I‘m currently on a speaking tour down under, banging the drum for free speech, so am watching my country go to rack and ruin from 10,000 miles away. I remember a palpable sense of a cloud being lifted when Gordon Brown left Downing Street in 2010, not least because, following the inconclusive election result, it looked as though Labour might cut a deal with the Lib Dems and cling on to power. I was particularly relieved when Michael Gove was appointed Education Secretary because it meant the free schools policy was part of the coalition agreement that David Cameron had thrashed out with Nick Clegg and I’d spent a year struggling to set up a school with a group of other parents on the assumption it would become easier after the election. Over the next four years, I co-founded four free schools and became the country’s leading advocate for the policy. I didn’t realise at the time that education reform would be one of the few – the very few – successful policies the Conservatives could point to after 14 years in Downing Street. Needless to say, Labour has pledged to take a sledgehammer to Gove’s reforms in spite of the evidence, both domestic and international, that they’ve boosted educational attainment. Expect England’s schools to become more like those of Wales, where Labour has been in charge since 2009. In the latest PISA assessments, Wales was shown to be the worst performing nation in the U.K., significantly below the OECD average.
That cloud has returned, obviously, although my fears about not seeing sunlight again until 2034 have receded. Yes, Labour has won a landslide, but it’s not quite Starmageddon. According to the exit poll, his landslide, predicted to be the largest since 1832 in one eve-of-election poll, is in fact smaller than Tony Blair’s in 1997, although not by much (170 v 179). More encouraging, if the exit poll is to be believed, is that Labour only managed a vote share of 36%, significantly lower than in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn (40%). By contrast, the Tories and Reform won a combined share of 43%. Sir Keir has won a landslide but not a mandate – his own majority is down by 16,000 – although I doubt he’ll be constrained by that.
The Left of the Labour Party will point to the fact that Starmer polled fewer votes than Corbyn – we don’t know that for sure yet, but it looks likely – and dispute that Labour only won this election by tacking to the centre, just as the Right of the Conservative Party will argue the Party didn’t lose by abandoning the centre ground (which is the prevailing orthodoxy among ‘One Nation’ Tories, believe it or not). And they’d both be right, in my view. In spite of Starmer’s victory, technocratic managerialism – or “stakeholder capitalism”, as Klaus Schwab calls it – hasn’t exactly triumphed in this election. The Uniparty – that is, the Conservative Party under Sunak and the Labour Party under Starmer – got a bloody nose in the sense that the two main parties received an even lower share of the vote – 62% – than they did in 2010 (66%). That’s a lower share than in 1983 at the height of the SDP‘s popularity (70%) and worse than in either of the 1974 elections. Indeed, lower than in 1923, when the two main parties won 68.7%. You have to go all the way back to 1918, when the Liberal Party hadn’t yet collapsed, to find Labour and the Conservatives collectively polling a lower vote share (59.2%).
The superficial take on the result is that the U.K. is bucking the anti-technocratic trend sweeping the rest of the globe, particularly France where we may be witnessing the death throes of the Fifth Republic. But look beyond Labour’s landslide and the real story of the last six weeks is the rise of Reform and the lack of enthusiasm for the two centrist parties. Indeed, if we had PR in the U.K., as they do in the EU, we might now be looking at a Right-of-centre coalition with a populist leader at the helm and a move away from the Uniparty’s position on immigration and Net Zero, as well as its uncritical embrace of sectarian identity politics. We may have to wait another five years before that happens, but it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Starmer’s premiership will breathe new life into this calcified ideology. Much more likely is that a succession of policy failures, leading to a financial crisis, civil unrest and rolling black-outs, will be the death knell of technocratic managerialism. In 2029, the British electoral may finally vote for real change.
John Gray was very good on the imminent collapse of technocracy in a piece for the New Statesman on June 19th:
The recent YouGov survey showing the long-dreaded “crossover”, with Reform 1% ahead of the Tories, was the moment technocracy hit the rocks. Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.
Populism is, among other things, the re-politicisation of issues the progressive consensus deems too important to be left to democratic choice. Immigration was one such issue, climate policy another. Both have stormed back into the political realm.
