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 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'.

Some Friendly Advice to Hysterical 'Liberals'

What is really fascinating about the last day or so has been the lesson that 'liberals', both London-based and American, appear not to like democracy very much, especially when it comes up with a decision of which they do not approve.

The current Remain response is to try to overturn a democratic decision by fair means or foul - by a replay ('best of three' or keep going until they win?) based on claims of lies from people who lied, by Parliamentary coup d'etat or by Lords blocking. What next? Calls for the Army to step in or for the Bundeswehr to be 'invited in' to liberate us.

60% of Scotland does not want to be part of the United Kingdom anyway and the Northern Irish nationalists, well, we know what they want, so the democratic vote in England and Wales was not 52% but much more than that.

It was a decision made not by racist Morlocks looking to munch on the effete Eloi in the universities but autonomous working class and middle class individuals, debating the issues, ignoring fear and slander, and coming to a view on what was in their and their country's best interest.

I really do wonder at the mind-set of these people. The European Project is truly proven here to be more important than national democracy. Or is this propaganda just coming from people nicely immersed in the gravy train and terrified of the plundering coming to an end. They really do seem to want a manipulative dictatorship of the intelligentsia. They really are anti-democrats.

Our side's reaction has (up to this point) been emolliative and magnanimous in victory. We have remained relatively silent. We have urged not only calm but unity in the national interest. We are seeking a negotiated withdrawal that is amicable and retains as much of 'European values' as possible. We have only asked that the final say on policy be ours because we have a democratic mandate.

And what do we get in return? Hysteria. Aggression. Slander. Attempts to mount a coup (not just in the nation but in the Labour Party). I have seen what amounts to a racist (or rather classist) cartoon apparently labelling 17m or so people as skinheads in, of all places, an Israeli newspaper - you would think they would know better, wouldn't you?

What should our reaction be? How long should we put up with this before ending our current demobilisation and pulling our troops off the reserve list to undertake a second campaign in which lessons will have been learned and no quarter can be given.

You see, our attitude to a war of aggression on us is to say - bring it on but only if you must! We don't want it but if you insist on it, we will respond. A majority of the English and Welsh people are neither racists nor fools.

They will be angered at the patronising attitudes of urban intellectuals who have been lining their pockets at their expense for far too long. I mean, how many cultural studies experts exactly do we need to export goods and services? They will be even more angered by a metropolitan political class that has failed and now purports to tell them how to think.

We who fight alongside them act as a restraint. We want peace, harmony, the opportunity to build a better and fairer and more prosperous Britain in collaboration with all the reasonable elements in the political class. But if you declare war on the people, you declare war on us, their intellectual allies.

A war of workers and intellectuals against a supine and weak, and failed, liberal political establishment can end in only one result - if not now, then in five years, ten years, twenty years - because we believe there is no value greater than national democratic sovereignty as a precondition of individual freedom and long term prosperity.

Please do not underestimate the sheer force, the cold determination, the rationality of our position - or that we will not harden over time.

So, a piece of advice. Lay off the patronising attitudes. Lay off the aggression. Work with us to build a pluralistic, tolerant, independent Britain that is fundamentally democratic and is ready to work with and not against the European nations to build a better world. But if you want to push us all into a cultural civil war, that will be your decision and not ours and you must take the consequences.

Independence Day: Resurgence

Last night I had genuinely not expected to wake up to a Britain in the first stages of national independence - and nor did many others. Many leading Leave activists were predicting a Leave vote of 40-45%. Although I was not so negative, I thought Remain would push us down to 47-48%, respectable but, as Harry Oppenheimer once said, '51% is control'.

On the Left, my friend on the Morning Star editorial team was getting angry at what he thought were lost opportunities and the capture of the debate over 'free movement of labour' by the Right. Later that evening on the BBC, it was heartening to see John McDonnell at least try to address this concern where no Kinnockite or Blairite  would - perhaps there is hope for the Labour Party after all.

I dropped in on the Leave.EU Post-Referendum Party and nearly the first person I saw was a chipper Arron Banks who told me that private polling of 10,000 people had predicted a 52:48 vote in favour of Leave and that the swing would be produced by an angry industrial or post-industrial Northern working class but that London and Scotland would counter that somewhat. He turned out to be right.

I kept an open mind but no one else I spoke to at the event (I left early to 'be with my family' at what might have been the political equivalent of armageddon) took the poll seriously. This is how gloomy Leave had become after the onslaught of the entire Liberal Establishment, the manipulations of Project Fear, the viciousness of the Labour-driven Project Slander and the calculated sentiment of Project Vigil.

And then I awoke (my family remained for the duration) to victory and to the prospect of sunshine, a day off and a visit to the cinema to see the afternoon performance of 'Independence Day: Resurgence'. What had originally been an ironic consolation will now be an unalloyed pleasure regardless of the quality of the film. Suddenly all the planning for the consequences of defeat was no longer required. There was only one task ahead - to 'defend the revolution' by any means necessary.

Since Remain had behaved so appallingly in the last ten days of the Campaign and still appears not to get (at least on its Left) why it had lost, we Leavers must act without any weakness of will or false attempt at a reconciliation with people who have bullied and lied but, above all, shown utter cavalier lack of respect for the independent decision-making powers of the British people. The people who had been ignored and treated with disrespect had fought back. If Labour does not learn its lesson (and it shows every sign of being incapable of doing so) what happened in Scotland will happen to in the North of England.

There is no reason to explore the reasons why Remain lost (because, let us be clear, Leave only won because Remain lost) but only to note that the alienation of the Leave Left started and ended with an atmosphere of bullying and disrespect that was evident as early as April. Left Leavers will not be easily cowed now. But there is something more disturbing to note - Leave managed to tip itself over the edge because of the organisational drive and activist dynamism of UKIP.

