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.