Gray’s conclusion struck me as particularly prescient:
In functioning democracies, technocracy rarely works for long. Relying on scraps of academic detritus, its practitioners struggle to keep up with events. Even when their theories are sound, they do not legitimate their policies. Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but science cannot tell you what to do about it. Conflicting values are at stake, some of them involving major losses. What entitles a caste of bureaucrats to make these tragic choices for the rest of us?
While the populist revolt is gathering momentum, Labour is going all in for technocratic management. Rachel Reeves proposes to give the Office for Budget Responsibility a greater role in approving fiscal policies. The recent record of the Bank of England does not inspire confidence in such bodies. In times as uncertain and clouded as ours, devolving the powers of government to rule-bound institutions is a fast route to ruin.
The challenge of the next five years, assuming this is a one-term government, will be to stop Starmer and his army of blobby bureaucrats vandalising the English Constitution – or, rather, continuing the process of transferring power away from Parliament and into the hands of judges, officials, quangocrats, regulators and international bodies that was begun by Tony Blair and which the Tories did nothing to reverse over the past 14 years. In the Daily Sceptic, J. Sorel has warned repeatedly about this constitutional vandalism (see his articles here) and elsewhere David Starkey has been raising the alarm. This will be a last ditch effort of the professional managerial class to resist the coming populist revolt – to neuter parliament so effectively that when the insurgents arrive in Downing Street in 2029 and start pulling the levers to stop mass immigration and abandon the ruinous carbon emission targets nothing will happen. Number 10 will belong to the ‘dignified’ part of the constitution, along with the House of Commons and the House of Lords, assuming it hasn’t been replaced by a Senate of the Nations and Regions, God help us. Although, as Matt Ridley pointed out recently in the Spectator, the Blob is already in charge in key policy areas.
Preserving the English Constitution won‘t be the only challenge. Trying to keep the Conservative Parliamentary Party united over the past 14 years has been like herding cats – one reason we’ve had five Prime Ministers in that period. What hope, then, of uniting two Right-of-centre parties? Already, a schism has opened up between the different factions on the Right of the Conservative Party about whether to admit Farage, with Suella Braverman arguing for and Kemi Badenoch against. I’m fairly confident the next leader of the Tory Party will be a Right-winger, not least because the Left’s strongest candidate, Penny Mordaunt, lost her seat in the early hours of this morning. But if it’s Kemi, she’s going to have to patch things up with Farage or risk facing a repeat of what happened on Thursday at the next election.
The other story of the night, of course, is the emergence of the Muslim Vote, with pro-Palestinian candidates having taken several Labour scalps at the time of writing. If the Right can unite and the Muslim Vote turns into a fully-fledged political force, that could lead to a reversal of Starmer’s fortunes in 2029. Just when you were breathing a sigh of relief about the demise of the SNP, another ethno-nationalist party has sprung up – only in this case, the nation state its supporters owe their allegiance to is Gaza rather than Scotland. That’s bad news for the country, but could be good for the Right. If Starmer criminalises Islamophobia, allows Sharia courts to flourish and changes the law to permit Muslim prayer in schools in an attempt to stop Labour haemorrhaging support to the Muslim Party, that would open up a clear dividing line between the Nat Cons and the radical progressive-Islamist alliance. Queers for Palestine versus Pensioners For Britain. I think the Faragists wold win that contest.
So not a good night for conservatives like me, but I’m not convinced it heralds a two-term Labour Government. On the contrary, we may be glimpsing the outline of a Right-wing coalition that could sweep to power in 2029.
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I’m afraid facts and arguments aren’t going to change the minds of Net Zero advocates.
What will change their minds is the sense that those who don’t want it are getting angry and might start going for Net Zero zealots in ways they might not like.
They need to feel the need to change position at an emotional level. And we all know fear works best.
Personally I make a point of ensuring that anyone who defends climate change policy perceives my anger and a certain sense of menace that I’m not standing for it.
That’s the sort of emotional response that gets people re-thinking, in my view.
Indeed. Righteous anger coupled with a couple of winters freezing in one’s home and – heaven forbid – being deprived of the internet and one’s dumb-down-the-owner ‘smart’ phone (due to power blackouts) and we will probably see some change in direction. Recent history shows how quickly zealots can change sides – 2 years ago there were millions standing in line for untested poison, now they can’t give it away. Reality bites big.
