Even if by some highly improbable miracle Sunak/Hunt & their coterie of Blue Blairites snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, things will continue to get worse, and root causes of that will not change one iota. Why? Because the direction of travel is exactly what Sunak, Hunt, Starmer etc all agree on and want. They all want a technocratic regulatory state & that’s what we have, a technocratic regulatory state.
Under Labour, it will just become much more obvious, the rainbow makeup brighter, the clown shoes they are destined to keep tripping over more polished, particularly given they will have a triple digit majority. We must end the fiction that the fraudulently named Conservative Party circa 2025 is an alternative to Labour as opposed to much the same thing, just more lubricated and with a better wine list. They had a big majority and could have systematically attacked and undone what Blair did, but they did nothing, because a critical mass of the Tory grandees don’t actually want to. Blair is one of them. What will it take for the last Tory loyalists to see that? Probably nothing and I can easily imagine the photogenic but inane Penny “women-with-cocks” Mordaunt becoming leader when Sunak rides off into the sunset.
We passed the point of no return the day Truss was deposed, that was when we went over the cliff edge. We are a nation of Wile E. Coyotes and a great many of us have yet to look down to grasp the truth. It is pointless and counter productive to call for the brakes to be applied because we are mid-air, there are no brakes. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take us to hit the bottom. We just need to start thinking about how to survive the impact and what comes next after that.
Air brakes!
(credit to Bugs)
It’s fashionable to cite this guy on Samizdata. Just in case I’ve mangled the URL, this is the thrust of the conversation.
“In Russia last year, (2017) four hundred people were arrested for things they said on Social Media, four hundred people in Russia. Obviously, this country is very different. How many people do you think were arrested in Britain for things they said on Social media last year ?”
“Go on.”
“Take a guess”.
“I’ve no idea”.
“Three thousand, three hundred.
“Really ?”
Remember free speech and democracy ? Because in the UK, that’s all it is, a memory.
And Russia has a population three times larger than the UK.
Perhaps Brian was right, and perhaps Milei proves it. Maybe we need to fall off the cliff for things to change. What I do see, is that there is no large scale grass roots movement, targeting under 30s that is going to change the direction of travel even over the timescale of generations.
I’m with Simon Gibbs and we need to change that fact [the absence of grass-roots movements].
Many young people are receptive to a different narrative (and yes, it is about narratives, or explanations of the world, if you prefer) but most of us (and I include myself) spend too much time clutching our heads and saying “we’re all doomed”.
I was seriously thinking about voting for Susan Hall to be Mayor of London (as they have moved to first past the post now – an entirely cynical move by the Tories and an inferior system to the second round one they had in place in previous elections). Although she is a Tory, she can’t be worse than Khan, whom I detest with every fibre of my being, and I do have to live in London after all (I want to move just outside but my wife likes the city, and I mostly like my wife). However, I think I’ll vote Reform; Susan Hall standing next to Sadiq to denounce extremism or whatever clinched it for me.
This time, for sure, with certainty, a technocratic regulatory state will work!
The Russians, the Chinese, the Germans, the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs et endless cetera failed at making technocratic regulatory states work because they are inferior in intelligence and work ethic to Rishi Sunak and his Blue Blairite Band, who are hard working geniuses.
Further, “Rishi Sunak and his Blue Blairite Band” is a great name for an old time Ballroom Dance band.
For those serious about targeting under 30s: Eric Hoffer describes the terrain and the plan in True Believer. (engage the destitute, depressed, and disaffected youth directly and offer them a brighter vision of the future)
When it inevitably crashes and burns, someone will have to pick up the pieces and try to glue it all back together.
The thing I find most marvelous about all of it? The fact that many of us can see it coming, but the idjit class we’ve collectively put in charge cannot.
It’s almost as if the criteria we used to select them were… Invalid? Erroneous? Flawed?
Then, too… There’s this other problem: Why have we allowed it all to get this big? Why did all that power, wealth, and prestige get placed into “government”?
