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In which our Pete again spells out the difference between a flash in the pan, and what it takes to build a party that can endure for 100 years... Surely at some point, Reform will invite him to help them get a grip on party basics? I don't buy this. A few weeks ago, Reform was in the doldrums, and it was already looking like the moment had passed to salvage it. Tice and Habib don't really understand what it takes to build a movement. They thought it was just a matter of getting on the airwaves. But then along comes Farage and its fortunes changed.&nbsp;But all the hope and energy is invested in just one man, and none of the necessary work to turn Reform into a sustainable, coherent movement will be done. There will be no policy work, no strategy, no message discipline, no internal coordination, zero cooperation, and endless internal bickering to the point where at least half the senior figures fall out with Farage and resign. History repeats, leopards do not change their spots.&nbsp;Consequently, it will nurture no new talent, it will neglect any serious vetting, making all the same mistakes Ukip made, and will end up limping from one embarrassment to the next, with Tice, Habib and Farage all contradicting each other, and Farage will run his mouth once to often without thinking. He's sailing close to the wind with his Ukraine remarks. He might be essentially correct but his lack of attention to detail will be his undoing. If it isn't this, it will be something else. I'm all for plain speaking, but you should at least try to avoid walking into ambushes.&nbsp;What you get from all this is a disorganised mess of a party that cannot withstand the departure of its leader, and it implodes as fast as Ukip did.&nbsp;Y'know, if I were Nigel Farage, I'd be hoping to lose Clacton. He is unassailable outside parliament, and he doesn't have the vulnerability of random unvetted colleagues. His outsider status is the source of his power. But once he's in their circus, they'll know exactly how to deal with him. They will collectively unperson him, the speaker will overlook him, and they'll swamp him with formalities. The Tories will will pull the faux outrage routine as much as Labour. They'll turn him into an Andrew Bridgen figure, out on his own. He will acquire a certain anti-prestige, in the same vein as Galloway and Powell, but they will be able to contain him, not least since Reform is unable to convert its polling into seats.Had they done the groundwork, and identified their most winnable seats, concentrated their ground game there, and made damn sure they have first rate candidates, they might have been able to make a go of it, but that's too much like movement-building. If they hadn't started this process already, we can safely assume they won't now.<h3>I appreciate the game plan for many is to simply destroy the Tory party in the vague hope that something better will replace it, but this replacement isn't just going to fall out of the sky. It has to be built, attending to the fundamentals that make for a successful movement that can withstand the departure of its leader.&nbsp;</h3>With that in mind, I'm just not all that enthusiastic about "getting onboard" a bus to nowhere that will probably break down somewhere in the wilderness. If the aim is to destroy the Tories, they seem to be doing a pretty good job unaided. I would rather the energy and resources were invested in a vehicle with coherent aims. A failure to do the groundwork now means that we're back at square one when Farage gets too bored/tired/old/sick.

Politics with endurance is hard work

Pete has a special interest in the military (check his X profile) and is again disdainful of a threadbare Reform strategy. So here is a proposed big picture defence review and it makes simple sense. The elephant in the room is the question of Ukraine and who is playing what game. At moments like this it can help to assess the EU position, and do precisely the opposite... On defence, Reform is as bad as all the other parties. Pledging to increase troop numbers, and defence spending to 3% GDP, is just not serious policy. Standing armies are expensive and wasteful. You only increase troop numbers if you're planning on having a war, and as I understand it, Farage (rightly) favours de-escalation in Ukraine.&nbsp;In peacetime, we need three basic things from the army: Training excellence, logistics, and readily deployable special forces. In the event of war it should be able to turn all of its professional soldiers into NCOs capable of training civilians into soldiers. As such, a peacetime army is a standby war college.&nbsp;In terms of maintaining readiness, we are better off expanding the civilian reserve. It should be promoted as a good way to acquire new skills, make friends and earn a supplementary income.&nbsp;Defence, though, is ultimately downstream of foreign policy. If you don't know what your foreign policy is, or where your interests lie, you will never have fit for purpose armed forces. Equipping the army in abstract of a coherent foreign policy is why procurement is messed up and there's so much waste. As usual, it comes down to a definition problem.&nbsp;I would venture that if we are to increase spending, it should not be to arbitrary targets. Defence spending should be as much as needs be - no more, no less. Arbitrary targets killed intelligent policymaking in every strand of governance.&nbsp;I would further venture that the Royal Navy is where we need the investment. We have a pitifully small surface fleet, and a serious manpower shortage. With current pay levels and limited career opportunities in such a small organisation, it just isn't the attractive career it once was.&nbsp;In terms of procurement, we have a system wide problem where most essential kit is becoming too expensive to lose. Drones and tanks, for example, are expendable battlefield assets, but not after we've goldplated the requirements and the cost several million a pop. We may have the best tanks and helicopters money can buy, but they can't be in two places at once, and we just don't have enough of them - even to support a small army like ours.&nbsp;The watchword for defence should be readiness, with the capacity to quadruple in scale in a short time if circumstances demand it, but the last thing we need is bloated armed services with bored, demotivated sailors and soldiers.&nbsp;It's true that Reform's defence policy would struggle to be more asinine than the Tory national service policy, but you can't expect to be taken seriously as a patriotic party without a detailed and credible defence policy.

