what it wishes to defend and what it’s willing to compromise on. There is, increasingly, no vision, no appeals, no attempt, even, to win the public for the current social order through things like devolution, the Big Society or Levelling Up – only a frantic spackling to keep the exact conditions of, say, 2010 in place, forever.
And so, expect the contortions to become stranger still. Here is one: in 2024, your typical Labour moderate or Conservative of One Nation believes that immigration is beyond criticism, but that the political rights of those migrants can be revoked on a whim. Here is another: 14 years after he announced the death of the professional politician, David Cameron is in the parliamentary Conservative Party, and Lee Anderson is not.
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The ruling class hates Britain that’s always going to be a problem. Don’t believe me? If you loved yr country you wouldn’t destroy yr power grid, open yr borders and then join a proxy war against a white Christian country with the largest gas reserves in Europe. Judge ppl by their actions. Their response to lee Anderson is to waste 1 million on some dreadful Muslim statue.
Yes Climate Policies and Open Borders are two things in particular that are hard to explain from any perspective that involves common sense or rational thought or indeed concern for the welfare of a population that at one time gained prosperity from cheap abundant energy and had National Identity. —-The madness can only be explained from the perspective of outside interests. Those interests emanate from the UN and its desire to govern the whole world. What better way to do that then by destroying National Identities with mass immigration so that we all just feel like citizens of the world. —-And what better way to control that world and the people in it by controlling their access to the most important commodity of all —ENERGY
Has this statue been put up yet? Because I’d love to see the reaction if it got climbed all over, draped in Union Jacks/St George flags and generally desecrated by patriots, just to see both the reaction of the local community and politicians plus the response of the police.
“An eye for an eye” dictates that we must uphold equality at all costs…
The Left’s – and the “intellectual” classes (all Left now) hatred of their mother country is the real problem. Orwell noted this eight years back. Read “The Lion and the Unicorn”
Why no memorial to the Hindus and Sikhs who served in the Empire and Commonwealth forces in the world wars?
The design of the Cenotaph intentionally excluded all religious symbolism. Though the empty tomb is a prominent feature of the Christian faith.
In Rochester Cathedral there is a large memorial to local men who served in Queen Victoria’s colonial campaigns in India and South East Asia. Also included are names of men who must have been Muslims, Sikhs or Hindus who were either sepoys or served in a non-combatant role.
Oh, they’ll start campaigning for them before long. And what about the brave Jews who fought back via the Allied Forces ….. I guess they don’t count either?
I asked Lee Anderson by email if ” he still thinks the vaccines are safe and effective”
He didn’t answer yes or no(no surprise there then) but went on to tell me about his family and himself that have all had their up to date shots with apparently no problems!
So he still supports them!
No one is perfect, not even Lee, but I do still rate him for the rest of his politics
If Lee Anderson is still supporting these “vaccines” then his standing is hugely diminished. He owes it to himself and the electorate at large to read the evidence, that he has failed to do so is frankly appalling. I will have to look upon Lee Anderson as a fraud from now on.
Yes, must admit I was a disappointed, he didn’t say directly that he supported them but just described the shots given to him and his family, its a individual choice I suppose but still, he normally sees common sense and this ,as I say, was disappointing!
I seriously think Lee means well! Could he end up becoming a changeling?
Like, John Campbell, who had the jabbys
But eventually realised?
Maybe he will end up being an asset!
We certainly need that kind of turncoat!
Don’t the “governing class” have largely the same ideas they’ve always had, everywhere? That is, to keep governing, by whatever means they can get away with. What’s changed as far as I can see is the more global nature of of this ambition – they see their future as part of a global rather than a national establishment – less autonomy but more security. The other significant thing that has changed is that with developments in technology and the involvement of the state in everything it is easier than ever to control people.
Nothing to see in Rochdale?
The telling part of this by-election result is the second place candidate. A businessman but with no prior political history. He wasn’t even afforded odds by the bookmakers.
Essentially, the result was a vote for ‘none of the above’. There being no box on the ballot paper for such a choice, people have seen these two men as a substitute.
It’s not particularly clear what the electorate want. The only notably socially conservative are the Mormons. Perhaps they should run candidates, though Jesus of Nazareth declared that His kingdom was not of this world.
Mr Galloway has explained that he took the oath in the Commons otherwise he would not have been allowed to take his seat.
A strange reason for being proscribed in the Downing Street sermon? It might be conjectured, purely hypothetically about no living person, that a politician who was obviously radical was less desirable than one who was covertly so; all Saville Row business suit on the outside while wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath.
I think the best context in which to understanding these tendencies is the rise of what is called the PCM – the professional managerial class. I switched off from British politics in about the mid 1990s. They all started speaking this queer management speak which I just couldn’t understand. And then Blair and Dubbya got together and Dubbya was wont to speak in four word sentences with pregnant pauses in between and then Blair started copying him and Obama carried on with it. The whole thing is utterly obscene. Sunak with his fake working class accent,although even the obtuse can see how patronising and fake he is.The delivery alone shows the contempt they have for us.
it is a good thing in as far as it goes. But given the stranglehold of the octopus it will be very difficult for any national government to bring about redemptive change such is our reliance on global supply chains. To build an efficitent pencil factory from scratch would take about five years. There is no bring it all back home again and even if we did we would still rely massively on imports of raw materials. This system has so many vulnerabilities that it cannot last much longer. There are grim truths to be faced. A population the size of ours in such a small country will suffer severe losses. You could be talking about a loss of 40 million in three years just looking at current trajectory and that is without even considering acceleration ot catclysic events.
In just three months time people like these will be the norm. You will get all sorts of chancers rising to the fore. If you have the will and the acumen you will best them easily. And the state of mind. There is only one state of mind that can win in this darkness and you will be asked to find it,
A time comes when a man’s word and voice is his bond.I am talking about a time where the notion of sincerity will mean a great deal. That is ehat the young have been preparing for. That is why they seem so strange to you.
Galloway is ancient in years and yet I bet he appeals to the young and the spiritually alive more than any other politician. That’s because the young yearn for a fuiture and Galloway is their best option. I think he will rise to the occasion given the constellation of world events. Impossible to do otherwise. I generally hate politicians but I do take my hat off to this man and the movement that he will create.
The Establishment is desperate and determined to retain its grip on power. And it will do whatever it takes to achieve it.
Galloway, Anderson – and even more importantly, the banished Bridgen – threaten it.
That’s all.