Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 5 - Piddling Around On the Margins of the System: Liberal Reformers

This latest review is fairly simple - just a list of six 'parties' (I have removed the Foundation Party, a pro-Brexit and anti-lockdown populist conservative party that strongly emphasised process, because its website seems no longer to be functional) who think that all our problems will be solved if we changed the nature of democracy. This, of course, is ridiculously simplistic. 

These ideas tend to come from politically naive middle class 'engineers' who do not understand that the key changes necessary to transform national governance need not be radical (such changes are unlikely to be adopted in any case and are fraught with real world unintended consequences) but should simply be changes to how existing representative democracy is managed so that it is made more informed, more independent of influence and community-accountable. The root of our problems lie in the corrupted nature of the classic liberal democratic political party and its relationship to the executive, the market and the media rather than representative democracy itself. It does not lie in our lacking an 'ideal (Platonic) constitution'.

The great flaw in the 'process reformers' (and also of many libertarian socialists, activists and anarchists) is that they think that all their fellow citizens should necessarily be interested in politics. Instead, we need a democracy that is responsive to the interests and concerns of the population at large precisely so that they have no or minimal need to be involved in practical administrative politics. Therefore none of these will make the short list or the watch list but they are presented here to show that there are a fair number of frustrated middle class reformers lurking in the political undergrowth and that you should feel free to join them if it is in your nature to be a political nerd.

• The Movement for Active Democracy

• The Independent Network (most famously associated with journalist Martin Bell) which sounds lovely in theory but independence is not in itself a sign of administrative talent or sound policy.

• The Direct Democracy Movement which proposes radical direct democracy and quotes Elon Musk and Tyson Fury as radical democratic libertarians.

• Your Voice Party 

• A Blue Revolution is populist party centred on Lincolnshire that seems most concerned about debt. The long website reference to De Bono's theories of mind suggests that we are in the world of human resources and managerialism despite the democratic thrust. The potentially creepy part is the complaint that "the current political system wastes a lot of energy arguing and debating." Arguing and debating is how we resolve conflict without recourse to weaponry. Maybe this is putative Platonic technocracy in action!

• Vox Pop Gov is an attempt to have mass populist democracy through technology but misses the point that principles, values and general direction should be in direct accord with the popular will but not so implementation. Implementation requires experienced and informed management. The national level of political, technical and general education is so poor that this would be a disaster, certainly with our irresponsible media and manipulative interest groups leading the debate. This is politics as 'Strictly' or 'Love Island'.

What this group of 'process' political parties tells you is that there is (if you add to them the huge number of small local and resident-based parties) a considerable amount of discontent amongst the hard-pressed white collar middle classes that is already going nowhere as far as resolving the fundamental problems of a failing representative democracy is concerned. 

 

Instead of challenging representative democracy to do better through guided and technically specific reforms to increase accountability and reduce the influence of special interests (which at least Reform UK is prepared to talk about albeit unsatisfactorily), most of these 'parties' are offering technical fixes that reek of unintended consequences. These anxious middle middles are politically naive and none (not even their processes) can be taken very seriously.

 

My sense is that these tend to be white collar graduate managerial, professional or technical types frustrated with both a national politics they barely comprehend (but think they must be expert in because they are expert in something else) and with local politics which are, democratically, a standing joke to anyone with a sense of humour. They are often mid-level local business consultants, in small service businesses or in areas like marketing or human resources. They want both liberty and order and they think these are easily reconcileable through process reforms alone. They become 'political nerds' because they are psychologically used to and trained in 'process' and think process can be applied to politics.

 

Of course, politics is not like that - it is 'struggle'. Such types are uncomfortable with confrontation and struggle from the get-go yet confrontation is necessary for any form of political progress. Our problem today is not too much struggle but too little under a political class with shared values who fixed a dysfunctional system in their favoour. They are not interested in the economic struggles of the working or lower middle class because they are relatively secure if anxious that they may not always be so. Their 'slippages' come from slow declines in respect, status and even revenue that they put down to failures of process in an act of internal misdirection. They do not put down their slow worrying decline and anxieties to great socio-economic and technological change but to failures of management - if they (as relative juniors in the managerial system) were better managed (they believe), then all would be well. Thuis, they think, new political managerial processes are required and these will solve all problems

 

One useful comment from a reader of an earlier draft can be added here: "The first things that came to my mind when reading this [last paragraph] was the growing use of 'stealth taxation' (e.g. the above-inflation increases in alcohol duty, for example) prior to the 'credit crunch' of 2008; the second was the accelerated shift towards rentier capitalism post-'credit crunch' and the ways in which 'austerity' policies facilitated such a shift. Those individuals from the less monied portion of the middle classes were essentially frogs being boiled slowly by the economic elite." The frogs in this case are beginning to notice  that they are being boiled but are simply calling for the pan to be filled with fresh water.

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 4 - Assessing the Emergence of the 'Far Right'

The methodology of our investigation has been covered in a previous blog posting.

 

It is time to look at the parties of the 'Far Right' that operate within the bounds of democracy (even if some on the centre-left insist that they do so only barely). My definition of Far Right is different from that of liberals who insist on including populists and right-wing conservatives in the category. I do not. The central part of my own definition makes them difficult to include in my analysis as serious contenders for power or for key policy ideas but not for the reasons more mindless liberals think. I am not interested in liberals' ignorant dismissal of anything that fails to fit into their group-think but merely dismiss as 'fascist' as if a reference to Mussolini's Italy in the interwar period tells us anything useful about British politics in the twenty-first century.

My definition tends to emphasise the absolute essentialism of such parties rather than their claimed negative attitude to democracy - as race, nation or religion. The Left have their equivalent in class and the centrists in their belief in the market and the liberal State. Classical liberals, populists and libertarians might feel the same about individual freedom. The organic nation, class, State and market are evidenced political realities and individual freedom a reasonable aspiration. However, religion may be an evidenced social reality but depends on the irrationalism of faith while race as central idea in politics is now demonstrably a scientific absurdity although it might reasonably be replaced with some sense of organically derived culture. Instead of white or black race, we now might see talk of white or black culture which creates room for (say) the Black Panthers or even the Aryan Brotherhood insofar as they express themselves in those terms.