Defence basics

Student of climatology, Chris Martz, takes no prisoners in the climate debate. He backs everything he says with copious background research and an uncompromising response to&nbsp; critics "... Climate alarmists unremittingly scream from the rooftops about “increasing weather extremes,” and anytime Mother Nature goes boo, they latch onto the media-spun storyline that every weather event is “unprecedented.”A few of us, however, make our living by compiling climate data and then charting it to see what it reveals. All it takes is a few minutes to download it from NOAA or whatever “official” source, drop it into an Excel workbook, convert it into a .csv (comma delimited) file and run the script through Python. And, in most cases, we find that extreme weather events aren’t on the rise either here in the U.S. or on a global scale.If the alarmist, however, is presented a chart or study or quotation directly from the IPCC AR6 Working Group I report, The Physical Science Basis, to show that (a) extremes are not increasing, and (b) the event in question is not unmatched in the historical record, he or she changes the subject to global average surface temperature and says “But, averages are increasing. You’re cherry-picking data and you can’t differentiate weather from climate.” And, they do this without being able to see the irony of their statement. You can talk until you’re blue in the face or until your nuts fall off, but it won’t make a difference. It will go right over his or her head because being able to think like a rational and normal human being is beyond their capability.By and large, climate activists are self-confessed anti-capitalist “degrowthers.” They have a mission to terminate future economic growth and destroy the socio-economic system of the West and use climate change as a means of doing so through using the scientific community as a crutch to gain public support. So, it isn’t about science to them. It’s political.<h3>They are Marxists. Plain and simple with the rare exception.</h3>You can try reaching across the aisle all you want, but it will be to no avail. The climate doomer crowd suffers from an incurable mental disorder, I am sure of it at this point. You cannot reason with an individual who has taken a position on an issue that he or she didn’t reason his or herself into. If you give them an inch, he or she will demand a mile.&nbsp;The only tools the activist mob has in their arsenal are blanket statements like “all scientists agree,” or “you are not a scientist.” They habitually reply with straw men and non-sequiturs to try and gaslight you. This is a communist tactic used to try and make you question your sanity. These are mentally dysfunctional people with malicious intentions. Don’t feed them.They deserve nothing more than to be ridiculed, laughed at and mocked endlessly until the house of cards finally comes tumbling down..."Fighting talk, but the anthropogenic lobby STILL relies on a speculative hypothesis to sustain its desire to spend untold £trillions on the pursuit of net-zero. How come so many politicians accept the hypothesis without ever seeing the evidence and proof?<figure id="figure-6fp3auo5emlxoifudu" data-full-width=""><img id="6fp3auo5emlxoifudu" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/2eAILU6G7vYN7BPBdjgrTPtbhIwCxnNRY4ulFKSxv42MZjWqrgWsbITRR5z1o0va.jpg" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 25% 70%;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="anthropogenic evidence " data-positionx="25%" data-positiony="70%" data-fullwidth="true" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/2eAILU6G7vYN7BPBdjgrTPtbhIwCxnNRY4ulFKSxv42MZjWqrgWsbITRR5z1o0va.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 25% 70%;"><figcaption class="body-normal text-gray-500 mt-2">anthropogenic evidence</figcaption></figure>It is an act of religious faith, where the fear of being called a climate heretic by the mob has caused too many feeble politicians who have no concept of science to capitulate. Yuri Bezmenov explained how the tactics of Joseph Goebbels have been adapted and updated in his seminal video from 1984... (<a href="https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q" data-mce-href="https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q">https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q</a>)<figure id="figure-a7lt65a3rnlxnsv1kl" data-full-width="" class=""><iframe id="a7lt65a3rnlxnsv1kl" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1EA2ohrt5Q" class="w-full bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;" allowfullscreen="" data-url="https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q" data-corners="default" data-fullwidth="true" data-mce-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1EA2ohrt5Q" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;"></iframe></figure>Follow <a data-mce-href="https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1803203973203238939" href="https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1803203973203238939" title="Chris on heatwaves, and the data credibility gap" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@ChrisMartzWX</a> on X for regular enlightenment. <a href="https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1803895160738283834" data-mce-href="https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1803895160738283834">https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1803895160738283834</a>

