The Psychoses of the Established Political Parties
It is silly season for the Conservative Party. We now read articles about what is going to come from the Right side of politics, whether the Tories can benefit from the global Right turn? Out of power, they can be irresponsible, consult think tanks, lick wounds, exchange tweets with Reform: they have the luxury of having suffered the best sort of landslide election, the one where the result is not even slightly convincing.
Let me summarise. Turnout was around 60%. I approximate. 34% of the popular vote got Labour over 60% of the Commons. (The Tories got fewer seats in the Commons in 2019 with 44% of the popular vote.) 24% of the popular vote got the Conservatives under 20% of the Commons. 12% of the vote got the Liberals less than 2% of the Commons. 14% of the vote got Reform less than 1% of the Commons (five seats out of 650). I do not mention all this to advocate proportional representation: for I think that would make politics muddy and untransparent as well as what it already is, mostly after-effects, symbolic victories and defeats, and much confusion.
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And the biggest contemporary madness of the political crowd is climate claptrap.
Repeal the 2008 Canute Tribute Act, disband the Climate Claptrap Committee and abandon pandering to Zero, Zilch, De Nada.
Twelve days until the Inauguration and counting. Trillions of ackers liberated in one fell swoop.
Bring it on.
It only takes the application of A’ level Physics and Chemistry to understand why NET Zero policies are leading us (and Germany 🙂 ) to catastrophe.
The implication is that, not only do the Arts and Humanities graduates in Westminster and Whitehall don’t know History, there aren’t any Natural Scientists or Engineers in those places.
Not even A level education is required, just a small dose of common sense, and the ability to see reality right in front of your nose.
You can’t replace highly energy efficient hydrocarbons, with decades of existing infrastructure and knowledge, with unreliables (what they call renewables) in a few years.
Solar power is not available at night, nor through possibly 9 months of the year at more Northerly latitudes. Turbines only produce when the wind blows – all basic common sense!
The weather right now is cold, there is very little wind (across most of the country), its dark and overcast most days, and the days are short!
There honestly can’t be that many people who cannot see this, so we have to assume those leading the charge to blackouts and misery do know, but are being handsomely rewarded to not give a s**t.
Of course there are almost no Engineers in those places. We are very dangerous to their ideas because we can see the idea to its endpoint, that is what we do. Take a river and someone suggests a new bridge (the Boris Bridge to Ireland for example). An Engineer is consulted and says “there are a number of difficulties with this bridge, the water is deep, the bridge is long, the weather is often terrible, and it will be very expensive and not usable some of the time. It is also a strategic risk to us if it was ever damaged or destroyed”. Politicians do not listen at all, because the have no vision, and start a project (HS2) with no idea of the cost. Then the CS get hold of the plan and “gold plate” everything (loads of new roads, fancy crossings, huge tunnels, etc”). The project starts and is miles over budget from day one, yet no one has the courage to scrap it at that point! It is now a National Requirement that the project is completed, although no cost-benefit or operating balance sheet has ever been made or even thought about. This applies in spades to… Read more »
Spot on, The Net Zero nonsense is killing us and Germany and would have done for the USA if Trump had not won against the corrupt Biden administration
It has nearly done for a lot of California. They just haven’t noticed yet because it is rich.
I often wonder if the country would be actually better off with a government that effectively does nothing.
Because all the ideas they come up with are bad.
Legislating for this, legislating for that, banning this, banning that. Taxing the living daylight out of us and wasting the money. The state, like a parasite, invading every aspect of human life, politicizing everything, hectoring and finger jabbing while things are just getting worse and worse.
Who in his right mind thinks that people like Theresa May, Liz Truss, Boris and Starmer have the ability to solve any problem, let alone run a country?
Defence of the Realm, food, energy and border security, law and order, education, health, citizen welfare, balancing the books and adhering to an unspoken hippocratic oath of government – Do No Harm.
Most of the rest is froth and, at worst, national self-harm.
Why does the state need to be involved in education and health?
What’s “citizen welfare” in this context?
For the same reason it needs to be involved in other things like ‘industry’, regulation, foreign aid, media and sport.
Empire-building, sinecures for the inadequate and those happy to be handed unearned freebies as ‘benefits’; the dependency slaves.
Health questionably. For education, I’m thinking back to the Victorians, the 1870 Education Act and all that folllowed thereafter, that my antecedents one to three generations back all benefited from.
