#58 What next ?
DR HUGH WILLBOURN
Good news from the UK: the legacy parties have both taken a beating. Congratulations to Sarah Pochin and Nigel Farage.
Bad news from the UK: they still have four more years of Uniparty misgovernment ahead. Starmer et al will carry on the destruction started by Blair and faithfully continued by the Tory party for fourteen dreadful years. Nonetheless Reform has won an important battle on the electoral front. Now they face the long, brutal war to make real change happen.
Blair’s Blob will fight back. They will launch strikes, lawfare and endless non-compliance tactics to defend their privileges and luxury beliefs. And they still have another four years to mandate folly in Westminster. We can see the level of intransigence of the Blob in the recent publication by an NHS Trust in defiance of the recent Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender.
Clearly if Reform go on to National Government in 2029 they face a gargantuan task. Mr Farage will find himself elected captain of the Titanic half an hour after she has struck the iceberg. Furthermore, to extend the metaphor, he will have to contend with the crew he inherits claiming that scientific consensus has determined the iceberg does not exist. But the situation in the UK is so dire that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore it. It has become acceptable to say that we are screwed. Decay is everywhere, on ordinary streets in ordinary places. The moral, social and physical decline will accelerate. Violence will soon be as commonplace as shoplifting on the boarded-up High Street.
The dangers, the turbulence and the conflicts are not confined to formerly Great Britain.
Formerly Irish Ireland is disintegrating too. France, Germany, and Romania are actively undermining their own social contracts. Throughout the West, regardless of political affiliation, Governments have taken sensible concerns, analysed them with narrow, dysfunctional criteria and ended up with destructive policies. The policies are set without regard to context or consequences and they are always structured by abstract goals.
Abstraction knows no boundaries so abstract, ideological ‘solutions’ are asserted in every context, in every field, in every industry, in every artistic endeavour, in every village, town, city and nation. Everywhere that abstractions, from Anti-racism to Net Zero, are prioritized over specific, contextual solutions the results are eventually, invariably, hideous.
Well-connected grifters cash-in, everyone else loses.
All of the above is frightening, but the situation is worse than that. So much that is dreadful is happening so fast that we don’t have time to parse the consequences of one catastrophe before another is upon us. Yesterday’s disasters – the vaccine injuries, the collapse of education and the suborning of science – slide into the background as the spotlight falls on yet another incident of cretinous policing, gender lunacy, democratic subversion or diversity absurdity.
Almost every action of Government is damaging. In the UK the public sector is driven by cult-ish beliefs and self-interest. Young people have been gifted a monstrous national debt to keep their abusers in luxury retirement. No wonder they are underwhelmed by the idea of work. We have suffered for approximately seventy five years from the encroachment of ideologies. From Maynard Keynes to Susie Green ideologies have been taken more seriously than concrete reality. The consequences are huge national debt, massive population change, institutional corruption, educational subversion, child abuse and boarded-up high streets.
These ideologies are built-in to the world view of the bureaucratic class so that they do not see the world as we do. Whitehall is a palace of delusions with each directive curated by diligent civil servants who have been trained not to question the procedures they enact. Perhaps occasionally, in their verdant gardens on a Sunday afternoon, contemplating their return to policies, projects and Gantt charts on the morrow, they wonder to themselves what they are doing …
To see our future look to San Francisco, Beirut and Johannesburg. The enormity of the situation makes it difficult to grasp. And to see the scale of it, the range of it, not even the whole of it, without being overwhelmed by depression is ever more difficult.
If Reform, or any other party, are going to turn things around they need to understand the problem is not just waste, grift and wokery. The essence of the problem is that the vast majority of our elected and appointed governors have distorted perceptions. They don’t just disagree with ordinary people about facts. Their entire world view is shaped by abstractions. Where you and I see choosing the best candidate for the job, they see racism. Where we see voyeuristic men in toilets they see liberation. Where we see weather, they see doom.
To these people no context is determinative. All situations are merely instances of generalisations. This is a profound distortion of perception. None of us, of course, can claim to see things perfectly, but equally we must not deny that these dominant misapprehensions are maleficent.
Hence the necessary changes are not just fiscal, legal and social. They are philosophical and perceptual. We need to promote genuine pragmatism and a way of thinking that does not assume the primacy of abstract categories. This is more than a paradigm shift. We need to overthrow the dominance of paradigmatic thinking. We need to stop making policies and start applying principles appropriately in each context. This is not easy. It will be difficult and mistakes will be made. But at least some of the time we will do the right thing.
The ancient metaphor of the Ship of State was fitting. A wise leader knows how little they can predict and hence how fallible are policies. He or she sets a course and deals with trouble as and when it arises. We need the pragmatism of a helmsman and the guidance of principle.
