The End of Ideology
Let me say right away that I have met Steve Baker, and like him as a person.
He is a good Christian and I believe tries to act in a moral fashion. However, his recent bizarre tweet is as clear an example of any of how woke, and how lost, the Conservative Party really is.
As a general rule, you know you are in trouble when Tom Harwood is agreeing with you.
As many have observed, we voters are now faced with a choice between various Left-wing parties, with minor differences about how to manage the country.
The Tories are Lefties who occasionally say something like “The woke Civil Service has gone too far”, or “Perhaps we should stop some of these boats, eh?”. Labour are Lefties who, since Starmer realised he actually wanted to get elected, will throw in something like “People were right to want to Take Back Control”, or “Maybe we should train some British nurses lol”.
Even the Reform Party is running with policies that could be straight out of a 90s Lib Dem manifesto. “Raise the threshold of income tax” is their big idea. And it’s a good one, but it does not address any of the moral or social Leftism that is destroying the country.
As Steven Edginton pointed out, in Reform UK’s 2023 plan, “Immigration was featured on the third slide and was the 16th bullet point.”
The battle for the next election, it seems, is being fought almost solely over competence.
We became used to the idea of the end of ideology in the Blair/Cameron years. We were presented with managerial politicians who claimed to be sensible Centrists.
In reality, the Blair years were incredibly radical when it came to social issues, such as the deliberate breaking down of the traditional marriage, or the imposition of mass immigration upon the country.
Cameron, having failed in his younger years to get anywhere with actual Conservative positions, continued this legacy with his disproportionate obsession with issues like same-sex marriage, and making the Conservative Party more diverse. In fact, we have his diversity-focused “A-List” to thank for Liz Truss.
What has been sold to us as the end of ideology is actually the complete triumph of Left-wing ideology, to the point that it even employs the word ‘ideology’ to quash any dissent.
Notice that when Liz Truss tried to nudge our economy ever-so-slightly Rightwards, she was immediately attacked as a rabid ideologue. I suppose that’ll teach her for being ungrateful to the Left-wing ‘equality of outcome’ thinking that got her into her position in the first place.
The political tensions not acknowledged by our political parties ended up violently entering via the back door in the form of Brexit.
That is because our political differences are real and cannot ever be truly suppressed. Much like the war on masculinity, the testosterone will find its way out somewhere. If it is not allowed in the mainstream, it will find other channels. In this way you might say Brexit is the Andrew Tate of political phenomena.
Once they removed Truss, we returned to the war over competence. In other words, who can best manage this failing country, while avoiding real change.
This was confirmed once again just a few days ago by Claire Perry O’Neill, a cabinet minister under Theresa May who now claims the Tories are “beholden by ideology and self-obsession”, while praising Labour’s “sober, fact-driven, competent political leadership”.
Golly.
Of course, I agree with the suspicion of ideology in one sense. The origins of conservatism as we know it go back to Edmund Burke and the idea of inductive reasoning. Conservatism proceeds from empirical truth to draw conclusions about the general, i.e., “These things seem to work and we like them.” While the Left imposes top-down policies that work in theory, but not in fact.
So what we need is in fact a lack of utopian ideology, but clearly this is not what our political and media establishment mean when they talk about ideology. They mean that whichever party they happen to belong to will manage our decline into a dysfunctional Socialist dystopia slightly better than the other lot.
Our failed political parties will not stop illegal immigration, strikes, the breakdown of marriage, the destruction of education or the desecration of Britain’s history and heritage. None of these can be solved by Left-wing thinking, because they are caused by such thinking (or lack of it).
What we will continue to get is big state economics along with ultra-Leftie social and moral causes.
All one can do is vote against the Tories and deliver the archetypal ‘bloody nose’. Temporarily satisfying, perhaps, but ultimately achieving very little. And probably followed immediately by a cringe joke from a newly-elected Keir Starmer about ‘sticking plaster politics‘.
Lord, spare us.
Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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“All one can do is vote against the Tories and deliver the archetypal ‘bloody nose’. Temporarily satisfying, perhaps, but ultimately achieving very little.”
Totally agree about voting against the Tories but if it is satisfying at all it will be not temporary (Labour will be worse) but in the long term with the emergence of a properly conservative political force. It may be too late, but we surely have to try, or take other routes.
Heritage seem pretty sound as a political party. Their leader, Kurten, was a covid sceptic I think from the start, often present at anti-lockdown protests.
Kurten is excellent, a good Christian man and quite 19th orthodox in his beliefs about government and socio-economy. 100% against the Rona fascism.