Those latter, of course, are not found in the UK. They would not be counted worth considering in any case since they do not have a practical democratic politics underpinning them. Arguments about culture, shorn formally of race, certainly do emerge in populist circles yet we have already noted in our previous review that a major role is played in populism and right-wing conservatism by middle class ethnic activists and, as we shall see, Britain First is at pains to demonstrate itself as anti-racist in contradistinction to the BNP. My approach to the Far Right (you will see a similar approach to the Far Left later) is to ask whether often deliberately manufactured liberal prejudices are actually correct and whether any of these parties might possibly have 'ideas' that would allow them to fall into our future watch list (alongside the Populist Party and the Heritage Party) or even be allowed greater recognition. The four ostensibly Far Right entities we have looked at are:

* The English Democrats [ED] (which might reasonably be considered populist)

* The British National Party [BNP] (with its pan-European adjunct The Alliance for Peace and Freedom)

* Britain First [BF]

* The National Housing Party [NHP]

Of the four, the BNP and BF can be disregarded not only because they are ideologically so extremely essentialist but because they are diametrically opposed to the general trend in British political culture which may have its resentments and disappointments and be profoundly concerned about wokery and mass migration but is fundamentally uninterested in racism and radical nationalism and instinctively tolerant. As we note below, if either attained serious power, it would be a sign that the existing system had completely collapsed or at least was on the verge of collapse. The authorities seem more frightened of the last, the atavistic BF, whose policies on paper do not actually appear as unreasonable as liberal commentators would like us to think. Its aggressive attitude to Islam, however, is tantamount to a potential declaration of religious war on whole communities in a country where the pass was long since sold on mass immigration and where there is no way now to challenge what has come to pass without triggering violence that would not serve the British people whatever their background.  It is quite simply not functionally useful to anyone.

The ED and NHP are way stations between populism and the 'essentialist Far Right'. Both are canaries in the coal mine of politics with the potential to channel either English resentments at the compromises required to maintain the Union or specific discontents about the conditions of the working class as the Tories return true to type. We could theoretically put both on the watch list but the concerns that the NHP wish to address are equally matters of interest to the populist and right-wing conservative forces we have identified elsewhere. The NHP duplicates the efforts of more viable others perhaps with a few caveats. Our decision, however, is to add the ED to our recommended watch list because a specifically English reaction to the decline of Britain is something to be studied in more detail as a possibility. 

The English Democrats

The English Democrats share many of the positions of right-wing populists (and, as we have noted, should perhaps be classed with them). There are the same concerns with migration, 'freedom' and veterans but adopted within an English national framework. In a sense, it is less for something than against the inclusion of England within the British State machinery. This has some merit, especially if the Scottish Question gets out of control in the next few years. It has actually moderated its position from independence to support for an English Parliament and so should be on the watch list for that reason alone. It sits somewhere between Reform UK and the Far Right and has been subject to some infiltration from the BNP. It is very unstable but if it stabilises on the right side of populism under the right leadership it could revive on any English resentment of the policies of the British State. On our marker policy, Ukraine, it has tended towards a diplomatic silence (probably because the nationalist Right is split on the issue) but there are clues from its Twitter stream that it resents the flow of funds and resources to Ukraine.

The British National Party

The BNP is a biologically racist party which is unlikely ever to change its position and would not be trusted to have done so even if it claimed that it had. Whatever we might think of any particular policies (and few if any are attractive), this core is so at odds with the instinctive good-humoured tolerance of the British people and its folk memory of fighting fascism in the early 1940s that, although the Party might exploit immigration and cultural conflict as well as indigenous white working class discontent (where there are justifiable reasons for policy concern), the only way this Party could achieve any form of meaningful power would be if there was a cataclysmic collapse in competence within the existing system. Sadly, the leadership of the existing system cannot be relied upon in this respect so it becomes imperative to ensure that alternative forces are available to block the return of divisive racial politics and cultural atavism.

We should also note that the BNP is part of a Far Right European International, the Alliance for Peace and Freedom, that tends to back Russia whether Russia likes it or not. This makes it doubly problematic because it appropriates legitimate criticism of 'Western' (European elite) foreign policy towards Russia and links it to extreme right-wing nationalism.

Britain First

Britain First is only fascist in the eyes of the polemicists of the Left. On closer examination, it is, in fact, committed to democratic politics and is anti-racist (the relevant and prominent part of its web site is very explicit in being anti-racist with pictures of ethnic identity supporters) but it is also Christian Nationalist and intensely anti-Islam at the Far Right fringe of the so-called 'counter-jihad'. It is only interesting if you have decided that radical militant Christianity is your thing and you consider Islam an existentialist threat to your country. Indeed, its members talk in such terms of religious war that one might reasonably fear that it would bring the seventeenth century's horrors forward in time. It is for this reason that the State watches it as a threat and not because it is anti-democratic (fascist). The threat is the theoretical if unlikely possibility that a population under pressure could vote it into office to 'deal with' the consequences of neo-liberal mass migration.

There are sound secular and even liberal reasons to be doubtful about the growing influence of Islam in the West but, if you are not sold into militant Christianity, you might be equally doubtful of the influence of Christianity itself or even organised political Judaism. This religious and sectarian essentialism (partly originating from Northern Irish politics) clearly worries the 'authorities' (which is never a reason in itself to abandon something) but we should perhaps all be worried by something whose growth could result not in legislative change but the potential for possibly unintended violence in the streets.

However, it has to be said that, in other respects, its claimed principles seem to be largely reasonable. Its detailed policies are radical but do not seem to be unduly extremist. The same practical concern applies to Britain First as to the BNP - if ever it became a serious political force, it would not be on its merits but on the total collapse in acceptability and competence (and perhaps we are not too far from the latter) of the existing political system. Just as the BNP tries to appropriate Enoch Powell (incorrectly) as part of its brand so BF tries to appropriate Trump (equally incorrectly). And BF (it must not be forgotten) is a 'revisionist' breakaway from the BNP.

These appropriations enable liberals to make a a superficial labelling of Powell as a racist and Trump as a fascist which are both incorrect. For the background to Britain First, by all means read Wikipedia's coverage but make a point of checking out its own web site since there is some reasonable suspicion that the usual suspects at Wikipedia has an interest in making it sound worse than it may be. If it was not so avowedly Christian Nationalist, its policy prescriptions might have been interesting enough to put it on the watch list but, as its stands, the reasonable aspects of the Party hide an unreasonable faith-based ideology. But make your own mind up.