“Citizen welfare” a bit woolly, but the Victorians did bring in the concept of the public good. Problem is give the state an inch and it takes a mile.
I wonder what novels Charles Dickens would write about the Great Britain of a century and a half later? Olivia Twist, Great Unexpectations, David Siliconfield, Bleak Council House…
(Interrupted by a power cut, thankfully brief, and had to start again – Miliband, get your act together!)
Education is great, just don’t understand why the state needs to be involved. If we’re worried about the poor not being able to afford education and health care, give them vouchers, but I see no reason why the state should regulate education or be involved in providing it directly.
I’d be interested to know if any other countries have a privately-run education system and how it works?
At random, I just looked up Singapore as a high-tech country and seems education predominantly state run.
Maybe there are none. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a workable idea. Different states may have evolved state education for different reasons – indoctrination, a safety net for the poor being the most obvious that spring to
mind. Singapore is or was quite an authoritarian place with a fair bit of state involvement. Lee Kuan Yew was not I think a libertarian.
“Most schools in Macau are private or subsidized schools. As of the 2023–2024 school year, there were 76 schools in Macau, including eight public schools and 68 private schools”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Macau
https://www.cdqq.gov.mo/en/home-coming/living/education/
Interesting; thanks.
Kind of odd as it’s part of China but presumably a legacy from earlier times.
Perhaps not the most instructive example as it’s very small and kind of weird.
All the rich send their Children to British Independent Schools, the state is not good enough!
The issue here is still that making educated decisions about education requires a certain level of it which some people don’t have. Using a German example I’m familiar with: The most basic form of education in Germany is Grundschule (elementary school) followed by Hauptschule (main school), lasting for a total of eight years. Afterwards, pupils are supposed to become apprenticed in some business or factory and learn the skills necessary for the job they will work in until retirement in the next three years. Apprentices are paid salaries and it’s totally common for an apprentice’s parents to pocket most or all of that on the grounds that it’s high time that the child (of fifteen, usually) starts to contribute something to its own upkeep, ie, the cost of food and lodgings. Weren’t it for mandatory education, the same kind of parents would certainly prefer for their children to become part of the workforce and thus, earn them money in exchange for feeding, clothing and housing them, as early as possible and that’s exactly how things worked before mandatory education was introduced: As soon as children were physically capable of performing some real job, they’d be doing that to contribute to… Read more »
Most parents hope their children have better lives than they did, and try their best to help them achieve that. I think it’s a fair bet that most parents would also think that some kind of “education” would be a good way to give their children a decent start in life. Anyway you’re assuming schooling would not be compulsory AND that children working full time would be legal – I haven’t really given that much thought but I think it’s a slightly separate question to the one I’m talking about which is that the state doesn’t need to be a direct provider of education and I am not convinced they need to “regulate” the sector either.
I’m not assuming anything, I’ve just described two models of child education which have historically existed, a purely market-driven one were schools are private and sufficiently well-to-do families may send their children to one they can afford and approve of while children of uneducated parents usually end up with no education, but enter the work force in some capacity as soon as they’re able to. And the one which was created to address what some people believed to be the failings of the purely market-driven model where the state mandates, organizes and runs educational institutions to provide at least some standard ‘basic education’ to all children regardless of their backgrounds. I’ll also provide some real-world example of what uneducated parents who think their children should get an education for having a better lot in life can come up with: The German author Karl May (1842 – 1912) was born into a very poor weaver family. May’s father had always wanted to “become something better” than a poor weaver, especially as he had a multitude of interests and talents which all came to nought because due to his almost complete lack of a education and due to unfavourable circumstances, he never… Read more »
I think it would be different now
I think so, too, because parents aren’t so ignorant anymore that they would come up with the idea that making an early teenage boy memorize the content of random “learned books” (written for adults) would provide him with a useful “higher education.” But that’s because these parents themselves had had an education beyond elementary school level themselves, ie, because of the system you believe to be useless, while the “May method” was a direct result of the kind of system you’d prefer to be established instead. I don’t think we’ve evolved to become more intelligent since Heinrich May tried to beat “learning” into his son¹. We’re just in a much better starting position because of the changes to the educational system which have happened since the 1850s. ¹ For an amusing twist, this method actually worked. Karl May was supposed to become a teacher but was thrown out of the profession in disgrace because of a dispute about the old watch of a colleague. He claimed to have borrowed it with the consent of the owner and just forgotten to return it, the owner claimed it was stolen. He fled and spent some time making a living as wandering con-man… Read more »
I never said the system was useless
I don’t think things would ever revert to how they were
No not most, some may. You should look carefully at our society, this is far from the wisdom of many parents with little education themselves. Quite a lot is “class based”, the labourer class being least interested. Brave New World has a strong message here.