Richard Tice of the Reform Party is part of the Establishment, so Reform Party is all part of the problem.
As you say the Heritage Party is the only one which is not Establishment endorsed & thus doomed to failure as it would rock the boat too much.
The clue is in the name of the Tice/Farage party. They seek to ‘Reform’ the Conservative Party rather than electorally destroy them.
Farage and Tice have form on marching their troops up the hill and back down again (2019) and Farage was often standing down his own people to allow Tory Eurosceptics keep their seats whilst leading UKIP.
It also worries me that Tice has a talk show aired by a TV company owned by Murdoch.
Various shades of Marxist-Globalist Grey. Gender dysphoria, the Stabs, the Uketopia etc one narrative across the spectrum.
In the 20 sec attention span of me-media, intelligent debate does not exist. You simply follow what the Religion of Science and what its Apostles the experts, proclaim as gospel.
Reform is a disappointment. Seem to be a less duller and less dumber version of the Con party or as the article said, a 90s Lib Dem party.
The greath 19th century debates in this country – Toryism, Liberalism, Gladstonian, Disraelian, Labour-Socialism – were in many ways, rather complex, related to real issues demanding some keen debate. People used to read the Parliamentary debates and follow the arguments. Nobody reads anything these days do they.
Interesting comments about the Reform Party; that’s why I prefer the Heritage Party.
What has happened to today’s newsletter? “Sorry page not found”
Most of us just want to get on with our lives
But this is a Battle for Britain moment
The UK has been SO WEAKENED by Blair Brown plus 12 years of Clever Tory Twits that five years of Labour will finish the Big Beast off
The canoe will topple over the edge of the waterfall
Reform aren’t the solution
We need a RICH PERSON to fund 500+ Intelligent, practical, capable incorruptibles
Running UK PLC is about managerial competence
NO IDEOLOGY NEEDED
Foreign affairs more cerebral
Its not hard to put the GREAT back in BRITAIN
Deleted comment. Will repost later.
Or as someone said a few years ago “We are all socialists now”. ——–When you see the incredible clutter of inefficiency and disfunction in the UK, we can see that statement ringing true. Perhaps once we have turned into Venezuela we might say “Eh , wait a minute” —————– The best government is the one that governs the least but in the western world we now have governments that govern the most and are taking control of every aspect of our lives except maybe our toe nail clippings , but hey, don’t give them any ideas, or we may soon have a little toe nail caddy that gets put out on the street every 6 months. Try not to put it out on the wrong day though or a little sticker from the toenail officer may appear on it.
This neoliberal mantra which nowdays claims to be conservative due to its age (imagine it’s over 40!) has thoroughly failed to accomplish anything positive since it’s invention as radical egotism doctrine in the late 1970s. The wokest country on the planet is presumably the USA. It’s also the one where the state has been shrunken most. One could almost be tempted to think that the supposed cure has actually caused the disease.
🤣 🤣
Is the problem we are facing in a spoilt, soft Western world really even one of ideology? Sure, left-oriented parties follow the communist tradition of Mao and Stalin that what went before must be eradicated to achieve real change, but I don’t even see that as the biggest problem. It seems to be more a matter of people who have been made very soft with good times for decades, being unwilling to accept reality any longer. The slightest adversity is “unfair”. They like being infantilised and cast as victims by politicians who either pander whichever way necessary to garner votes and advance up the career ladder or politicians who themselves are infantile and who reason from emotion rather than rationality (unfortunately many female politicans seems to fall in this category). A heat wave and drought in the summer? Let’s sit in the dark, freeze, starve for a couple of years and that will sort it. In the meantime, China and India keep on trucking on, laughing their heads off at us – oh, and the summers are still hot and there are still droughts. Endless promises of rainbows and unicorns rather than stark reality. Hence why so many people believed… Read more »
Excellent post JaneD in my humble opinion, thank you.
I have posted this graphic here before which sums it up for me. Visuals, visuals, visuals say I.
They are often better received by ‘the lazy of mind’.
A picture is worth a thousand words 👍
I agree. Great post.
An excellent commentary, as always. Many thanks. I wonder how much of the ‘credit’ for the current situation is attributable to the so-called social media?
Not on Twitter so didn’t know that about Baker….pretty depressing.
The only real threat to the two main parties is reform, not perfect I know, but would give the other pair bloody noses and a wakey wakey call if nothing else, even forcing a coalition!