A climate control switch

On brink of a Tory wipeout, I’ve been out in London, having discussions with conservative thinkers about how we rebuild conservatism. As discussed previously, this is difficult when we have a basic definition problem. Conservatism has become synonymous with Thatcherism and libertarianism, and the elements of the Tory party are still wedded to these radical economic doctrines.&nbsp;Everyone on the right agrees that if we are to build a fit-for-purpose conservative party we have to rid it of the liberal internationalists who prize the international rules based order over national sovereignty, but as I keep pointing out, there is little remaining that’s worth salvaging. The free trade fundamentalists of the ERG are not “proper conservatives” and “PopCons” aren’t either. The very last thing we need is MAGA-infused, reheated hatcherism. Thatcherism was very much of its time. The right ideas at the right point in history - but it has nothing to offer present day Britain. People younger than me have no inclination of what it was like before Thatcherism. We didn’t have anything like the choices we have today. In a material sense, everything is better now. Ordinary people can have nicer things when markets are allowed to do what they are good at. Under socialism, much about British life was drab. Particularly the food - especially anywhere near the transport network (road and rail). I’m not at all nostalgic for it. These were the days were the only type of coffee you could get was scalding hot coffee coloured hot water in a polystyrene cup.<h3> When government runs things, what you get is what you’re given. The unleashing of capitalism was transformative for Britain. It was timely, necessary and welcome. </h3><h3>But looking at the world as we now find it, with consumer capitalism taken to the extreme, we find that you can have too much of a good thing.</h3> Our appetite for labour saving devices and instant gratification purchases has lessened us somehow. It has contributed to a broader spiritual crisis. We are an unhappy people. Our day to day material needs are generally met, but we are more isolated from each other. Somewhere along the line we lost any sense of place, community and belonging. At the end of this economic experiment, everything we value is falling apart.&nbsp;We can quibble over the causes here, but we can all agree that something has gone awry. Mass immigration and unfettered globalisation (the extremes of liberal economics) are certainly major factors. What we know is that this is not how things are supposed to be. Our collective instincts tell us this. The people want change and they can all agree they are not well served by the parties of the status quo. The fragmentation we see in politics is certainly unprecedented in my lifetime. Our task, then, is to define a new model of conservatism that speaks to the economic and social malaise we find ourselves in.&nbsp; The left would have it that the answer is to revert to socialism. The centrists want to preserve the status quo. Neither of these approaches addresses the root causes.<h3>Renationalising energy won’t make the wind blow. Further immigration will not fix our productivity crisis. A greater infusion of cash into a dysfunctional NHS will not improve health outcomes. Net Zero won’t reindustrialise Britain. Quite the opposite, in fact. The state assuming more responsibility for our welfare will not solve the cost of living crisis.&nbsp; </h3>Certainly, our economy lacks dynamism. Supply-side reforms are needed. Strategic deregulation can reboot housebuilding and infrastructure renewal. But after three decades of corrupt neoliberalism, deregulation has become a dirty word. Moreover, deregulation means abandoning the ill-conceived climate treaties, which is anathema to the ruling elite. Much rests on winning the argument that there is no climate emergency and the drive to reach Net Zero will make us poorer to no useful purpose. The right will continue to lose as long as it surrenders to dogmatic green ideology. In fact, green ideology underpins the entire basis for modern day left wing authoritarianism. Saving the planet is the pretext for enslaving us and dismantling democracy. Democracy is the greatest threat to the established order.&nbsp; As such, it is for conservatives to make a full throated case for real democracy, nationally and locally. What ails Britain is the gradual, almost imperceptible abolition of democracy. We still engage in the performative voting rituals of democracy, but the vote has no real power, and the ruling class is moving into endgame.&nbsp; <h3>This is what makes Starmer’s Labour so dangerous. Labour seeks to eradicate what’s left of parliamentary sovereignty and make it all but impossible to implement conservative policies. </h3>To a point, this was already the case through membership of the EU, which we sought to remedy by leaving the EU. But the premise we fought on was faulty. Restoring parliamentary sovereignty overlooks that parliament did all this to us in the first place, and now that we have left the EU, that same parliament will again display its contempt for democracy by rubber-stamping Gordon Brown’s constitutional reforms. Perhaps I’m missing something, but parliamentary sovereignty seems to be part of the problem. Parliament enjoys the right to give away powers and mess with our constitution without our consent. Every major piece of constitutional vandalism of the last four decades was done on the sly, with no meaningful public debate. There is no constitutional constraint on what it may do, and indeed there is nothing stopping it putting us on a trajectory to rejoin the EU by stealth. In theory, general elections are our means of holding parliament to account, but it’s not working.Conservative luminaries tell us that all that’s required is a restoration, by way of unpicking the Blair regime, but Britain’s archaic system of “democracy” is a relic of a bygone era. Parliament worked in conjunction with the Crown and the Church, but the monarch no longer wants the job of defending the faith or the powers of the Crown, and the Church has all but abandoned Christianity. As such, a restoration would be rolling back to a pre-internet, pre-secularisation model, from a time when our elites were generally better educated than the voters, and bound by a vague sense of patriotism and loyalty (which is clearly no longer the case). The world has evolved, and British democracy must evolve with it. <h3>I’m not one who would abolish the monarchy as it still has a ceremonial role to play, and gives the public a sense of continuity, but if the Crown no longer plays a role in the defence of sovereign powers, then the people themselves have to provide the oversight. Direct democracy is the only true form of democracy.&nbsp; </h3>For conservatism to thrive, it needs to make a better counter-offer that puts people in charge of their own affairs. Conservatism recognises that the bedrock of a functioning society is community, but community cannot exist as remotely managed abstract provinces concocted by bureaucrats. There is no national democracy without local democracy, and there is no economic dynamism or justice unless government is responsive to democracy.&nbsp; <h3>The lesson we should have learned from the last fifty years is that the politicians cannot be trusted, and they’re not fit to be in charge. So how about we put the people in charge, and give them the ultimate veto over what is done to them? © 2024 Pete North Also on Substack &nbsp;<a href="https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/fit-for-purpose-conservatism" data-mce-href="https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/fit-for-purpose-conservatism">https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/fit-for-purpose-conservatism</a> </h3>&nbsp;&nbsp;

