What happened in Britain during the extraordinary years of 2018-24 wasn’t the philosophical defeat of ‘Toryism’, or even its betrayal. It was a legal and bureaucratic power struggle that the British Right fought and then lost, decisively.
Here was the essential question of the last six years: is opposition politics allowed in Britain? Almost everything turned on this issue; old Left-Right appeals were the exception not the rule. First came the saga over the referendum result and whether it should be honoured, which meant a constitutional crisis over prerogative powers and an extended showdown with the courts. Corbynism, so close to victory in 2017, was crowded out and fell by the wayside.
Then came a series of unprecedented interventions by the standards and ethics committees into politics. Sue Gray stalked the elected Government in plain sight. An obscure ultra-royalist reading of the constitution was invoked to prevent Boris Johnson from seeking a new mandate from the electorate.
The Parliamentary Right found itself winnowed away by investigations, which led to the former Prime Minister’s expulsion from the House of Commons and his allies being threatened with the same if they criticised these proceedings. A leading member of the Conservative Right, Miriam Cates, was hit with a gag order at the climax of its showdown with Downing Street over illegal migration. Investigations into workplace conduct unhorsed a Deputy Prime Minister and nearly did the same to two Home Secretaries.
Policy became almost irrelevant. The legal inheritance from New Labour made border control impossible. When Raab fell to a workplace investigation, his ‘British Bill of Rights’ that would have replaced the ECHR fell with him. After opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) became Government policy, a Health Minister was asked to refer herself to an ethics advisor for leafleting against “15-minute cities”. In the closing days of the Sunak ministry, a court case killed onshore fossil fuel extraction at a stroke.
Seldom have ideas counted for so little. This was a battle over the levers of Government – not what should happen once they were pulled. Everything was downstream from a willingness or an unwillingness to challenge the various non-partisan bodies for control of the British state.
The coalitions that formed were motley and defied ordinary description. Steve Baker, Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak were each starchy Thatcherites. Rory Stewart was a Burkean stickler for tradition, Theresa May a committed Anglican. None of it mattered. When the time came, each made the only choice that really counted now: for ‘decentralised’ Britain and against the democratic executive. The same was true of their opponents. Almost nothing united Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Nadine Dorries beyond some defence (ebbing and flowing) of central and democratic authority.
Things were now elemental enough to make the old distinctions blur into irrelevance. The most scrupulous Thatcherite could not have passed a budget without first neutralising the OBR. No YIMBY could have built without defying Natural England and limiting the scope of judicial review. And no kind of Government is possible at all if probity and ethics boards are allowed to cashier the people’s representatives for interrupting people.
We are well beyond theoretical jollies about the remit of the state or the proper role of the markets. Owing to a few key individuals, in 2019 the British Conservative Party essentially solved the problem of centre-Right politics in the 21st Century: that is to say, how to rouse the lower-middle and working classes with a demagogic appeal against the Blob while not spooking the upper-middle classes. The solution, as it turns out, was to simply recast the necessary attack on institutions as modernisation and reform. This is a circle that has yet to be squared in any other Western democracy.
By the end of 2019 the way was open. If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, even after the folly of lockdown the permanent administration essentially surrendered to the Johnson Government, offering to let it carry out the long mooted reform of the Civil Service that would have drastically cut its headcount and ended its institutional independence.
Had this been carried out, it would have opened a new chapter in world history. Britain would have been the first major country to decisively break with the bureaucratic-oligarchic model that rules virtually every state on the planet. At the very least, it certainly would have made the old divides between, oh I don’t know, the Bow Group and Blue Beyond feel less pressing.
Britain is further along in this historical process than any other developed country. Even the most extreme Project 2025 stretch goals would leave a President Trump with far less control over the state than Boris Johnson enjoyed in January 2020. People like Keir Starmer appreciate this. His first speech outside Downing Street had almost nothing to say about living standards, everything to say about probity, ethics and the liberties of the quango. He is prosecuting a conflict that the British Tories began and then refused to wage.
And so to say now, as many do, that the Conservative Party should in the wake of its defeat muse on the philosophical case for the centre-Right is to forget all that has happened – perhaps wilfully. It ignores how politics has regressed, or perhaps progressed, into a bare conflict between institutions. It means everyone can go back to ignoring that a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority was ousted from office for eating cake. It means that everyone can go back to ignoring that the particular formation around Johnson and Cummings got within an ace of actually dissolving the Blob and transforming politics forever. Those who would sooner forget about these events are taking Keir Starmer at his word: that the ordinary democratic process has resumed and that the last few years were only a freak aberration, never to be repeated.
More than anything else, it allows the Tories to ignore the fact that they have, since 2019, known perfectly well how to win a popular mandate from the British people, which can then be used to carry out a reformation of the state. Everyone knows what would drive a person to vote against something like Starmerism – this showy, hand-wringing over the reason why only invites us to think they don’t like the answer.
How will a centre-Right Government elected in 2028 pass a budget in the teeth of OBR opposition? These are the salient questions, and their ultimate answers are more profound and more revolutionary than any paean to ‘institutions’, or even to free markets. Politics as commonly understood ended in 2019, and those who would now lead the opposition should not forget it.
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Aren’t these the people who have already decided that social distancing and forced face masking will continue for their victims no matter what?