Other than that, I’ve lost all hope as far as politics is concerned, it’s just more of the same whoever we get. Just don’t vote might be the best scenario
So we’re back in the 1930s where it came down to a choice between fascism or communism – both left wing, collectivist ideologies. The first was the version of the establishment, the latter the version of the outsiders trying to get in.
I think the problem may be that we keep looking to political parties for national salvation. Pretty well all of those parties are now deep-state, authoritarian, top-down socialists who have become politically bloated on the public’s desire to be protected from all of life’s hardships by government policy. In effect, we, the public, are feeding this monster. The more the state assumes control of every aspect of our life the less freedom we have. This will likely continue as long we keep looking to politicians for answers. The solution is to break the dependency. People could start to learn that the reward for greater self-reliance is greater freedom – being more alive in fact. Politicians would start to realise that we only need them to take care of truly national issues; defence, macro-economics, crime, and transport infrastructure for example. Instead, through our total dependency on politicians, we have encouraged them to be surrogate parents, controlling and micro-managing every detail of our lives. There will be a backlash at some point when things have gone really too far for the majority, but wouldn’t it be good to establish a clear separation of state and individual before we get to that point?… Read more »
The problem is that the only way to do that in our system, short of revolution, is to vote for parties who will trim back the power of the state – or not vote at all in such numbers that the current process becomes untenable, but that doesn’t seem very realistic. There are few limits on the powers of the government to expand its remit.
“Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely” If Lord Acton (1834 – 1902) was aware of this why do we keep on making the same mistake?
We have a corrupt unelected and powerful civil service at the highest levels with people holding senior posts for decades.
And they have been very good at keeping under the radar whilst doing untold damage to the country and democracy.
Ministers tend to listen to and follow the advice of their senior civil servants. Doing otherwise can be fraught and even dangerous to a politician’s career.
These are people with power and influence and decades of developing external networks of and who are also adept at manipulation.
It’s even worse in Wales where we’ve had Labour in power for over 20 years. We’re totally f*cked!
Nice read.
2 good, angering ones in conjunction with this and the Spiked one. https://www.takimag.com/article/the-new-inquisition/
https://www.takimag.com/article/a-sick-society/
i remember Tony Blair’s first move upon becoming leader of the Labour Party – he and the shadow cabinet spent a weekend on a management training course, believing this to be preferable to conventional political debate. This was the start of the end of ideology… nowadays, I see the labels left and right to have lost their original meaning; now, left = collectivism while right = individualism
It’s the whole idea of political parties that is bankrupt. They are corrupt, tyrannical private organisations that have done us great harm. Time to end them forever. Vote only for independent candidates or don’t vote at all. Restore the real constitution.
Has Baker been jabbed?. He sounds vaccinated to me.
Conservatism cannot flourish until the fake Conservative Party is electorally destroyed.
It’s obvious that the elections are effectively rigged from the outset as there’s no real choice between parties and their visions; we merely have a choice about how left wing progressivist our next government will be and are expected to vote for the least worst option. In that sense, we’re the ultimate exemplar of the postmodern EU state, ironically enough. For me… I’m done. I’m not voting at the next election.The game is rigged and if I still take part, I’m legitimising and perpetuating it. I’m not playing anymore. No one should. A government elected with ten per cent turnout will have no moral legitimacy. Not voting is the only option left, which I hate to do. We need an international declaration establishing new countries and a series of diaspora. If you want to live in a left wing, welfarist security state, feel free to do so. If you don’t, you need to be able to go somewhere else. In an era where satellite surveillance allows you to be watched from the sky anywhere on the planet and you’re effectively locked up by citizenships and passports in a particular country, there needs to be a way out if you find… Read more »
Mark Thornton wrote: “We need a RICH PERSON to fund 500+ Intelligent, practical, capable incorruptibles. NO IDEOLOGY NEEDED” Easier said than done and is it a safe effective political approach? Perhaps Toby/Will etc might start a regular column with invited well-read knowledgeable writers to spell out their vision of a number of things: what kind of political party most people would find acceptable what kind of Europe we would like to see One of the problems with the second of these two topics is the vacuum Brexiteers are leaving for Rejoiners to fill. I would like to see a strong prosperous united Europe but not one controlled by the gangs of buddies of the dangerous technocratic corrupt unelected EU. As for the first I see three main problems: the left/right knockabout is for the dinosaurs the people we have filling the boots of Government are not performing well a corrupt civil service at the highest levels which serves whose interests? Not the country’s. As for invited writers, I am a little wary of “experts” particularly in the light of what Professor Philip Tetlock’s research proves – that dart throwing chimpanzees make more reliable predictions than “experts”. And what Kahneman &… Read more »