I belong to a country club where the membership is predominantly white working class people, most in trades, most self employed. The youngsters talk about the college courses they are doing to enter trades. They all seem to want to get on in life to me. Of course there are hopeless parents with no clue, probably there should be compulsory education until a certain age, I just want to be able to choose where to send my kids to school and what they learn there.
In the past this was the same in Britain too, It was the first education act of 1944 that changed this significantly, even though there was a war on! Ever since this has been ruined by various Governments, even Tory ones with Michael Gove as education minister!
Because they want to control it. So simple yet few even see it.
It’s more why have politicians taken over.
It’s useful to have standards: many are international. It’s good to have standard battery sizes. And GSM has worked a treat, but the politicians only came in at the end, to ratify what the knowledgeable had agreed to.
What’s GSM?
Industries have an incentive to standardise and can sort that out for themselves.
I want politicians to be in charge of the important stuff that it makes sense for the state to be involved in because they are accountable and I can vote them out
Global system for mobile comms – virtually all mobile phones use this standard now, mean your phone can work in multiple countries/networks etc. I agree politicians should NOT be involved in anything unless there is a clear need – the overreach of the state now is bonkers, with many people seemingly happy to be told how to live every element of their lives… personally I always have a great desire to tell them to foxtrot Oscar as I suspect many others here do!
Thanks
2,3, 6, 7, 8 do not need to be done by the state although I concede some facilitation and safety net might be needed.
I agree
Arguably only the first 5 should be the sole purview of the State, and even some of that is questionable.
And the final one.
I can’t remember the actual dates but in the mid Victorian period, we had influence over quite a considerable amount of the planet, and involved in quite a few conflicts as well. (I didn’t use the words empire and wars, to reduce the propensity for offence to some) At this time we had about 13 -15 cabinet ministers, including the PM, and all was run reasonably well, if history can be relied upon. Today we have so many cabinet ministers interfering in our lives nothing really works anymore, either in operational terms or employment. Before anyone starts stating the facts about poverty and workers rights, every epoch has its horrors. Over 100 years ago, people joined the armed forces for a square meal and employment, National insurance was in its infancy, and was there to offer help, not a means of not having to work/ contribute to the socioeconomic construct of the society as a whole. Successive governments have increased their influences to a point where people feel that they do not have to contribute to society, and in some cases despise the society that actually made them what they are. We are now at a stage where there is… Read more »
Countless books have been written explaining that central planning doesn’t work and lead to tyranny and that free markets are by far superior solution to complex economic and societal issues. But people still refuse to believe it. There is this stubborn belief that the problems that stem from central planning are because it wasn’t done properly or it wasn’t the right people and that making adjustments and perhaps getting some better people it will work well. People just can’t grasp that it is systemically flawed. And when one tries to explain this to people they’ll tell you all the ways in which they think the free markets supposedly fail, not realising firstly that nobody is claiming that free markets work perfectly (just a million times better than central planning) and that most of the failings they attribute to the free market are actually the consequence of meddling by central planners trying to direct the free market. But people just don’t want to understand this. There is a weakness in humans that makes them want to put themselves in the hands of a someone else. They prefer to be comfortable, relatively well treated slaves than face the uncertainty that comes with… Read more »
Indeed. I think there are other issues that lead us down this wrong path – there’s a section of society that feels it doesn’t benefit from free markets as much as they would like, so they vote for redistribution of wealth. There’s another section that knows or thinks they know (we’ll see) that they will be largely OK more or less whatever happens but likes to feel virtuous by believing the state embodying their enlightened wisdom can “fix the world’s imperfections”.
Liz Truss was ambushed by the BoE’s LDI and the BoE itself. They have admitted it, and many have said that the risk was much lower made out as they had used static figures.
It’s who in his right mind thinks that people like Liz Truss would be allowed to solve any problem, let alone offer hope by starting up fraccing?
