Standing in the ruins

I'm not as furious at Labour as I was at the Tories. Labour is just doing what envious, low ability, economically illiterate quarterwits do. Almost everything they're doing was predictable, and predicted. Everything they're doing is entirely in character, and nobody should be the least bit surprised that taxes are killing jobs and destroying entire industries. That a court is sitting to decide what a woman is, and we're now basically debating euthanasia, is really just the icing on the cake. This is why we put up with Tory governments so often and for so long.

We all knew this was coming though. All Tory governments reach the end of their useful life, when the material difference between criminal incompetence and raging psychopathy is marginal. Some of us assumed Starmer would be more of a crashing bore than a tinpot dictator, but he's got carried away with the idea that he has some kind of mandate.

What makes Starmer especially incompetent is that his world stopped turning in 2016. That the liberal postwar international rules based order is collapsing around him bypassed him completely, and he's still labouring under the illusion that Britain leads on the "world stage" and that all will follow.

Like all insular remainers, it escapes him that far right populism is rising (and winning) in Europe, nation states are reasserting their borders, and EU economies are flatlining thanks to green energy policies and Net Zero ideology. Liberal progressives inhabit a world of their own where reality never intrudes.

In some respects it's like having a foreigner in control. Starmer has no feel for governing and no affinity with the British people, most of whom he regards ars far right. It is similarly lost on him that the working class whom Labour claim to represent absolutely despise him. Starmer is not just alien to this country, he is alien to this planet. This is man who presses for more war in Europe while further dismantling our own armed forces.

Knowing that Labour would be this awful, I could at least console myself with the notion that the electorate will soon do to Labour what they've done to the Tories, and that Labour would be the last gasp of a dying regime. But then the Tories went and fucked that up by electing Olukemi Badenough as their leader. It seems likely that the Tories could win by default in 2029, but will do nothing to dismantle the many impediments to vaguely sane, functioning government.

I thus resign myself to the fact that is to be no British renaissance any time soon. Starmer will again shackle us to the corpse of EU neoliberalism while the Tories will pointlessly grumble from the sidelines, and the rest of us will have to adapt to colder homes, intermittent power supply, shrinking pay, fewer jobs, rising violent crime, failing institutions, and a moribund economy. This would be easier to swallow were it external influences creating these conditions but all of it is entirely self-inflicted because the entire establishment is in thrall to the same death-cult ideology.

The sad part is that it wouldn't take all that much to fix things. We saw during Covid what government can do and how quickly it can be done when there is the resolve and the political will, but that political will only seems to exist when there's an opportunity to meddle in our lives and restrict our freedoms and choices. What we need is a complete clear out of the entire political apparatus but our electoral system, and politics more generally doesn't allow for interlopers. We've seen in Reform how the closer a party gets to real power, the more it becomes what it seeks to replace.

It seems that with a political solution so remote, there is only decline and fall to look forward to. I can see why Peter Hitchens is telling young people to abandon ship. It's only out of some misguided optimism that i persist with politics at all. I've long maintained that a degree of self-delusion is necessary to function in politics or one would simply resign from it all in despair. Writing about politics these days feels more like charting the decline that political activism. It's not even funny anymore. The destruction inflicted upon us by our political class is beyond anything our mortal enemies could achieve with an armada of tanks.