Growth, Growth, Growth

 Sadly, politicians and all of their advisers, are rubbish when it comes to mantras. And in choosing to mimic Blair’s 'education' trifecta, which policy resulted in ever-dumbed down, largely worthless McQualifications, Truss has gifted the opposition with open goals galore. Growth in poverty, foodbanks, waste, exploitation, illegal immigration and anxiety are merely the first six examples that sprang to mind.

In trying to encourage business to grow, a plentiful supply of cheap labour will be needed, and we all know where that is coming from. As mortgage rates grow, people formerly in merely dire straits will have to tighten the belt still further and consumption will be affected. Consumption – there’s another one; all these undocumented incomers have brought tuberculosis back into the national medical frame where it is and will continue to be a growing problem.

As queues for medical attention grow, so too will the gaping maw of the NHS budget. Graduates of soft courses in the social arena will continue to stuff the unemployable categories of grievance mongers, critical race theory advocates and the enemies of common sense everywhere. Our ‘not-zero’ climate policy will grow the output of CO₂ into the atmosphere as outfits like Drax use the ‘burning biomass isn’t counted’ loophole, spending £billions in the bargain to assist in the deforestation of primary forests in British Columbia. 

As anybody studying the effects of bureaucracy over the centuries will know, growth does not automatically translate into wealth. Grow the government tax-take, grow the civil service, grow the NGOs funded by the devious diversion of funding into the money-pits they represent. Trickle-down economics? The problem is where it all trickles to. In every area of government intervention the markets find a way of sucking up potential and turning it into waste.

But what’s the alternative? Astute parents should advise those of their offspring unsuited to the rigours of engineering and science to opt for one of the more nebulous of disciplines which, while having no useful purpose n the world nevertheless increases one’s opportunity to acquire personal wealth. The growth in anxiety and its drop-of-a-hat diagnosis will surely lead to a demand for more therapists. And the growth in the number of things you can supposedly be treated for will expand the field still further.

The real inspiration?

Growth in manufacturing? No way – we need to export all these real jobs to developing nations. What we need is growth in spending. Get out to the shops, splash the cash, acquire like there’s no tomorrow (There probably isn’t, economically). Perhaps I was wrong and Liz Truss didn’t borrow from Blair. Maybe she took her cue from Viv Nicholson and is really exhorting us all to “spend, spend, spend”.

All for one?

The protesting classes have been out in force and emboldened by Labour’s current massive poll lead, are doing what they do best, encouraging impotent hope. People who have never before marched are taking to the streets to ‘do their bit’ and swell the ranks, and presumably the word ‘solidarity’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But look who is leading the charge and you’ll see it is the same old union stalwarts and diehard class warriors.

Starmer is probably right to urge his MPs not to stand on picket lines because the rise of the left and their supposed championing of the common man is as bad for moderate Labour as it is for the Tories. The blues are, of course, the eternal enemy, so to the extent that such protests turn people against what they imagine the Conservatives actually stand for plays Labour’s way. And the terrible optics of the first skirmishes of the new Truss administration must surely push voters still further to the left.

But the danger here is that with a taste for socialist rhetoric and with the scent of blood in their nostrils, formerly moderate types may be persuaded to go full-Momentum and make the same mistakes that socialist agitators usually make. The assumption that this common man is more biddable from a socialist standpoint than from a small ‘c’ conservative position needs a critical second look. Because the ultimate aims of the left are a long way out of line with the aspirations of the average worker.

Positions on immigration, social justice, education, the role of the state, national sovereignty, defence, energy security, policing and the ever-widening identitarian movements reveal complex challenges, challenges which defeat thinkers across the political spectrum in terms of simple solutions. To take just one, immigration; why if immigration is supposed to be so good for us, has no government managed to convince the population of this beneficence?

Back in June this year ordinary, decent people found it frankly incredible that an unwashed mob could prevent police from carrying out their duties to detain and deport. But in the heads of the Peckham Peaceniks, they were doing god’s work, with the backing of certain members of the legal profession. Once, parents would proudly declare that their son or daughter was a lawyer. Today they could be excused for feeling let down and even ashamed.

The same sense of entitlement to action is seen with other extreme protest groups who willingly engage in disruptive campaigns which cause real harm to the ability of our common man to go about his business and earn a living. Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the statue topplers… You may ask, in what world can their actions be right just because they believe it is? You have to wonder who gives such people the authority to carry out their sabotage when the police effectively stand down in their presence.

The left is intellectually lazy. In assuming without question a morally superior basis for their beliefs, they promulgate their simplistic portrayals of cruel Conservatism, of government against the people, of graft and corruption at the top, as if they would be above such human frailties. Moribund tropes about inequality wash up hard on the rocky shores of legions of underprivileged white workers who see not only no reward for their efforts but opprobrium for their skin colour. White privilege? Do us all a favour.