Fit for purpose conservatism

Everyone on Twitter thinks they'll be brave and disobey any future blasphemy laws. Most won't though. A few will to begin with, but the police will round on them and there'll be exemplary prosecutions. People will go to jail, others will be heavily fined and publicly shamed. They'll pick you off one by one, and if you've got anything to lose, you'll self-censor.&nbsp;There will be some online protest (as there's been over Sam Melia), but the media will go into full character assassination mode so however noisy the protest, it will be written off as far right activism - and the likes of the Free Speech Union will stay quiet on the matter.&nbsp;The authorities will be clever about this. They won't provoke a mass protest by bagging everyone with a spicy opinion. If you're below the line, with just few followers, you'll get away with it, and they won't go after anyone who would otherwise become a free speech martyr. They'll do it quietly and selectively, initially bagging people who are already regarded as "far right" so as to dampen public sympathy. They'll then start leaning on social media companies to suspend accounts or shadow-ban them.&nbsp;We can expect cautious condemnation of this from the likes of Farage and Reform, but I don't imagine there will be a full-throated defence of freedom of speech because Farage always stays inside the lines. Like him or loathe him, the only hope we have is if Tommy Robinson can mobilise a mass demonstration.<h3>In the past I've been indifferent about Tommy Robinson, and often critical of his methods, but we're past all that now.</h3>Our only salvation will be to mobilise the British spirit of defiance (if it still exists) and TR lot will be key to that. If Labour attempts to install the APPG definition of Islamophobia into law, then we're all going to have to drop our petty differences and get behind him. I'm sorry I took so long to realise this.&nbsp;This has always been debated as something for far in the future, but what we're seeing in this election is the foundations being laid for an Islamist takeover of British politics.&nbsp;The Muslim Vote organisation is engaged in a highly coordinated campaign to put enemies of British liberty in parliament, and they're going to succeed. This is just the beginning but by 2029 they will have their ducks in a row and could even have dozens of MPs. They have already made the Labour Party their gimp on a leash. Starmer might land an impressive majority this time around, enough to keep the Islamists at arms length, but as Labour tanks in popularity, he will turn to them to stay in power, and they will make their demands. They'll do it piecemeal, but they'll keep going until they get everything they want.&nbsp;This, incidentally, is why I'm so critical of Reform. They keep playing it safe, and they haven't done their homework. Unlike the Muslim Vote, they don't have a set of equivalent demands for a time when they wield leverage over the Tories. The Islamists know how to play the game, but the British right is just playing at it. The Islamist enemy is playing the long game, they are better organised, and have a ruthlessly efficient ground game, when all Reform has is an ageing rabble-rouser. Having an intellectual foundation, and a coherent set of demands is absolutely pivotal to movement-building and you can't wing it with populist tropes. The Islamists are showing us how it is done. We need to learn from them. But there will be no equivalent movement-building under Farage because he's always winging it.&nbsp;<h3>This is very rapidly becoming a national emergency, and these could be the last years of Britain as a liberal democracy. This could be what puts us on the road to civil war, as our politics is completely colonised by foreigners.</h3> This is why we need to be super careful about handing Labour a supermajority. I appreciate the seductive nihilist sentiment of "zero seats", but in the next parliament we need every ally we can find. If Farage is determined to run Reform as an incompetent civnat/populist party with no plan, then we are likely to be completely outmanoeuvred by the enemy. We can't afford to play it safe any more.<h2> The line has to be drawn here.</h2>