No wonder it was closed down and Energy was put under a reliable minister. 🙂
Liz Truss went off script, and even her appointment was an accident. She was never going to be allowed to continue by the RPTB
In the Netherlands we used to have regular periods of non-government whilst coalition governments were formed.
These periods used to be the most stable periods, exactly because no new dictats were issued.
it is the mission of this socialist government to make the electorate a better sort of people, all the measures it is adopting are illustrative of what an appalling, selfish, deplorable shower we are and that we are in desperate need of being ‘improved’ with morally upstanding rules, laws and codes of conduct … no more wrongthink, no more selfish driving of cars, no more meat eating and so on and on and on … we must bow at the alter of prescribed righteousness, as determined by those who know better and can recognise the despicable attitudes and behaviour that must be rendered unto our Socialist Saviours for corrective therapy
Very interesting.
I hadn’t thought the Conservatives had always been this way.
It does seem that this is just one more example of once you see something you can’t unsee it.
Once the mendacity of the Conservative Party is seen and better still seen in this historical context, it’s difficult to look at them in the same way any more.
Could we be entering the era of “the end of bullshit”? One can only hope.
Kemi Badenoch is an almost perfect embodiment of the desire to dish the Whigs
The gap toothed Nigerian is an embarrassment. Is this really the party of Churchill and Thatcher?
The political parties are mafias. Pure and simple, something the article misses.
They exist for power and enrichment.
Reading, law codes, history, principles?
How charmingly naive.
It did make me reflect on how completely insane it is that we live in a world in which most (if not everyone) don’t know the laws and rules under which we are all supposed to live, because there are just too many. It’s literally impossible for anyone to know them.
And that means that the people that make them don’t know them either. Which is just as mad.
When one thinks of it that way, of course society is going to disintegrate. How can it not?
They don’t even read the bills they pass – like the massive and mysteriously pre-cooked Covid Bill that took away their own power for the duration. Behind the throne, massive unreadable bills capitalise on that illiteracy and laziness (as in America, where a 1500 page Omnibus Bill was presented to Congress in the hope of its being waved through on the same day. Of course, the real changes were buried somewhere in the verbiage).
The assisted dying bill and the forthcoming climate and nature bill are both pre-cooked pieces of legislation drawn up by lobbying interests outside of Parliament.
No doubt their sponsors hope and expect them to be rubber stamped by their know-nothing payed for stooges in Parliament.
We were better governed in the 19th Century.
Yes, and also before the 16th century, when political parties first appeared. Somehow Britain, its People and its Parliament managed to survive for centuries without any political parties at all. Citizens just chose a local worthy to represent them and their local interests.
No law or “bill” should be longer than one A4 page.
Exactly – if you can’t get across the point in one page, you’ve not thought about it enough. Years ago I knew a company who did the same with their capital application process – that certainly sorted out the ‘this must be good, it’s 5000 pages and weighs a ton’ brigade of Billy BS’s who are very common in the corporate world, usually aided and abetted by consultants
Article says LibDems have less than 2% of House of Commons but their 75 MPs is about 11%.
There’s a typo – libdems have 11% of seats in HoC.
Great article. The author has exposed the Conservative Party for all to see. It was all there, it it just took an interpreter to inform us. Made me rethink my politics – well that is not entirely true as I dropped the Tory Party and joined Reform.
I wonder what the author would make of the Reform Party – the doctrine of the public bar politics, perhaps.
The Liberal Democrats, with their 12% of the vote, have 72 seats, or 11% of the House of Commons, not “less than 2%”.
The main losers from our first past the post system this time were Reform.
“The Conservative Party was basically the rump of the resistant Ultras who had barely weathered the Great Reform Act of 1832, put up with Peel’s attempt to cosy up to reform after his Tamworth Manifesto of 1834, but disliked Peel’s late adoption of Free Trade in 1845 and 1846. The Tories split: some followed Gladstone and the ‘Peelites’, while the rump of gentry and old Toryism stayed with Earl Derby in the Lords and Disraeli in the Commons. The Conservative party was an ineffective and small minority for 20 years.”
Dear me. In fact the Tories were in government a few times over that period. They also won the most seats in 1847. In 1852 they won 330 seats, compared with 324 for the Whigs.
Basically, the party was not “an ineffective and small minority for 20 years”. Although the split over free trade restrained its ability to take power, it was definitely not ineffective, small or a minority.