So, support the strikers, march through our city centres, protest all you like. But what are you achieving, other than a day out and a sense of camaraderie? Maybe this is enough, maybe you can convince yourself that you did your bit, that you are a part of the solution. Or, rather, have you just fallen for the fictions of a failed ideology, risen to the rabble-rousing rhetoric of the union blowhards?

What are you rebelling against?

What have you got?

Revolution is just not the British way; there is a reason that the Conservatives are the natural party of UK government, and while they may appear to have lost their way recently, I’m pretty certain that the perpetually enraged and warring factions of the alternatives have little to offer. The organised events of Enough is Enough are impressive in their reach, but will, I believe, achieve little as tomorrow we all go back to work and look after number one.

Give Truss a Chance?

The knives are well and truly out for Truss. If it was just the eternal opposition of Labourites this would be unremarkable. If it was just the puffed-up pontificating of that malodorous and wretched excuse for a human being, James O’Brien it would be business as usual. If it was just the former spin doctor and liar-in-chief, Alastair – raging bullshit – Campbell it would be laughed off as irrelevant, but it’s not just the usual suspects, it is everybody.

The Bank of England, the BBC, the EU, the IMF… and more besides. There is almost a queue of people awaiting their turn to do down the pound and in turn to unseat the fourth Conservative Prime Minister in less than a decade. If current moods are anything to go by, we might yet have another one before the next general election, such is the zeal for turmoil.

Chaos abounds. In every critical area you can imagine chaos and confusion is now the default mode. Name a sector – industry, energy, financials, law and order, education, health, care and society-at-large – and nowhere will you find a comforting sense of order. And so many seem to be heavily invested in perpetuating this state. Especially those who see themselves as political victims. Victims of Toryism, Trumpism, Brexit and, of course, Boris; nothing will satisfy these malcontents short of a complete collapse of everything. But their next step is unclear. You bring down the wall, perhaps, but what do you do afterwards?

It is clear that something needs to be done, that sanity needs to be restored to our national debate. Most ordinary people still think along the same lines we always did, but the conversation has been hijacked by those who will not admit anything other than their own thesis. Identity politics has split the national psyche asunder and allowed crank ideas such as critical race theory, gender issues and hate crime rhetoric to distort every utterance. If only they were given the chance.

In every speech, every policy, every initiative there will be something to offend somebody. And yet, instead of pushing ahead, somehow the storm-force winds of protest manage to keep the ship in harbour. We are sunk without a leadership with the balls to tackle all of this, and such a leadership would be mightily cheered on by the huge majority who feel powerless against the wokeratti.

And lest the anti-Brexit, anti-fracking, anti-oil, anti-white, anti-Tory, anti-justice mob pretend to themselves they are doing god’s work, let us not forget that none of them give a good goddamn for the country. They do this entirely for themselves. It is all about them. To the woke mob, solving any of our national problem comes secondary to the outright rejection of anybody with whom they disagree. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, John Major said. Well, this is for certain the tyranny of the minorities.

We were and are warned about all of this. Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Doyle, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Christopher Hitchens and many others, whatever you think of them – and make no mistake, what you think of them is most certainly influenced by the perpetrators of national destruction – have been telling you for years. And yes, I deliberately included Hopkins and Robinson in that list because if your reaction to their names was revulsion, you may be a small part of the problem.

If you reject an idea, a notion, a warning, simply because of who delivers it, or if you embrace an ideological position for the same reasons you may be behaving rationally, but you are not behaving well. The march of the so-called progressives has been a long one and its roots lie centuries ago in the doctrines of Engels and Marx and it is carried on today by the extreme left factions of the Labour and Green movements. Its agitators are the young and foolish and the middle-aged and straight out cranky, and others like them who will never have to suffer the consequences.

The old society may have had its faults and it may have disadvantaged certain groups whose voices needed to be heard and heeded, but the breakdown of the social order portends far worse outcomes than its perpetuation ever did. The media is a never-ending rendition of new varieties of Project Fear; Project Doom-and Gloom, Project Bring Down the PM, Project Hate the Tories, and Project Talk Down the Country. If we can just learn to ignore the naysayers, hold our noses and give Truss a chance, we might find she has something to offer. If instead we listen to the haters we will never find out.

Out of Proportion

I see some people are aghast that Keir Starmer has rejected the Labour Party conference vote to adopt what they regard as the open goal of proportional representation. The fact that they think such a system would be an answer to the political impasse in which most modern democracies now find themselves reveals much about the dearth of political savvy in the membership.

How would it work, I ask myself. Seriously, how? How would you allocate seats, and in whose name would those incumbents vote? Do we just vote for a party then have the bureaucrats divvy up the seats based on total numbers? That is, if the Libdems get enough votes to claim 20 seats in Parliament, how is it decided to which local area area they are appointed? On that basis we might see that most Labour of seats, Liverpool, being gifted a Conservative MP, which while it may be fun for the rest of us would be a death sentence to the duly elected.