Yep everyone wants to “save the planet” till the penny eventually drops that the planet is fine and it was never about the planet in the first place.
We see the same tactics used against those who put rational arguments and science up against the loony climate change protagonists.
The loonies are not loony and those with rational arguments and science are the loonies.
All achieved using the same approach to so many other issues that are destroying our social values and structures and done using
useful idiotswhatever activists they can fund to implement this madness.The end justifies the means for those behind all this crap who see the destruction of social values and structures as the ends which justify the means.
DS is invaluable as a source of information and a forum to read what sensible people have to say against this backdrop of madness.
Or “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and parasite governments of both parties are certainly putting the manufactured climate crisis to good use to implement all the progressive policies they have long craved
No facts and reason……Just faith and emotion. Climate activists and those who glue themselves to things decided long ago what is true and there is no budging them. But we need to remember it is government and their phony climate models masquerading as science that brainwashed them all. —–Thos governments can hardly come down hard on their own useful idiots that do all their dirty work for them now can they?
Until the liberal mainstream media, and especially the BBC, do honest reporting over the utter folly of spending trillions on completely worthless and highly dangerous Net Zero madness nothing will change.
I would suggest that everyone complain to the BBC via. their Make A Complaint web portal. Find a climate change article on the BBC website, it’ll almost always state that greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of climate change, something that we all know is complete rubbish. They always make this dumb statement without any dissenting views allowed. That’s complaint-worthy in itself.
Do you really think complaining to the BBC achieves anything? It is impervious to complaints.
Hopefully one low level individual there might start to think for him/her self and light a spark. A long shot, I know.
At a stroke, we could cut the staggering 0.0016% of the atmosphere that is human-caused CO2 by wiping out most of the world’s population by toxic medical interventions, geoengineering, gmo food and electrosmog. Unless some people have already thought of that.
Just as a matter of interest – have any of the Net Zero zealots ever clarified what’s the target internal winter temperature people are expected to maintain in this brave new world of theirs, or hasn’t that sort of practical reality crossed their tiny minds? I see the WHO, NHS and others currently recommend 18-21C, and building ‘sperts recommend above 16C to stop condensation and mould. Are those numbers likely to drop, I wonder? (My place regularly drops well below those already; wonder if that means I get extra brownie points?!)
Off topic, but who cares..
So.. 2.30 pm tomorrow Andrew Bridgen after 20 refusals and the pressure of constitutants harassing their MPs there will be a debate (1 hr slot) about excess deaths.
Its the first parliamentary debate in the world… You couldn’t make this up in your widest of dreams..
https://youtu.be/uWP6mGiDveI?si=sYVcJHZC-SLCDsYQ
More off topic…. Was all this about provoking Iran..
Brand talking sense… Yet again (don’t believe the narrative about him, it’s an attempted matrix takedown)
https://youtu.be/jWO-mtt4_lU?si=vUDuZ1TDB4O-iFMW
”Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you,”
This is a momentous nightmare social experiment, the current technology cannot deliver, the current resources are inadequate. As this nonsense progresses and it becomes increasingly obvious that our current population cannot go ‘net-zero’ and live at anything like present living standards, what is going to happen? Are people meekly going to accept immiseration and a degeneration of living standards back to medieval times? If we do go down this route the UK will become a weird basket case like the mad uncle you keep in the attic while the rest of the world gets on with life. This is a recipe for huge social upheaval and turmoil, the end result of which is hard to predict?
Something similar to North Korea, I expect. Only without the abundant luxuries…
‘Saving the planet’ is worth any cost in some eyes. Even if you can’t afford it, and it wouldn’t save the planet anyway, (primarily because it doesn’t need saving from CO2).
Useless people trying to give themselves a sense of destiny.
The NIC should be closed down and sent back to school while we find some adults to carry on the essential work.
The can will need to be continually kicked down the road because what the parasite political class are trying to do is not just impossible, it is unaffordable, but the pain and suffering inflicted will be a severe blow to hard pressed taxpayers suffering the fallout from the malady infecting all of parliament called PSPS (Pretend to Save the Planet Syndrome)