Reform will best serve the nation if it rejects the Uniparty’s centralised follies and reduces policies to a minimum. It can campaign nationally on national issues and trust its excellent new councillors to find sensitive solutions to local problems. This is a good time to show the world a better way to govern.
-o-
I explore the genesis and dangers of abstract thinking in my book, “The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it”. It is accessible and entertaining. According to a recent review, “This book is worth the time of pretty much everyone in the world. It’s as close as possible to spending hours of your free time with somebody interesting, bright and gentle, who relates to you a lot of stories … The most pleasant audio book this reviewer has ever listened to.”
It is available by clicking here, (see also further reviews) and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.
This article (#58 What next ?) was created and published by Hugh Willbourn and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
Even in ‘boring’ British politics, anything can happen now
Reform’s triumph in these elections confirms that in the UK, as across Europe, the old political order is finished.
MICK HUME COLUMNIST
The remarkable success of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the English local elections confirms, as noted by spiked editor Tom Slater, that the spirit of the Brexit revolt is still alive and kicking. The collapse of support for both Labour and the Conservatives also showed that, in one sense, British politics is becoming closer to Europe’s. And that’s more bad news for the (ironically pro-EU) establishment parties.
Across the continent in recent decades, the ‘mainstream’ parties have suffered dramatic declines or even disappeared altogether – especially since the populist insurrection started turning European politics on its head.
Italy’s long-dominant Christian Democrats went into the same dustbin of history as the rival Communist Party. In Germany, the Christian Democrats / Social Democrats duopoly that almost monopolised postwar politics is now clinging together for dear life, the parties barely able to muster a majority of votes between them. Only in Britain, we were assured, did the old two-party order continue to hold sway. But that superficial stability was an illusion.
The Brexit referendum result in 2016, followed by the victory of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the 2019 European electionsand the emergence of Reform in last year’s UK General Election, showed that things were changing here, too. The victory of Farage’s insurrectionary movement in this week’s parliamentary by-election, local and mayoral elections has confirmed that the old order is coming to an end and there is no going back.
We now know that, even in ‘boring’ old British politics, anything can happen. The populist revolt is great for those of us who want to see political change. But it is a dire prospect for the Labour and Tory parties who built, and rely on, the staid status quo.
The closer you look at the results, the worse it gets for the UK political establishment. For example, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives lost 15 of the local councils that they had controlled before the elections. Impossible as it might seem, things have got even worse for the Tories since their General Election drubbing last July.
For its part, Keir Starmer’s Labour, which won a ‘landslide’ only last summer, achieved about the same level of support as the Greens last week. The combined Tory-Labour results amounted to about one-third of the votes cast – an historic low.
Worse, as top poll-watcher Sir John Curtice has noted, support for both the Conservatives and Labour is falling more heavily in places where they previously were strongest. There are no more red or blue ‘walls’, no more heartlands, no safe seats or core votes that the old parties can rely on. The only reason things were not even worse for Labour and the Tories this week was that they colluded to ‘postpone’ local elections in several counties where Reform would have won big.
Although the Tories are reportedly facing ‘extinction’, Labour’s precipitate collapse seems even more striking. After all, it is barely 10 months since Starmer won one of the largest-ever parliamentary majorities – albeit by winning just one-third of the votes cast – and smug pundits were talking about ‘a decade of Labour rule’. Less than a year later, Labour already looks finished.
The contrast with the last time these local councils were elected, in May 2021, is revealing. Back then, Tory prime minister Boris ‘get Brexit done’ Johnson was still enjoying the fruits of his dramatic General Election victory in December 2019. Labour was hammered so badly in those 2021 local elections, and even lost the parliamentary stronghold of Hartlepool to the Tories in a by-election, that Starmer considered resigning as leader. Yet in this week’s local elections Labour did even worse than that, and lost one of its safest parliamentary seats, Runcorn and Helsby, to Reform.
As a consequence, after an even shorter time in office than Johnson had enjoyed in 2021, Starmer looks like a dead prime minister walking, his directionless party almost certain to lose any important election it contests. The extraordinary is becoming normal.
As for Reform, despite the desperate efforts of the media to ignore and belittle its history-making success (the top news on the BBC after polling day was that Prince Harry is a bit upset), nobody can now seriously dismiss Farage’s soaring movement as a mere ‘protest party’. Reform has growing support in every region, among former voters for all parties and none, and especially among the working classes.
The establishment’s horrified reaction to Reform’s latest breakthrough showed how much they fear and loathe Farage’s ‘upstart’ party – and particularly, Reform’s ‘revolting’ voters. The Faragophobic BBC could not hide its snobbish contempt when describing Reform’s newly elected regional mayor, former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns, as a ‘former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’. Sneer all they like, but the BBC’s preferred ‘respectable’ parties will not be winning any UK popularity contests anytime soon.