As with the BNP, there is a distinct risk of Britain First being part of an appropriation of the Ukraine issue for Far Right purposes which would halt the necessary critique of Western (Centrist) foreign policy by associating it with 'fascism'. The Russian position that the Ukrainians are backed by Neo-Nazis (the 'Bandera' claim), which is not entirely false if often very much exaggerated, is muddied considerably by BF's support for Russia that is linked to neo-nationalist and orthodox elements in the Duma.

The National Housing Party

The smallest player on the list is the National Housing Party which majors on the nexus between lack of housing, immigration and liberal obsession with human rights. The implication is that the right to housing (social housing) is being denied because of liberal middle class prioritisation of abstract rights. The Party targets the culturaly conservative working-class, pensioners and veterans - a common mix of interests for the British Right. It does not appear to have more than an eclectic range of policies but also does not seem to be particularly harmful. Nor is it very large although very active on social media.

It might be on a watch list to help identify trends in public discontent amongst working and lower middle class constituencies but our existing recommendations in Part 3 probably do this adequately. Where it scores is on its apparent concentration on housing which all the major neoliberal parties have neglected and where problems are set to get much worse thanks to a combination of out of control illegal immigration, high interest rates and lack of construction. Needless to say, any campaigning they do is carefully ignored by the centre-left and centre-right mainstream media.

The populist Right or Left Party (see Part 3) that can put together a cogent, credible and communicable plan for national housing for the working class could probably make it redundant over night. Its position on the marker policy of the Ukraine War is to see Western engagement as part of a globalist mission which seems to be a pattern on the Far Right. Its policies are an amalgam of right and left-wing and could even be seen as the most right wing element of any working class social democratic revival. In our view, it is too small to count but it might act as another canary in the coal mine indicating levels of discontent - but not enough to include in our watch list. 

 

The next review will concentrate on a range of new process-driven liberal-centrist parties, none of which is likely to achieve any significant power although perhaps some of them might be added to our watch list as sources of ideas on constitutional change which might then be taken up by other radical reformers on the Left or the Right or even amongst more intelligent and less narcissistic centrist politicians who want to avoid eventually being hanged from lamp-posts if the state of the country deteriorates much further.

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 3 - Emergent Alliances Against The System?

There has been a long delay since the first two parts of this investigation because we wanted to assess changes in the overall political situation that might be relevant to the process. You may need reminding of what we are about. Our current situation was covered in a Blog Post in May. If anything, things have got worse. The Government is struggling to deal with problems of its own making. The economy faces, according to the Bank of England, three years of zero growth. Inflation is only slowly coming down and interest rates are rising. We are stuck in an unwinnable war that drains our Exchequer and undermines the global trading system. The Labour Opposition is flaccid and offers more of the same. The public is alienated from its political class. The methodology of our investigation was covered in a Blog Post in June.

Changes in the last three months were sufficient to delay analysis. We should note a number of factors that make a major change to our political system more likely after the failure of a Labour or Coalition Government (in other words somewhere around 2030) rather than as a result of the expected 2024 Election. This latter election is likely to be less interesting than the 2024 elections (Presidential in the US and European Parliamentary) elsewhere for one very simple reason - our national political culture still cannot get out of the mind-set of the solution to a bad Government being simply its replacement with an equally likely to fail Official Opposition. In order to effect serious change not only does the Tory Party be seen to have failed but Labour or whatever amalgam of established parties emerges out of the election must also be seen to fail. The key phrase is 'seen to fail' since, like a frog slowly boiling in water, the atomised British electorate has a tendency to fear radical change and to accept slow decline and moderate privation (or short term unstable asset growth and moderate taxation) rather than face the facts of national decline and weakening social cohesion. 

In other words, if failure is not dramatic, there is a risk that the Buggin's Turn of British politics will continue for generations while the nation sinks remorselessly into provincial status at a global level (which may be no bad thing) and infrastructural collapse, mounting social conflict and deteriorating morale (which are very bad things) without any decisive action being taken

So what has happened in recent months? First, the situation of the Government has seen no recovery, its leading figures are scuttling and looking for new opportunities and there is no enthusiasm for its probable successor. Second, electoral revolt has started on specific single issues - initially on ULEZ and implicitly Net Zero. Third, Farage is back in play leading a highly focused anti-woke campaign on de-banking that has thrust him back into prominence on the national political stage. Fourth, national populism in Europe is becoming more viable and more aggressive in its challenge to the dominant liberal system (although it has its own internal contradictions) while Trump seems to be strengthened rather than weakened by the legal warfare operations being undertaken against him. Finally, the Ukraine War, although low on electoral priorities, looks like another elite failure of policy to follow the failures in Afganistan and Iraq. 

In this context, the official Left has little to say that is not an opportunistic attempt to exploit the Centre-Right's troubles - the message is merely that Labour will be more effective than the Tories at managing a broken system (which is in itself barely credible) rather than being the agent of questioning whether anyone can be effective under a nineteenth century constitution underpinning a twentieth century state under conditions of twenty-first century complexity. In this context, only the populist Right appears to have something to say that might get public traction and it is poorly led in the absence of Farage.

The first of our five 'investigations' was, therefore, of "around nine broadly centre-right challengers to the Tory status quo" but including the Social Democrat Party which is arguably centre-left. The intention was to short list from the four or five categories under review (see relevant posting) and present them as a set of rational alternatives to the existing parties that dominate Parliament and which are clearly failing or may be expected to fail the British people. As we will see in a later blog posting, there is one potential serious alternative on the Left but the blunt truth is that, so long as the 'Corbynista Left' quixotically insists on blind loyalty to the Labour Party in the hope of take-over one sunny day, the energy for real change is mostly on the Right.

 

The SDP is definitely interesting. Reform UK, derived from Farage's earlier efforts but currently without his active involvement, has the more potential. The SDP could perhaps win a seat or two (it has a strong presence in Peterborough) but only Reform can strip votes from the Tories and from the Labour Red Wall to create a phalanx of MPs under FPTP that could be decisive in coalitional negotiations. Their commitment to proportional representation gives us the prospect of a pragmatic single issue alliance in Parliament with the Liberal Democrats that could transform British politics.