Chances are that most new students will have had much more independence at home, before they were locked away into substandard bedsits and behaviour-policed by private security guards behind grid fences, all in the name of not posing an inacceptable risk to staff.
social distancing and forced face masking – evil – look at Australia
SPEECHLESS Australia OUT OF CONTROL
Alex Belfield – THE VOICE OF REASON – (I don’t agree with everything Alex say he, but I am willing to forgive him)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIdta7AA2IY
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“Aren’t these the people who have already decided that social distancing and forced face masking will continue for their victims no matter what?”
Exactly. As with every other body that is meant to stand up for those it represents, the suggested solution to the ills caused by coronamadness is not to question the madness or push back against it, but to ask for more help in mitigating the disastrous results.
I wish these students all the best in their coming University life, young people have been treated appallingly by this disgraceful government.
If institutions, at some point over the next year, have to go “on-line” for some reason or other ..these same students should demand refunds.
Saint Boris must remember that HE is responsible for the destruction of these young people’s futures, with his cruel and pointless lockdowns. He must also remember that they are the voters of the future, and they will remember how he totally threw them to the bottom of the pile.
But they may realise that Sneer Smarmer would have locked them up even harder and more cruelly.
I wouldn’t blame them for spoiling their ballot papers, big time.
Boomer here. I’ll have much the same thoughts next time I vote ……
It beggars belief that young people are still taking the decision to burden themselves with huge debt for the costs of university fees. Especially so now that the government has made them a target group for ‘vaccine’ coercion. The pressures they will be faced with is immense and any good parent would guide their child away from the debt slavery towards apprenticeship if at all possible.
So let’s force them to wear masks all the time, exclude them from the Student Union unless they have the jabs, and test them to remind them that they might be biohazards, that’ll definitely help.
So my employers HR came knocking asking for everyone to submit their vaccination status. Me being me, I decided to get mine in first.
I’m posting my email here if anyone wants to reuse it when their time comes. On my lunch break so no idea if I will be still employed this afternoon lol
Thanks for your email regards our return to the office.
Could you please explain to me why an individuals vaccinations status is actually important when by looking at the latest data in the PHE Variants of Concern Technical Briefings (number 21) we can see clearly see that vaccinations have neither prevented infection or reduced transmission of the virus? I have no doubt that you and many others will dispute my assertion but it’s all there to see on page 21 of the document for HM Gov below should anyone care to look.
SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation (publishing.service.gov.uk)
Whilst I don’t doubt that some individuals within the company may sadly relish the opportunities for discrimination that the sharing of such private health related information presents, I for one find the request for this personal information deeply disturbing.
I appreciate that some vaccinated individuals within the company have strong reservations and concerns about their return to office and even returning to public life in general but I fail to see how an individual’s vaccination status is of any relevance given the above.
Is the company going to provide the unvaccinated and those who refuse to disclose with their own desks in an hermetically sealed room of their own perhaps or maybe just adorn them with yellow stars instead? Outside of such or similar measures I can see little or no use for the company knowing an individual’s private medical information.
Regards
Ask them, while they are requesting confidential medical information if they are requesting the HIV status of other staff members and if so why not?
Love it, not sure you’ll still be employed by the end of the day, do you have an HGV license by any chance?
I’m not sure all teenagers have been cooped up for 18 months, possibly those whose parents are sheep (possibly the same teenagers I now see muzzled) , but I’m happy to say we’ve had loads of them meeting up in groups throughout the whole debacle
Every time I see a group of teenagers showing total disregard for social restrictions, I think: good on you.
Not just the young ‘uns.
Last week I traipsed round my own small seaside town. Unprompted, the keepers of three businesses told me that by and large, this year’s tourists have been uncommunicative if not downright rude.
Fear does that to people.
I suspect they are the ones that normally go to the Algarve for tapas.
This year they have been grumpily tramping around tourist towns in the UK.
Teenagers don’t need help. They need to ‘do gooders’ to get out of their life – permanently.
Let us all hope that people remember all of this when the next election comes around and refuse to vote for the current incumbents of the House of Parliament. We have to change the system or we will continue to get “being locked down for almost two years, to something like as much freedom as you’re ever likely to get.” . Is that the “Freedom” you want? Let us not forget that Starmers Opposition was no Opposition at all. Those bastards took our lives and our freedoms, now we take their positions.
“The source said universities would have to address “socialisation issues” as well as academic study. “
I’m sure that the universities are doing all they can to minimize these socialization issues by enforcing such social activities as mask-wearing, antisocial distancing and enforcing inoculation with drugs of unknown effect.
You couldn’t f.ing make it up.
Another one bites the dust:
Rapper who mocked lockdown protesters dies of heart attack after having the Pfizer Covid-19 injection
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/08/24/rapper-who-mocked-lockdown-protesters-dies-of-heart-attack-after-having-the-pfizer-covid-19-injection/
“…some concern students may overindulge after two school years in which socializing was strictly limited.”
Because students never overindulged before.
This is presumably code language for concern that students might do something other than sitting – fully masked, vaccinated and alone – in cupboards while shivering with fear because of The Terrible Virus[tm].
Students need people who taught them only a very few things. But taught them how to think. Good learning starts with how to separate the shaft from the wheat.
Mr Dalton was receive by a University when aged10.
Don’t comply. Ditch the masks. – FIGHT BACK BETTER – Updated information, resources and links: https://www.LCAHub.org/