If local candidates stand in constituency seats are they then awarded victories based on a lottery system against total votes cast? So a traditional Labour seat gets a Labour MP, if sufficient national seats are won, even though the local vote perhaps swung towards another party. Because it strikes me that we already have a functioning form of proportional representation – the person with the largest proportion of votes wins.

Or maybe we should do away with constituencies altogether, rendering boundary reform obsolete and preventing the sitting party of government from fiddling with the demographics. In which case most MPs would come via the Oxford PPE route and reside in London… and likely tend towards ‘progressive’ stances. Oh how the Shires would wail!

The more I think about proportional representation, the more I wonder what it means, and more particularly, what its supporters think it means. Would it really be a benign, closest-thing-to-direct-democracy system, in which every decision better represents the wishes of the unconsulted majority? I thought that was called populism; apparently the harbinger of fascism. Or would it mean just endless coalitions in which ideals were traded for the sake of cabinet positions?

And what would a government under PR look like? Would we have, instead of single party government, a cabinet selected on proportional grounds? If we think the last few governments have exhibited a distinct lack of unity, imagine what will happen when we let the foxes into the hen house… and then invite along a motley assembly of pigs, donkeys and aardvarks to boot. It’s like the regular calls to adopt a Basic Minimum Wage – everybody seems to have their own idea about what this actually means, but nobody knows how it could work.

"Something tells me they're expecting a low voter turnout"

Some say that under PR we can make every vote count. I don’t see that at all. Just as now, you can wish as hard as you like that your vote – your specific vote – will elect your favoured candidate, but under PR just as under FPTP there will be winners and losers and those who voted for the losers will feel their vote didn’t count at all. 

I have a feeling that voters may, more than ever, turn away from engagement with the running of the country. In only the second nationwide referendum held in the UK, In 2011 the people voted against a system that was, by another name, proportional representation. Lest the irony is lost on feeble minds, when given the chance to vote party-free for PR the population overwhelmingly rejected it.

Conference Crazy

Based on the notion that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the last few days of the new Conservative government upsetting ‘all the right people’ I’d say it’s been a spectacular success. In fact, ‘upsetting’ is a massive understatement, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, going by the sheer incandescent rage of many of the offended. A week or so ago, Barry Sheerman, a Corbyn lickspittle of cartoon proportions, amused me with this tweet:

Of course, to people like Barry Sheerman, Ed Miliband was practically the National Front, so heaven knows what he thinks of Liz Truss. Actually, this knowledge isn’t exclusively vouchsafed to heaven – he thinks she is ‘literally Hitler’. But this, as ever, is how they divide us. Stick on a label and turn on the condemnation. Am I labelling Barry? Of course I am, but as the left are quite convinced of their own perfection, this is not a label he would object to.

The left do love their labels, and so does the press. Slogans, dogma, trite placard-bound inaccuracies, or outright lies – the veracity plays second fiddle to the satisfying anti-Tory sentiment. The fall in the value of the pound was leapt upon with glee by our partisan journos, describing the over-the-weekend drop in the most catastrophic terms, yet ignoring almost completely the bounce back to a little below where it was before the mini-budget.

But the commentators need little encouragement to trot out their flimsy forecasts and their condemnations. The man in the street neither knows nor much cares about economics, fiscal policy, constitutional fripperies, science, engineering, sociology… politics, even. In fact the very reason people like Giorgia Meloni in Italy are elected is because the chattering of the political elites sounds to the world at large like nothing so much as people with an inflated sense of significance telling us all how we should live our lives.

The last few years of Farage, Brexit, Trump, Oban, Johnson and others only became inevitable because of the total disconnect between the self-appointed ruling classes, the political dynasties and their flag bearers and the rest of us; those who have to live with their stitched up, cabalistic policies. Given no palatable offering but witnessing the ever increasing dismantling of the settled order of family, community, country, it is obvious to the thickest of we peasants that we have to resist.

The attacks on the right always takes the form of shouting Mussolini et al, and some nebulous charges of capitalist cronyism, but the leftist agenda is always predicated on imposing the most egregious of unfounded societal structures on people who want or need nothing to do with them. Call us racists, xenophobes, homophobes, etc, all you damned well like, it still doesn’t make it true.

As the Labour Party conference comes to a close and they all pat each other on the back for a job well done, cheering the latest polls which put them ahead on many issues, they might want to embrace a genuine truism; opposition is easy. Easy as hell. Aided, abetted and emboldened by the press, the commentators, the pontificating economic forecasters and of course the BBC, those who would terminally dismantle our society are going to demonstrate to us all exactly how much they despise us. And in two years’ time let us hope the electorate rejects them once again.