 

The fact that the SDP and Reform UK have announced an electoral alliance in advance of 2024 means that Reform UK are the best option for the material destruction of the Tory Party while the SDP permits 'revolutionaries' (in the context described in earlier postings, where there is no truly left-wing alternative, to support that destruction but from a moderate centre-left position and then hope to strengthen that position so that their guns can be turned on Labour and the Liberal Democrats at a much later stage.But this is a long game. The problem is that, without funds and reach (including dedicated activists), the danger is that sympathetic voters might simply remain at home or even vote for the least worst option in the establishment parties and implicitly endorse a broken system for another five depressing years.

In this context, there should be an honourable mention for Fox and Daubney's Reclaim Party which might be regarded as part of the emerging populist coalition and which has the virtue of having the right attitude to the hysteria surrounding Ukraine. Although an out-rider organisationally, it provides a convenient home for those concerned about freedom of speech and the widespread manufacture of consent. However, its recent by-election vote was derisory and its cultural politics only resonate with a small minority as a voting issue - many more may agree with it but not enough to push economic interests aside. It could perhaps deliver 2% of the vote to someone who could use it better.

 

We might also note as interesting the minor anti-globalist right wing green party The Populist Party (in case it develops legs in the discontented Tory heartlands) and the populist right wing Heritage Party (because it seems to have the only coherent set of policies related to the Ukraine crisis on the centre-right despite probably being a tad too right wing even for most thinking populists). These last two parties both have some organisational potential and the latter appears to offer a threat to Reform UK. The damaging effect of sectarianism on the Right matches its effects on the dissident Left.

 

From this perspective 'revolutionary bourgeois' Leftists who cannot relate to what we call the 'real' Left (to be covered in a later blog posting) should contemplate joining the small SDP to strengthen it for the future while 'revolutionary' Rightists, swallowing some doubts about the influence of the Johnsonite troglodytes, should be attracted pragmatically to Reform UK, backing it to replace the Tories on the back benches in order to effect some key reforms. Those more concerned with core individual freedoms and resistance in the culture wars might consider a third member of the emergent coalition - Reclaim - but the chances of this making an impact are slight now.

The reference to the Johnsonite Troglodytes is important because the radical dissidents on both Right and Left have the same problem - infiltration by the discontented elements in the main establishment parties in such a way that the revolutionary potential of 'real' Left and national populists is shattered by the presence of these essentially conservative forces. For the newly emergent working class parties on the Left (see later blog postings), the danger is of a rush of urban liberal-left excitable public sector graduate Corbynistas trying to create the eco-liberal party they wanted Labour to become and disenchanted with Starmer. 

 

For Reform UK (and so for the SDP) the risk is a rush of Tory pseudo-populists creating a new Party of war-mongering Atlanticists in return for a primitive small business low tax policy package based on an unworkable Trussanomics. The Tory pseudo-populists will be faced with a choice of capturing the Tory Party after defeat or taking over Reform UK. Such an outcome is likely not to be good for major national reconstruction - the parallel in Europe is the traditionalist conservatism of Meloni. For the discontented Left, the risk is of becoming Red-Greens on speed run by activists and graduates with no working class links.

 

But here we are only concerned with the centre-right populist challenge to the mainstream. In the next few weeks we will move on to look at the Far Right (where the probability but not certainty is of rejection as unviable for electorsal purposes), then to some centre 'process-driven' parties and thence to challengers to the Labour Party on the Left and to some single issue parties that we may perhaps add to the 'watch list'.But let us look at the centre-right contenders more closely. In the next couple of weeks, I will be looking at the Far Right before moving on to the Centre and Left.

The Social Democrat Party

The Social Democrat Party is not the same as the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s. This merged with the Liberal Democrats in 1988 but saw a surviving breakaway group implode in 1990 only to be re-formed under yet another breakaway group, emerging as a syncretic combination of centre-left economics and centre-right cultural policies. It is small but cogent in its policies which can be studied in summary in Wikipedia. 

 

It has undertaken an electoral pact with Reform UK in advance of the 2024 Election suggesting that it is positioning itself as the left-wing (socio-economically) of any revival of British populism. In policy terms it broadly meets the criteria laid out in our initial posting with one exception - a strong historic allegiance to NATO which fails to understand perhaps that the NATO of the era of Dennis Healey and David Owen is very much a different animal from the NATO of constant mission creep and complex global alliances that bring the UK back into responsibility for politics and war East of Suez. We consider this naive but not politically stupid since the majority of voters are equally naive. 

 

In all other respects, their policies are sensible. The entire package would not be a million miles away from the normal position of the moderate wing of the old Labour Party in the pre-Thatcher era. Although organisationally it seems quite competent, it is severely underfunded and relies on a dedicated team of outsiders so it really needs to show that it can exploit any populist resentment of the existing political class without being outplayed by the more ruthless Reform UK. Despite doubts about its foreign and defence policy (on the grounds of naivete in the modern world), the SDP gets shortlisted as a potential long term challenger to the dominance of the current bunch of clowns and comic singers. It is, however, a long play. 

 

The position on Ukraine (which we have made a marker during this process) is, in fact, considered and measured. It suggests the SDP have some understanding of NATO's mission creep but it clearly fails to understand the historical context for the invasion. Nevertheless, this position is vastly more intelligent (given the realities of British public ignorance) than that of the rest of the official political class.

 

Reform UK

 

The major contender for changing the structure of politics remains Reform UK, albeit that it is weak without Nigel Farage as Leader. It is successor party in turn to first UKIP and then the single issue The Brexit Party. Each iteration becomes more politically sophisticated and more capable of moving towards some sort of power although the latest version of British populism is largely dependent on the possible collapse of the Tory Party before 2024. 

 

This means that a broad-based single-issue Party (based on leaving the EU) has had to transform itself into a right-wing populist party with a broader base of policy aiming to capture the discontented working class who feel betrayed by both Labour and the Tory elite and the lower middle class Tory vote that simply feels betrayed. The class tensions are evident: they push Reform UK into a mix of right wing economics, aspirational libertarianism and cultural conservatism. 