You step back and analyze it, compare it to other things, you start to notice the similarities: How much of modern academia is “overhead” administration and extraneous crap? How much of modern “health care” is the full employment act for administrative drones? Ever wonder where the hell your money is going, for education or health care? Whose pockets are getting filled, while actual teachers and health care providers like doctors and nurses are receiving lower and lower wages?
“Government” is to society as the admin overhead in education and health care are to those fields. Same-same with the military–Go do a quick historical contrast between the number of flag-ranked officers and the actual lower enlisted scum that run things. We’ve actually got more general officers and admirals now than they had during WWII, with exponentially smaller forces. How’d that happen? Why did we allow it?
Bureaucratic sclerosis is a symptom of a moribund and dying civilization, along with below-replacement rate fertility rates. These facts ought to be telling the people in charge they’re screwing it up by the numbers, but since we’ve set up perverse incentives for them to ignore it all, well… Yeah. Enjoy the decline…
A government ultimately reflects the society that puts it in charge and tolerates its continued existence. The controlled demolition of the foundations of western civilization has been a project of generations and it certainly will not be reversed in the next election cycle or two, no matter how they turn out. No, your next Conservative or Republican government won’t suddenly discover traditional western morality, respect for the foundational values of our constitutions, restore financially sound economics or anything of that sort, because they don’t exist in societies that practice or believe in any of that stuff.
A society that doesn’t even have a fertility rate to reproduce itself won’t be in charge in the future. A society that has entrusted all of its most important institutions to a bizarre alliance of woke transgender activists, Hamas and Hezbollah supporters and apocalyptic climate doomsayers won’t be producing sound or even sane governments.
You want to restore something resembling a traditional western civilization? Be prepared for a battle of generations, starting with a raising a family and passing on those values in your home. Then make an alliance with like-minded people in your neighborhood and try to have something sane taught in your schools. Try to promote like-minded people into the major institutions that shape your society. If you are successful, you can eventually hope for the government to be as sensitive to your concerns as they currently are to the Hamas supporters marching in your cities and eviro nutcases gluing themselves to roads and other infrastructure.
If you don’t have youth, energy, determination and sympathetic people in the institutions of power the government and society will be shaped by those who do.
@ Kirk
“The thing I find most marvelous about all of it? The fact that many of us can see it coming, but the idjit class we’ve collectively put in charge cannot.”
The idjit class have their eyes fixed firmly on the future… about a week in politics. Why worry about next month, next year, or the next Parliament? The greasy pole is right here, right now.
We are in the shit in so many ways. What’s the solution? More to the point, what are the real problems?
Stuart Noyes said:
The real problem would be delusional and generally lousy people running things. Nothing else is really critical; we’re not running out of energy, we’re not running out of resources, and the climate is not collapsing. The problem is that all of these idiots are running around and using those supposed “crisis” issues as leverage to retain and widen their power.
They haven’t yet proven a damn thing, nor have they shown much of their work. When they have, the numbers haven’t added up.
In the end, it’s down to the people and the poor decisions made by the people in charge. Same as it ever was… In ten-twenty years, we’re going to be looking back, just as we are now, and saying “How could they have made those decisions…?”
Which boils down to, we have the entirely wrong people running things. I’ve met several politicians in person, up to and including the current idiot governor of my state. None of them have struck me as people I’d willingly leave in charge of a kindergarten… Matter of fact, I’d probably make a point of putting them down, and leaving one of the kids in charge. The decisions taken in my absence couldn’t possibly be any worse than the ones made by the politician. Which says an awful lot about the people we make our political leaders.
Frankly, I think it is far past time we start following the Dutch example. Although, I shudder to think what diseases the body politic would pick up from a steady diet of cannibalized politicians and “elite” group members. I strongly suspect that many of them likely harbor more nasty diseases than the average New Guinean savage does.
I think you are missing the point of the question. “Whats to be done about the way we run the country?” Forget it. There is no pathway back. The bill is going to come due for a hundred years of feckless behavior, short term decisions and a pathological inability to confront hard choices. The same systemic problems are showing up right across the west. In little old NZ where I live debt is climbing, the population replacement rate is now at the critical level – unsaid, of course is that no society has ever recovered from being at the critical level. Social and racial divisions are enlarging at a rate not seen in my lifetime. Successive governments have completely failed to reverse any of these trends, in fact have largely exacerbated them.