That is just a fact on the ground. The irresponsible abandonment of the Northern post-industrial working class by the Labour Party (John Mann was visibly angry about this on the BBC last night very early in the game) had handed it over not to wet liberal middle class patronising bastards in the centre but to national populists. National populists are democrats but they can and will ally with similar forces across Europe who are speaking for the abandoned classes of Europe while the middle classes enrich themselves on globalisation. And these democratic forces are not socialist or liberal, some may not even be democratic.

That is the real change to consider - the utter failure of the Radical Centre, whether Kinnockite, Blairite, Liberal Democrat (long since busted) or Cameronian to share power with the mass, bring prosperity, share difficulties fairly and evenly but, above all, not to disrepect a working class they clearly despise openly and sometimes humiliate. The failure of the Left has been the opportunity for the Right. Remain's debacle is down to the soft and liberal left, not the Right which is only learning to be politically effective year by year because the Left is run by fools.

The revolution (so to speak) is not the independence of Britain (which is simply a restoration of the right order of things and an opportunity to make change happen) but the potential for the overturning of a failed and arrogant elite. This elite presumed to speak for the people despite the dodginess of its hold over democratic procedures. Even now prominent Centrists regret the very fact of a referendum because it came up with the 'wrong result'. Now that is arrogance!

Democracy is an absolute value and yet the democrats are now on the Right. This should worry everyone who claims to liberal or socialist values. It is the 'real' Left that has to organise now both to challenge UKIP within the framework of national independence (for the sake of liberalism and socialism) yet, if necessary, to work alongside the independence Right against the Radical Centre (for the sake of democracy) and either to force Labour to return to its roots or get out of the way.

Some recognition is due to Left activists who fought the good fight against the odds but picking out names would be invidious. They know who they are. They would have fought on even if Remain had inveigled itself to victory through its command of the media and government. Life is good today but it is only the first day of a struggle to make the prospect of a paper independence a material reality that will bring a fairer Britain.

Panel Contribution - Initiatives of Change Conference: The Middle East Migration Crisis - Genesis and Responses – London, June 20th, 2016

Seven minutes is not a great deal of time to provide a creative solution to our biggest current challenge – the mass migration not only of the dispossessed by war but of the global poor under conditions of globalisation. The crisis is not just one of the Middle East and Europe. It is a global crisis. I have time just to propose one big political shift of emphasis.

TPPR is primarily an adviser to the private sector on the risk implications of changes in our political situation. We have been much preoccupied with Brexit which comes to a head on Thursday. The Brexit Debate contains important lessons for us. Basically, the liberal middle classes want idealism from their leafy suburbs while many working class people would like some compassion directed at their situation instead.

The cultural idealist in the metropolis who has done well out of globalisation has suddenly faced a revolt from half his fellows. The latter have realised, perhaps too late, that they have one shot at recovering their old cultural status before, not migrants, but the liberal middle classes in all its manifestations confirm their minority status in their own land.

Migration is too often framed as one of humanitarian duty against racism and xenophobia. But it is also one of class, of classes that see themselves (whether petit-bourgeois East Coast shopkeeper or working class Northerner) not merely as the general losers in the globalisation game but as on the edge of permanent insecurity and exploitation because of it.

The numbers of migrants is always exaggerated in political discourse but this truth is often used as an excuse to try to dismiss complainants as irrational or vicious. In fact, their protest is rational on several grounds.

First, the flow of migrants is increasing. They are not fools in the belief that assimilated migrants will come to be a permanent voting bloc working with the liberal-minded middle classes to steer resources ever more in the direction of those with the political power. The fears are anticipatory and correct.

Second, they see free movement of labour, in association with the capture of their political movements by the middle classes, including the official parties of the Left, as a means of atomising them and driving down wage rates but it also observably increases competition for scarce resources especially housing.

Many working people see what happens when unscrupulous exploitative business takes up the opportunity of cheap labour without having to invest in social infrastructure, the social capital needed to sustain the communities into which the migrants are also inserted without much social support other than the family, clan or tribe.

Third, the average working class reaction to people from faraway places and different cultures begins with being tolerant (although, of course there are a minority of fascists in these communities) but resentment grows – yet not necessarily because of the migrant …

When the dominant culture – the world of government and the BBC to oversimplify – engages in what the local community thinks of as an intrusive positive discrimination in which its own history and values are disrespected, it is this disrespect, anticipatory of humiliation, which becomes the problem.

The best of the Left has always tried to point out that an exploited white working class person and an exploited migrant have the same problem at heart. In general, the British working class has not been averse to this. Many of these issues would certainly be less salient if the globalising system had not resulted in an economic crash in 2008 in which the higher you were up the middle class food chain, the less likely you were to be hurt.

But now we are in the economic doldrums. Large numbers of people feel disrespected and under threat. Nor are they are wrong in seeing their problems increase if cheap labour is to be the engine that tries to keep a failing economic system alive until the next innovation-led economic cycle many years away.

And the creative solution to the long term problem of refugee and even economic migrant acceptability? We step back and give ourselves a three, perhaps even seven, year breathing space in which the West allows itself to put up some sufficient short term barriers to totally free movement of labour in order to buy itself valuable time.

Why? To allow the human-all-too-human to adjust to new conditions and prepare for the next economic cycle. To reconstruct a culture of respect for the ordinary person whether native or migrant. To put idealistic liberals back in their box as the dominant political species. To put in place the necessary managed system of migration control.

The positive results would be a breathing space for more toleration, less populism, more acceptance of those migrants who are here, the ending of an exploitative labour market, the political consensus for vital social investment overseas and the eventual widespread social acceptance of a restoration of moderate managed migration with an adequate infrastructure in place to handle it.