 

The tension in this is expressed by the difference of position on the marker policy of Ukraine between current leader Richard Tice, who adopts a nationalist 'Western' line suitable for the Johnsonite trogs he needs to attract and Farage, the populist king-in-waiting, whose own public pronouncements show more sophistication and understanding of what is really going on. In other words, Reform UK (which is already capturing disillusioned Tories) is forced into becoming more Tory than it should be in order to get any chance of breaking through to Parliament in sufficient force to ensure proportional representation (which will break the monopoly of power of the three corrupted establishment parties) in, no doubt, cynical alliance with the liberal-Left. 

 

The electoral alliance with the SDP is thus rational because the SDP can theoretically hold more left-wing and state interventionist eurosceptic votes in trust and each can lend the other sufficient of its base to divide non-Leftist political dissent between them. The SDP is the weaker link and Reform UK better organised and financed but Reform UK has to be on the short list for all its faults as the home for more centre-right 'revolutionary' spirits. However, it is hard to see how the SDP could remain allied to Reform UK if the Ticean appeal to discontented Tories results in the adoption of absurd Trussonomics.

 

I would personally regret that Farage seems (understandably) not to wish to return to front-line politics (although his righteous rage at de-banking might indicate a potential change of heart). I find Tice's neo-Johnsonianism faintly ridiculous except as a strategy for smashing the Tory Party, Nevertheless, this is the operation most capable of breaking the spine of the current political structures and getting a debate on change which includes the prospect of a proportional representation decision capable of terminally weakening the three failed 'parties of State' and returning more power to the wider population. 

 

Wikipedia gives again a useful summary of the history and policies of Reform UK. Despite the Thatcherite economics (in contrast to the SDP), not only does it offer sensible policies in other areas but permits some important leeway for national interest economic interventionism as well as constitutional radicalism closer to the position of the Left.

 

Tice's and so the Party's current position on the current international crisis adopts the mythology of the West but remains critical of 'lack of preparedness'. It actually contains wiggle room for a more sophisticated position closer to that of Farage but its purpose is to reassure Johnsonite right-wing trogs in the Tory Party that their idiotic foreign policy will not be disrupted in the hands of Reform UK. This may be unfortunate but it is logical since Reform UK is much less interested in the Eastern bloodlands and pleasing Washington than in national regeneration, keeping out of the EU and democratic reform. It has a Trump aspect though that risks realigning the UK even more firmly with Washington under a populist Presidency.

 

Farage's more intelligent but dissident position on Ukraine can be studied online. Given public sentiment and the mass of propaganda pouring out of the establishment media where we see Tory elites, pro-Europeans and Atlanticists combining on a narrative that must not be questioned, Farage is almost certainly wise to remain in the background on this issue and await events.

 

The National Liberal Party

 

The third on our Stage 3 list is the National Liberal Party which is ideologically attractive as classic liberalism with a strong sense of the importance of national self-determination. It seems to be largely London-focused but organisationally very weak - a classic case of placing ideas ahead of political reality. Reluctantly in some ways, we cannot take it seriously because the likelihood of it making any significant impact even within London is small. 

 

The Alliance for Democracy and Freedom

 

The Alliance for Democracy and Freedom is one of a number of populist right wing parties that have appeared in the wake of Brexit. It appears to represent many of the concerns of the angry lower middle class - eusoscepticism, anti-lockdowns, farming and fisheries concerns. migration, anti-net zero and international aid, support for military veterans combined with a broadly welfarist agenda alongside libertarian economics. What is striking is how many small start-up parties have a leadership cadre made up of ethnic minority British nationalists (see NLP immediately above). 

 

The best way to regard the ADF is as a source of policy ideas (like the NLP , the ADF strikes me as an ideas rather than an organisational party) but largely for the more right wing populist side of the 'revolution'. This is not a serious contender for effecting major change. In addition it is in danger, like many new small right wing parties, of getting trapped in discontents that may be short term in nature when political change is best ensured by hooking activists and voters not into expressions of immediate anger or outrage but into a long term determination to change the conditions of existence, 

 

The Party is strangely silent on recent foreign policy events which may suggest a struggle to square right-wing impulses in the street with what had stood as opposition to any embroilment in European defence. It is probable that there is a serious split in the interpretation of the world between Johnsonites who are essentially Atlanticist Cold Warriors with some notion of 'the West' and Faragists who are essentially nationalist isolationists with a more restricted view of national defence as defence of the nation. 

 

We have seen above how Reform UK has to try and square these policy tensions in order to attract Johnsonites while keeping Faragists queiscent in order to gain power. Whatever the AFD believes, it looks as if another response to these tensions, in a country whose consent for NATO expansion has been thoroughly manufactured by state psychological operations and the media, is one of silence until it all blows over. That, of course, is not good enough when there is a direct correlation between the central problem of the cost of living crisis and an inept foreign policy. This cannot be taken seriously for organisational reasons but also because of this evident failure of nerve during the 'polycrisis'.

 

Reclaim Party

 

Reclaim is yet another small populist party which tends to give primacy to cultural politics, notably freedom of speech. It might be called more Faragist than Reform UK nowadays but it is clear that there are good relations between the two parties. It might be considered a vehicle for pulling together 'culture wars' activists for a voice in any emergent Reform UK-led populist success. It could be argued that it is part of an informal coalition that includes the centre-left SDP as well as Reform where differences of emphasis and economic policy are overridden by a broadly shared ideology of national self-determination and a cultural politics geared to 'British working and lower middle class norms'. 

 

It gets an honourable mention (see our introduction) and a place on the short list as a potential home for those concerned primarily with cultural restoration rather than economic policy and on the basis that it is part of the 'transvaluation of values' required to contain and dismantle our national security state and its strategies of manufactured consent.

 

Laurence Fox, founder and leader of Reclaim, easily passes the Ukraine test if only for causing total outrage at The Indie for having the most intelligent reaction yet to the deification of Zelensky. In this sense he is a foreign policy Faragist, will refuse to apologise (which in itself endears him to me in an age of liberal buttock-baring at the first sign of offence) and acts as a possible counter-balance to the growing troglodyte Tory element transferring to Reform UK. 

 

The Libertarian Party

 

The Libertarian Party is what is says on the tin and represents a right-wing non-populist middle class position of small government and low taxes. It has made little political progress and is not taken enormously seriously except as the representation of an intellectual position. If you are a libertarian of this type, you are probably a member of the Tory Right already. 