A better formulation of the question is “What can I do to minimise the impact on myself and my family?” Some hard realities for you. 1. If your long term planning has a significant dependency on the state contributing to your upkeep, you are in for a terrible shock. The baby boomers will not stop funding their lifestyle until the bikkie tin is completely empty, that will of course include (continue) ransacking future generations wealth as well. So if, for example, your 2034 retirement plans include a meaningful pension, forget it – aint gonna happen. 2. By extension, the same imperative will force a relentless focus on any residual wealth. The hopeless addict with zero impulse control will have zero, zero respect for the fact that you think you own shit. The scenario is basically economic zombies staggering around looking for sustenance. They will not stop for a second to consider the ownership of that sustenance, or the fact that other people might have had future uses for that resource. Invest in long term plans? Ha ha. The zombies will have no planning horizon beyond the immediate.
And, of course, the zombies will have no respect for arbitrary boundaries such as nations or other countries laws.
That should be your baseline planning scenario. Thats what you should be asking of your elected leadership – “whats the plan for this?”
I know the answer… let’s break out a new Government and Leader from the ACME ‘Government in a box’. ACME products are always reliable.
Hopefully most would agree that the Liblabcon are equally dire and leading us the path to destruction. UkIP I believe were the biggest reason we got our referendum and we voted by a concerning small margin to regain political independence and return the UKs national status.
Considering our plight, a majority of Britons still support the liblabcon. So we are responsible as a body politic for our own demise. Enough people might have the metal to vote for Reform. Reform can only be a pressure group.
We will always have mainstream idiots. My solution is direct democracy. That’s the only proactive change we can bring. How I don’t know.
Hard to argue with what Perry writes here – the same “Western markets” (dominated by a handful of Corporate entities backed by the Credit Money of the Bank of England and other Central Banks) that did not bat an eyelid as 400 Billion Pounds (“not much if you say it quick”) was spent on wildly counter productive Covid policies (terrible Covid policies boasted about by the Prime Minister and Chancellor as recently as Wednesday), flung their toys out the pram when Prime Minister Liz Truss tried to reduce taxation – the very name “Liz Truss” has become a sneer, due to an endless media smear (agitprop) campaign.
Whether it is economic Collectivism (such as ever more government spending) or political Collectivism (such as the end of what is left of Freedom of Speech) there is no real resistance – the next Labour government will just complete an agenda that has been pushed for a very long time indeed.
I hope that Perry and others do “survive the impact” when this economy, indeed this society, crashes.
Some of us have talked for many years about how we are heading, as a society, for “the collapse” – however we have been unsuccessful in preventing it – it will now take place.
Sadly this is not “just” the United Kingdom – it is likely to be the Western world in general.
“There will be life after the collapse” – yes indeed there will be, but it will not be very pleasant.
Stuart Noyes: “What’s the solution ?”
Doh! We need more immigrants, obviously.
Or;
There is no short term solution. But a few suggestions;
(1) Complete reversal of the education reforms of the last thirty or forty years.
(2) Abolish paid MPs, or at the very least, devolve the responsibility for paying the MPs to the local constituency.
Stuart Noyes:
(1) A political class that is entirely self referential.
(2) Western Oligarchs and NGOs that are making decisions ( WEF, Open society ), that they then use their influence, graft and corruption to push onto the political elite – who are owned by a single point of political failure ( the central party apparatus CCO in the case of the Tories ) to force unwanted and often stupid policies onto the MPs who no longer representing their constituents, do as they are told.
I’ll either abstain (I live in Pimlico and my local Tory MP is useless) or vote for Reform.
Perry seems to be correct – Liz Truss may well have been the last chance for saving a free society, and the (Bank of England manufactured) “economic crises”, and tidal wave of media agitprop smears, have made the very name “Liz Truss” a sneer of contempt.
I only remember her economic efforts. Were there more because economics isn’t the sum of a free society?
Voting Reform sends a much stronger message. A Tory voter not voting = I am disgusted. A Tory voter voting Reform = I am disgusted and fuck you.