When I spent the last day of the 2024 election campaign knocking on doors in Farage’s Clacton constituency, ordinary Tory voters were visibly angry over the betrayal of Brexit and the disaster of uncontrolled mass migration. He won in a landslide. Now Labour is in the firing line.
‘There has never been an insurrection like this’, Nigel Farage told me when I interviewed him in January, and his words rang even truer this week. Boring British politics is exploding into a life and death struggle for the future. There is no telling how things will work out over the next three or four years before a General Election. But we should know by now, as they used to say at the start of the old TV show, Stingray: ‘Anything could happen in the next half hour.’
Mick Hume is the editor-in-chief of europeanconservative.com and a visiting fellow at MCC. He worked in communications for Reform UK during the 2024 General Election campaign.
This article (Even in ‘boring’ British politics, anything can happen now) was created and published by Spiked Online and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Mick Hume, Columnist
*****
This is much more than “a protest”.
What the elite class get wrong about the revolt that is now erupting across England
.
Over the last few days, England witnessed one of the most significant political revolts in the entire history of its two-party system. 677 local council seats. Ten councils. Two mayors. And one new Member of Parliament.
That’s what Nigel Farage and Reform UK, a movement founded only four years ago, just won. Reform won the largest number of votes. It won the largest number of seats. And it won overall control of most of the councils that held elections, while pushing many others into ‘no overall control’ by surging into first or second place.
Reform, in other words, just finished ahead of the two big parties, Labour and the Tories, that have dominated politics in this country since the early twentieth century.
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) never managed this. The Brexit Party never managed this. The Liberal Democrats have still not managed this. And nor, for that matter, did the Social Democratic Party (SDP), in the 1980s, which despite mounting an impressive challenge against the two-party duopoly never came close to dominating local elections in the way Nigel Farage and Reform just have.
All this, astonishingly, now leaves Nigel Farage, the man who’s been consistently mocked, insulted, and derided by the elite class in this country, as not just the only politician in British history to have won two nationwide elections with two different parties –having won the 2014 and 2019 elections to the European Parliament with UKIP and the Brexit Party, respectively—but the only party leader in modern history to have finished ahead of Labour and the Tories at local elections.
And yet, for much of the last few days the elite class in this country has visibly struggled and failed to make sense of the sheer scale and strength of this revolt.
Consistently, everybody from Kemi Badenoch, who is leading the Tory party into oblivion, to the Financial Times, which has spent the last decade refusing to accept that many people might not want liberal globalism shoved down their throats, have described this revolt as “a protest” and Reform as “a protest party”.
But this is completely and utterly wrong.
Why?
Because, for a start, the word “protest” implies that millions of people out there are merely voting against the system, rather than for something.
It also implies Reform’s voters are irrational, with no coherent or logical motivation of their own, and suggests this revolt is just a temporary ‘flash-in-the-pan’ –that once these irrational protestors have vented their frustration normality will resume.
But this could not be further from the truth.
As anybody who has bothered to look at the evidence knows, Reform voters are not merely reacting against the system –they are voting for a clear, coherent, and entirely rational and legitimate set of things.
They are voting for an end to the extreme policy of mass uncontrolled immigration that’s being imposed on them from above, with no democratic mandate, by an indistinguishable political, cultural, and legacy media elite that has moved sharply to the cultural left over the last two decades and lost touch with the rest of the country.
They are voting for the only thing that makes a nation-state and social contract between the people and their rulers possible and sustainable over the long-term —a nation with strong borders that prioritises the safety and security of its own citizens, and removes foreigners who openly and flagrantly break the rule of law.
They are voting for the only thing that will also ensure they remain willing to support the welfare state and trust the system in the years ahead —a principle of ‘national preference’, whereby it is the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding majority that is prioritised and rewarded, not those who choose not to work, who do not pay tax, and who do not respect our laws.
It is this principle of national preference, by the way, that would not only ensure our leaders deliver things such as a dedicated, national, statutory inquiry into the rape gangs —the absence of which has now become a powerful symbol of how the political class is no longer willing to prioritise its own people—but also ensure they avoid some of the truly absurd things we are now witnessing in this country, such as the British state using taxpayers’ money to outbid British people in the housing market and prioritise illegal migrants who break our laws.
Nigel Farage’s voters are not simply voting against Westminster —they are voting for an alternative to this shocking sense of unfairness that now defines a country that has long considered fair-play a central aspect of its underlying identity. In this sense, they are voting for the thing they have always known and cherished, but which they now feel is being consistently violated and abused on an almost daily basis.