The Libertarian Party certainly does not pass the Ukraine test with its somewhat militarist concept of a citizen conscript army on the Swiss model - these policies too are indistinguishable from the far reaches of the establishment Tory Right. The reference to this policy has unfortunately disappeared from the internet so it may have changed since the late Spring.

The English Constitution Party

The English Constitution Party is a right wing English nationalist populist party but committed to democracy (it might pass for the Far Right 'Andrew Bridgen' wing of the Tory Party) It gives the initial impression of being primarily for rather cross pensioners and it is anti-vaxxer and anti-immigration. It is on the verge of being classed as Far Right (which we will deal with separately). There is as much of an argument for English nationalism as for Scottish nationalism so it should not be disregarded on those grounds but only as something that marginalises itself with its own policies.

 

Curiously, with its radical anti-globalist agenda which merges with that of some left-wing parties (to be studied later), the ECP actually passes the Ukraine test but swings too far in the direction of conspiracy theory, almost certainly because of its interpretation of NWO control over Ukraine and extreme view of the national self-determination rights of the Donbas, Crimea etcet. as Russians. Athough its position was originally published in 2014, it was re-published to make a point in January before the invasion so we do not know exactly what the position is on the invasion itself.

 

The Populist Party

 

The Populist Party is a new lower middle class anti-globalist right wing Green Party which has a strong localist and ecolgical approach to politics but interprets this through espousing some right wing policies including immigration control and protection of the green belt. It is hard to judge what appeal, if any, this Party may come to have so we are putting it on a 'watch list'. Logically it is a threat to rural Tory votes and, if it grew, one might expect the informal Reform UK coalition to adopt its policies or find some other way to appropriate it. We can find no reference to Ukraine on its web site but its stance of armed neutrality suggests a critical attitude towards NATO. 

 

The Heritage Party

 

Finally we must note another London-based right wing populist party led by a partially ethnic minority British politician, The Heritage Party, which emerged out of the Brexit Party. Accusations of racism directed at the bulk of the populist wing of the Right look increasingly absurd in relation to the facts of their activist memberships. Their candidate actually beat Reform UK in the Hartlepool By-Election so they should not be dismissed outright but the anti-vaxxer position ensures that they will be classed as Far Right by the media regardless of any other policy positions.

They undoubtedly pass the Ukraine test with a very clear set of policies that actually link sanctions and the cost of living issue and propose a reasonably long term policy strategywith a strong No Net Zero focus.

 

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 2 - Categorising Our Targets

Given (to recapitulate Part I) that none of the currently significant political parties in the UK appears to be capable of dealing with the our extended national crisis, our mission was to research all parties that existed on the Electoral Commission, weed out some categories as irrelevant and prepare short lists of possible candidates for replacements of either the Tory Party or the Labour Party or both without allowing their current equally second-rate rivals (Green, Liberal Democrat, SNP) to displace them. The alternatives had to meet certain fairly loose policy criteria (see Part I) and be at least theoretically capable of sufficient organisation to make a difference.

 

For convenience, I repeat that I excluded: a) local resident-based parties (although the Independent Network may be included under 3. Process-Driven Parties below), b) all trivial or one person parties despite the temptation to consider the late Count Binface possibly more useful to the nation than most MPs, c) single issue parties with four exceptions for their gadfly possibilities, d) parties of the liberal left clearly committed to unravelling Brexit and falling into the open maw of mindless pro-NATO positions (which excludes nearly all Green and middle class graduate centre-left operations), e) essentialist right-wing parties that believe in the mythology of the Christian West, were Christian nationalist or white supremacist or were obsessed with cultural politics at the expense of socio-economic reality. Interestingly this latter sort of nonsense can be found deep within the Tory Party which has elements that are more Far Right than some organisations generally regarded as Far Right - of which more may be said later in the series.

 

This left us with four large categories worth further investigation in order to eliminate more operations as well as allowing us to give honourable mentions to some single issue gadflies. Four or five single issue parties are likely to be noted but without any expectations that they will be more than change some attitudes in other parties over time. The four main categories are: 

 

1. Around nine broadly centre-right challengers to the Tory status quo which look as if they may meet the policy challenges of the day (I have included the Social Democrat Party in this Group although it might class itself as centre-left and as a challenge to the Labour status quo). The other most noticeable name on the list is Reform UK but this is in the query basket because under Richard Tice it has appeared (so far) to be more concerned with attracting Johnsonite Tories (precisely the worst sort of people as far as the national interest is concerned given the abysmal failures of his administration) whereas Nigel Farage had been able to maintain a much stronger independent challenge to the establishment Tory Party. The very recent resignation of Boris Johnson from Parliament suggests a very serious risk that the chances of a dynamic challenge to the existing system from the democratic alternative Right could be weakened in the effort to win his populist vote by mimicking his policies and attitudes. We will deal with that later.

 

2. You may be surprised to find that I am looking at six allegedly Far Right parties even though I would guess nearly all will be counted out eventually for 'essentialism' about the nation, Christianity or race. This is because, while I could easily exclude most Far Right organisations for the reasons already suggested, my research suggested a) some of these groupings had some interesting ideas that should not be dismissed outright simply because the liberal mainstream media had decided to traduce them, b) the term Far Right is imposed on some of them (and centre-right challengers) as a political warfare operation by liberals and should be resisted as manipulative and, in some cases, false and c) what was an unacceptable organisation some thirty or forty years ago may have transformed significantly (evolved) in the meantime. I doubt whether any will survive the final cut but they should be given the chance. I found far more 'evolution' (from essentialism to populism) on the Far Right than the Far Left, much of which seems to have ossified somewhere around 1989. 

 

3. We have a third group of seven process-driven operations who seem to have no policies other than democratic transformation. I am deeply suspicious of some of these as stalking horses for left-liberalism but my greatest doubt lies in the belief that piddling around with democratic processes (other than proportional representation) will solve anything fundamental or deal with the crisis of our time which is the manipulation of minds by centres of socio-economic power and the need for political organisations that are committed to clear policies that can be explained to voters and gain their assent under conditions of full information. Nevertheless this curious liberal phenomenon of believing in process requires further investigation and may (if its policies were more intelligent) change one day the prospects for at least one of the failed mainstream parties which sometimes does have determinable policies beyond its slavish adherence to European federalism - the Liberal Democrats. As it things stand, either I will sweep away this group after closer study or produce an analysis with links so that the 'political engineers' amongst my readers who still believe that process is what politics is all about can come to a view.

