Wednesday 18 December 2019

Every nation has the government she deserves and England deserves Boris

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'Every nation has the government she deserves.' 
Joseph de Maistre's famous aphorism applies to the UK today, as it does to Romania and the United States and Russia and every country in the world.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the 109 new Tory MPs at a party on the chilly Commons terrace Monday evening. The 1922 Committee had to send out for an extra 50 bottles of wine. Victory is sweet and sweeter because of the lamentations from the left.

I liked this truth uttered by Graeme Archer.

Corbyn's party finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class.
He coined that zinger in a very interesting essay, from which I quote.
Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

Jay Elwes said this, with which I agree.

'Corbyn made the old, hard-left mistake of appearing to dislike Britain. His offer was ultimately a politics of shame. We should be ashamed of our unfair society, ashamed of how it operates, ashamed of success, ashamed of our country, ashamed of our history — ashamed of ourselves. That, at heart, was his message.'

I agree too with Tim Stanley when he said this.
'We live submerged in a culture that is at odds with most people’s values, yet it does its best to convince us that we are “the few” and they – the comedians, the actors, the academics, the artists – are “the many.” They have turned us into strangers in our own land.

'It’s comparable to a phenomenon observed in the USSR called hypernormalisation. The Soviet system was broken but the state wouldn’t admit it, and the ordinary people, because they weren’t even allowed to think of an alternative, became joint actors in a theatre of the absurd in which communism was great and everyone was doing well.'
A jolly Tom Harris blames Gordon Brown for the mess Labour is in and he is right. Gordon Brown, simply from pique, the guiding principle of his life, airbrushed out of Labour's history the achievements of Tony Blair and engineered the election of Ed Miliband as leader.

An unhappy Blairite and Remainer, the Independent's Political Editor John Rentoul, mused in his misery:


We can see clearly now: Labour MPs should have voted for May’s deal. We would have left the EU with the guarantee of staying in its customs union. May said it wouldn’t be needed, and if it was it would be a “temporary” customs union, until a long-term trade deal could be negotiated, but the point about the so-called backstop was that it was a fall-back position unless it was replaced by a deal that would have the same effect.

'....If they had voted for Theresa May’s deal, she would still be prime minister now, the weak leader of a divided party. And the Labour Party would be a potential party of government, instead of facing the prospect of another decade out of power.
In fact, Mr Corbyn was letting the Tories swing in the wind, as John Smith did over Maastricht and Harold Wilson over EEC accession in 1972, rather than rescue them. It seemed to make sense at the time but this time was different. Why? Because there there had been a referendum. Mr Corbyn betrayed the referendum result and therefore democracy. 

Sir Keir Starmer and Emily, Lady Nugee, who pressurised their leader to promise a second referendum, are perhaps responsible more than anyone else for Labour's bad election performance, but are favourites to succeed him. The Guardian-BBC-Independent approves of them.

It would have been much better for Labour and the country had Jeremy Corbyn  argued for the Norway model. He'd probably have got it. If not, he would not have lost so many of his northern seats. 

The Guardian-Independent-BBC tell us that the Europeans won't let us have a good deal. They also said Boris wouldn't be able to reopen the Withdrawal Agreement and wouldn't get or wouldn't win a general election. They were wrong. Let's not trust those people any more.

There was more humbug in this election than any in my lifetime. Everyone accused everyone else of racism, which is a feature of Britain's multi-racial, remarkably un-racist society. 

For any British readers who are very unhappy about the election result, here is very good advice from Sydney Smith. He is writing to Lady Georgiana Spencer, who was Lord Grey of the Reform Act's mistress. (Boris is not the first adulterous British Prime Minister. Not by a long way.)

The era which starts now will be about a war between capital cities and the provinces, in every country. Capital cities should lose, for simple reasons of arithmetic. The first rule of politics is you must be able to count. Brexit is only, I think, an augury.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. The big cities and graduates might defeat the small town people in the end. Graduates are now about half the British young. Liberal values are diffused through schools, universities, the BBC and the internet. Labour had a majority over the Conservatives among voters aged up to 39, which was the crossover. It was 47 in 2017. 

The baby boomers, in the end, have finally shed their liberalism. It's a shaft of sunlight before the dying of the sun.

The young in the UK backed Labour very strongly and they are not moving rightwards as they ascend into positions of power in their thirties. Shortly before the election, Ed West warned Tories about his generation.

The cohort currently set to move into positions of power, in the media, academia, medicine, law and other key professions, are far more liberal than any group before it, and not showing signs of changing. Not only that, but they are much less tolerant of conservative ideas than previous groups, and in the US at least far less tolerant of political ideas they disagree with. On top of this Brexit has radicalised a generation of even quite centrist graduates against the party.
This last point is important. Brexit is shifting huge numbers of influential people to the left, as Donald Trump has done.

Women, who used always to be always the conservative sex, and without whom no Conservative governments would have been formed in the second half of the 20th century, are now much more left-wing then men. 

This is a huge social change and is most marked among voters aged 24 or younger. Why is this? Feminism? The same thing is true in the USA. 

The old, the poorly educated and the countryside are responsible for Boris's victory. They were responsible for Trump's victory in 2016. The Tories beat Labour by a wider margin among people earning under £20,000 than those making over £70,000.

For a time I thought Professor Tanja Bueltmann, the German immigration specialist and Brexit opponent, who calls herself on Twitter an 'affinity Scot', was a parody account, but it is not so. She annoyed me for a long time but now is vanquished. However, she deserves the last word, in a remark she tweeted election night.

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2 comments:

  1. So you're saying this election is going to change the zeitgeist against the left but at the same time you're saying there's no chance for that to happen because the young generations are more liberal than ever?

    ReplyDelete