And at a much broader level, by voting for all these things, Reform voters are also clearly voting for an alternative to the elite consensus that has governed this country, on both the Left and Right, since 1997.
Reform is not just a reaction to Keir Starmer’s remarkably unpopular Labour government that took office last July, even if this government is clearly exacerbating many of the divides that are now opening up in this country.
Reform, more accurately, should be seen as vote for something other than the political, cultural, and media zeitgeist that has been imposed on this country in a highly authoritarian fashion ever since New Labour came to power nearly thirty years ago.
A pro-immigration, pro-globalisation, pro-liberalism, pro-Net Zero, pro-Woke, pro-trans, pro-London, pro-middle-class, pro-graduate consensus among the ruling class that chimes with the values of an elite minority, that at best represent no more than 15 per cent of the country, but angers and alienates the much larger forgotten majority.
It is both amusing and highly symbolic, for example, that the highest share of the vote in the entire country for Nigel Farage and Reform this week came in a ward located within Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield in northeast England.
Why? Because Reform, at root, represents a vote for an alternative to everything that Blair and pretty much everybody who has followed him into Number 10 Downing Street ever since, whether on the Left or Right, imposed on the country.
A big blob of social liberalism and technocratic progressivism mixed with an unfettered celebration of globalisation, identity politics, open borders, mass uncontrolled immigration, and universal liberalism, all of which has not only been backed up with authoritarian overreach (hate laws, non-crime incidents, expanded taboos, and concept creep to try and control and minimise dissent) but has also eroded the once distinctive foundations of this country and left its people deeply demoralised.
Once you grasp that, once you grasp the fact that millions of people in this country now want to vote for a “factory reset”, for an England and a Britain that is no longer defined by this post-1997 revolution, then you begin to grasp the potential that Reform’s revolt has to completely upend and reshape the political landscape.
Indeed, just look at the results of these local elections.
Contrary to the misleading narrative, loved by the left, that Farage and Reform are merely eating off the Tories, Reform on average won 32 per cent in former Labour wards and 32 per cent in Tory ones. It is, in other words, now hitting the entire two-party system. It is punishing everybody who has presided over this elite consensus.
And nor will this revolt disappear as quickly as it has arisen. On the contrary, if you look at the coalition and political map that Farage is now putting together it looks set to remain as a permanent fixture on the landscape for years, maybe decades, to come.
It should be remembered, after-all, that the tendency to view populist parties merely as “protest parties”, first emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s, when scholars across Europe were struggling and largely failing to explain the first significant wave of public support for populist outsiders in post-war Europe.
It was only when these populist outsiders, from the French National Front to the Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party of Austria, turned out to be far more durable and successful that the mainly left-wing scholars who studied them were forced to concede their voters might have clear and coherent motives of their own.
And now the same thing is unfolding in England, even if much of the elite and media class have failed to keep up. Nigel Farage is not leading an ephemeral protest group; he’s become the de facto leader of a much deeper and longer-term realignment.
You can see this too in the local election results. Reform’s vote surged to 45 per cent in the most pro-Brexit seats but fell to 19 per cent in the most pro-Remain seats. It rocketed to nearly 40 per cent in the most blue-collar parts of England but only 19 per cent in the most professional. And it jumped to more than 42 per cent in areas filled with people without degrees but fell below 20 per cent in areas filled with graduates.
So long as Farage and Reform are zooming in on the same issues that powered this realignment in the past –tapping into those instrumental and entirely legitimate concerns for something other than mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, the loss of our national sovereignty to foreign courts and conventions, the imposition of two-tier policies that undermine our country’s long-held belief in equality before the law, and the growing willingness of our political class to prioritise foreign criminals and illegal migrants over tax-paying, law-abiding British citizens—then make no mistake, Farage and Reform will have every chance of winning a parliamentary majority that is just as big as the one Boris Johnson mobilised, in 2019.
Much like the Brexit vote that lined up behind the now discredited Boris Johnson, the more this coalition switches instead to Nigel Farage and Reform, the more they will be able to outflank the Oxford-Cambridge-London-Brighton elite class in the first-past-the-post system and end up in Number 10. This is because the people who are now voting for Reform are not scattered thinly across the country; they are heavily concentrated in large areas which is what is giving Farage such strength in a system that both encourages and rewards this kind of concentrated support.
So, just like in 2019, when the elite class similarly underestimated and laughed at a charismatic populist who (at least then) understood the mood of non-London England, the next general election, as these local election results underline, could deliver a political earthquake that is just as big and just as consequential. The only question is whether the elite class will realise what is going on in time to do anything about it.
This article (This is much more than “a protest”.) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: Britain Briefed, YouTube
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