 

4. The largest group is the most unstable. It compromises 12 separate Left and Far Left organisations, In policy terms, it is probably the group with which I have most intellectual and emotional sympathy. However, a) half of these seem to be groupuscules trapped in ancient ideology and b) those that are not have a tendency to drift into the worst sort of liberal leftism as they grow and as graduate middle class activist engagement and influence increase. I would hope to whittle these down to perhaps two or three that look most likely to be both the most adaptive to socio-economic and political reality and the least likely to become the play thing of the usual suspects in the petty graduatocracy that is at the heart of the run-down of the nation. The internationalism of this group is no problem insofar as its ideal remains inter-nationalism and is cast in terms of co-operating nation states against imperialism and against process-driven liberal federalisms. This must also require some analysis of the role of the disenfranchised Corbynistas who are as dangerous in their potential to neuter the Left as the Johnson populists are on the Right. If anything is likely to endorse the power of the failed Centre in the eyes of an exhausted and demoralised public, it is the emergence of graduate left wing activists and petit-bourgeois Tories as the leading representatives of an alternative politics.

 

The next stage is to separate out these categories, analyse each and report on them separately. The final short list will be drawn from those that survive this process.

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 1 - Introduction

There is widespread discontent across the so-called 'West' with the workings of 'liberal democracy'.This is not a turn from democracy by any means but rather a sense that a political elite, buttressed by media and institutional structures disconnected from the voting population, is unresponsive and incapable of running extremely complex and interconnected societies. It is a crisis of representative democracy when representation no longer accords with public sentiment and the machinery that the representatives are supposed to manage on our behalf is out of their control. The lack of responsiveness is thus two-fold - our representatives have become creatures of a system they no longer fully understand and they have lost the will to represent those who elect them as they wish to be represented.

However, this is not going to be yet another impotent moan from another atomised individual in an impotent population. Such moans are simply ranting expressions of frustration and they generally change nothing. Atomisation means that there are few levers for individuals to exert power over the political process especially where all the institutional structures through which influence might be exerted are equally detached from us through professional bureaucracies and managements with no strategic national or community purpose - and that includes trades unions, churches and, above all, the five established major parties (if we include the Greens and the SNP). In all such cases professionalised bureaucracies and closed elites relate to each other within a similar conforming framework and compete for their own purposes - the survival aims of themselves. 

The only solution - other than an equally impotent strategy of violence such as we saw in the Capitol Hill Riots or the street explosions in France over pensions reform or protests against the placement of illegal immigrants in particular localities regardless of local wishes - is organisation but how do you organise resistance and reform when the agents and institutional structures of those claiming to reform society are themselves part of the problem, themselves embedded in a collapsing and dysfunctional system? One solution is stop thinking in terms of the value of each successive election where Tweedledum is invariably replaced by an equally incompetent Tweedledee and where politics has become a circus in which you cheer on one side only because they appear to be the lesser evil than the other side. The political cycle repeats like a broken national dishwasher where the dishes still come out dirty at the end.

The instinct of many people is just to rant away on social media and think that is politics. Meanwhile the mainstream media paint a distorted picture of reality and then try to undermine what little functionality is left in the system through sustained trivia. Many others are steadily withdrawing from the system in distaste no longer wishing to be complicit in the farce that is contemporary liberal democracy. I did not bother to vote in the recent local elections for that latter reason - my vote was futile since all it allowed me was a choice of four similar representations of dysfunctionality in a system that was already fixed in favour of our local bureaucracy and centralised authority. We are leaning towards the situation under the Soviets where 'contested' elections merely meant choosing between paper candidates amenable to current ideological 'reality'.

I have identified three fundamental flaws in late capitalist liberal democracy and they are not 'capitalism' (despite what the Left likes to believe) or 'the deep state' as conspiracy (despite what many Right populists want us to believe). They are the corrupting effects of the businesses we call media and higher education, the bureaucratism of a state machinery and institutional structures whose prime purpose is sclerotically to preserve the system rather than transform it and the decadent state of the British political party which is now little more than a brand alternating between factions where the factions have no idea how to run anything effectively and are wholly disconnected from the populations they purport to represent. Much of this combines into the surprisingly large interconnected 'new elite' identified by Matthew Goodwin but the problem is even more structural than he implies. This analysis may unfold further in future blog posts but is not the purpose of the current series.

The question to hand is what can be done to counter control of the machinery of government by a failed 'educated' but incompetent and narcissistic factionalised elite whilst ensuring that democracy actually exists rather than is just a name used as rhetorical cover for the current playground of activists, lobbyists, managers and political professionals. Time and time again, we come up against the core of the problem that no one will face - Parliament and the way our representatives are chosen and are accountable at the point where legislation is made and the executive and its policies are approved, crutinised and controlled. Above all, it is Parliament that has failed and is failing.

This is not the time to go all 'liberal nerd' and come up with weird and wonderful 'solutions' based on constitutional tinkering. Citizen's Assemblies, for example, are just shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. I would have no problem with FPTP if it delivered competent, tough representatives who could explain reality to the people and yet enforce the wishes of the people within reality on the State. At the moment FPTP is not delivering and it looks as if it cannot deliver because of structural issues related to the nature of the political party, its choice of candidates and its supine approach to the media and its own ideologues. Proportional representation reluctantly becomes a necessity to break the power of the existing powers and let new blood into the decision-making process. Primaries look as if they could remove power from committee cliques manipulated from the centre. AI might be helpful in elucidating what the people want and in political education but none of these solve the essential problem which is a cultural failure that could take decades to reverse and where it may already be too late.

And this is the point. We are now talking about a long game. The 2024 election will be fought over by the usual suspects and whoever wins is going to be dysfunctional and incompetent because the system has been built to be so. Any political programme to restore the nation along democratic lines is a long play involving a deliberate over-turning of the existing form of liberal democracy (notably the parties) and weakening of the power of the current cultural elite and media alongside improved mass political education that by-passes our half-witted and trivialising media caste. This requires the courage to put forward alternative ideas with the aim of shifting cultural and political power away from the existing elite (accepting the dreadful necessity of occasional compromises) in a process that may not bear fruit until 2030 or even 2035 during which period the existing sclerotic and bankrupt elite will have ample opportunity to 'fix' the system through regulation, legislation and psychological operations to block change.

So, from where will a peaceful democratic and non-violent revolution emerge (with always the option of street action if the system fixes go over a red line? The negative observers who say this is not possible must bear in mind that national democrats are in the position of the progenitors of the Chartists in the 1830s, the Labour Movement in the 1880s, the suffragettes in the 1890s and the Greens in the 1970s - and yet all those movements achieved a considerable amount in the subsequent fifty tears. Of course, democracy, the labour movement, feminism and the greens have all horribly degenerated in recent years but all four developments were socially constructive and, no doubt, national democracy would degenerate equally by the end of the century if it succeeded. The point is that national democracy and improved mass political education are needed now and, if a movement eventually create its own nemesis having done its job too well, this is how our species works - it fights for progressive change, the change becomes sclerotic, the sclerosis creates a challenge and the challenge becomes the next progressive change until it too needs replacement. 

In this series, we are going to avoid the nostrums of specific tinkering reform because the point is to get a thousand flowers to bloom, to break the stranglehold of a failed elite (or rather network of interlocking elites) and then to cherry pick the winning combinations for a national democratic revolution that will synthesise what actually serves our nation and population from both the current Left and Right. So let us start with one of the great problematics of our time - the political party.  This is because only the political party, tragically, has the potential organisation and will and approval (through the Electoral Commission) to displace the clowns and comic singers of the five daft parties that we are stuck with.

Of course, we must not be naive. The alternative parties will also have their fair share of clowns and comic singers but our aim is not to change humanity (which will always promote clowns and comic singers to the top of its system out of ignorance and laziness) but to change the system within which humanity expresses itself. We need clowns and comic singers who can actually make us laugh rather than rant like a BBC Radio 4 'comedian' or send tens of thousands into a meat grinder like the President of Ukraine and who can sing the songs the people like to hear. We need to be able to switch them off or get them off the stage quickly if they lack talent. We need, in fact, a creative revolution in politics much as we get such revolutions periodically in popular culture.

So, I decided to analyse all the parties registered by the Electoral Commission (except the plethora of local residents' associations, the vast bulk of single issue loons who do not understand how politics actually works and the obvious comedic loons who probably do but are just in it for the laughs) and then assess them on just seven broad if controversial grounds:-

1. Their general position on Ukraine/NATO - do they see the dangerous farce that is 'defence of the West' and how it is leading us towards penury and possibly war? If there is anything that demonstrates best the sheer incompetence of a ruling elite, it is the conduct of an ideological international relations strategy based on populist sentiment and ignorance about the actual conditions that led to the war in the first place.

 

2. Do they understand that a strong State is required to control borders and organised crime and that only a strong State will deal with the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century - including mass migration encouraged by weak-minded liberals and greedy business interests and the rise of artificial intelligence? In other words, do they get that a strong state requires the recapture of sovereignty by the people through the recapture of Parliament regardless of liberal ideology.

 

3. Will they maintain Brexit as an exercise in national self-determination? This is not about Remain or Leave but about democratic respect for the results of the 2016 Referendum and the failure of the bulk of the political class to respect popular democracy and implement the will of the people with systematic determination because that is what the population voted for.

 

4. Will they challenge the negative stance of our cultural elites to our inherited identities and free choices and maintain the right of all to dissent from prevailing elite ideology? This is important because, holding the levers of power, the existing system is trying to hide its dysfunctional nature behind ever more authoritarian and manipulative measures through ever more intrusive regulation and legislation with the paradoxical and self interested connivance of the mainstream media.

 

5. Are they committed to building a prosperous 'one nation' where public service is fairly rewarded, public services are fairly funded but efficiently run (not for the benefit of the managerial classes) and where the genuinely vulnerable are cared for on the basis of an open and entrepreneurial economy in which, in turn, energy and innovation are rewarded? In other words, do they have a sense of the 'commonwealth' which means a necessary war on poverty, ignorance and disadvantage and respect for the working classes and their values as much as the middle class and theirs.

 

6. Do they understand that resilience and eco-sustainability is a national issue and is being neglected in the rush to signal virtue at a global level with inappropriate extreme business-oriented Net Zero policies? Globalist solutions should be restricted only to the essential as direct state-to-state negotiations rather than be subject to huge and foolish international bureaucratic interventions that take no account of the realities of power in the world - our useless leaders have ended up not with the world government they dreamed of but two armed blocs competing at the expense of the developing world and at the cost of our own peoples.

 

7. Are they organisationally capable in the long run of displacing our incompetent and increasingly corrupted political class no matter how small and insignificant they may be at the moment?

 

This series of postings will unfold over the next few weeks and cover as many segments of the political market as follows with as much objectivity as I can muster. The process will be controversial because I am not going to accept common media assessments of the so-called Far Left or Far Right but will investigate their merits and demerits on their own account. When the project is completed (indeed as it progresses) I hope to have provided an eventual short list of candidates for engagement and support ranked in some reasonable order. 

 

I think we can safely say that the Tories, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the SNP will not be on that list (even if I was Scottish). All five of those parties are 'busted' for different reasons - the Tories are provenly inept at almost everything they have touched under successive Prime Ministers, Labour has become a grim exercise in power-grabbing under a second-rate cypher, the Liberal Democrats lied to their student vote over a decade ago and lying is in their constitutional make-up as opportunists, the Greens have turned into neo-conservatives in their desperate play for elite respectability and the SNP, well the SNP ... 'nuff said!

 

There are likely to be perhaps six or seven candidates for engagement, a shopping list or menu if you like, with at least one to suit any particular revolutionary taste - and, eventually, one of these will displace the Tories and one of these will displace Labour and either Labour or the Tories will displace the Liberal Democrats. It may take many decades although perhaps not at the rate required by a country crumbling under the most inept elite since the last days of the Roman Empire. The key takeaway is that it is time for all of us to consider detaching ourselves from the parties we have been told to support for so long as electoral cannon fodder or out of a ridiculous tribal loyalty some of us might better reserve for Arsenal or Aston Villa and find opportunities for new parties that can compete and struggle to transform our nation through transforming the terms on which we, the people 'do politics'.