The Sharia thought police

So who knows that the file in the picture is known as a <a data-mce-href="https://www.wonkeedonkeetools.co.uk/files/how-did-bastard-files-get-their-name" href="https://www.wonkeedonkeetools.co.uk/files/how-did-bastard-files-get-their-name" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bastard</a>? What a wonderful language we possess. It is really important to start making it plain to the blob (and presumptive elites) that when the votes are counted and Reform have more votes than any party other than Labour - but only a handful of seats then ALL voters will take to the streets of Westminster and demand a complete rethink of the electoral system.(**Aftermath note: maybe the most stark illustrations of the easily gamed electoral system is the number of votes needed byLiberal Democrats to win 71 seats; and then the fact that 20% of the population has given labor 60% of the seats in the House of Commons is a constitutional malfeasance of the highest degree. The sectarian vote that gave four seats to Hamas supporters is a further reminder that the system is fundamentally fooked.) It will be impossible to escape the obvious fact that is an outrageous embarrassment, and not merely no longer "fit for purpose". And Never mind postal vote fraud. So we should start NOW to demand that Starmer's glaringly illegitimate government should be postponed for 6 months. That would be enough time for a new phone/internet voting system to be discussed, trialled and implemented.&nbsp; It's not nearly as big a task as those that don't want any sort of PR or change will try and pretend. The only reason why a politician might not want to clear away the embarrassment could be that their party benefits unfairly from retaining the "traditional" fraud. Yes, we understand all the issues around security and fraud - but banks and government have made ownership of a smart phone with internet access pretty much compulsory if you want to exist at all in 2024.&nbsp; And at the same time as doing this, we can tidy up many aspects of identity and tracking - and the need to back up all phones securely.&nbsp; It's especially handy that WOTE founders were involved in the foundation and deployment of the internet for its entire 40+ year evolution.&nbsp; And a couple of us also worked on Amstrad's famous <a data-mce-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_E-mailer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_E-mailer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">emailer devices </a>and network from 1997.&nbsp; Those were the days...<figure id="figure-5ca074dzmlxhz0c7a"><img id="5ca074dzmlxhz0c7a" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/40IyYoO7KsG4mObtHl8u48pzNiglhYsC1X6YOkF6CupnJ9HR3KvbQr317vObqMNK.jpg" alt="orange fruits" title="orange fruits" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 70% 15%;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="Amstrad E-Voting Terminal " data-positionx="70%" data-positiony="15%" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/40IyYoO7KsG4mObtHl8u48pzNiglhYsC1X6YOkF6CupnJ9HR3KvbQr317vObqMNK.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 70% 15%;"><figcaption class="body-normal text-gray-500 mt-2">Amstrad E-Voting Terminal</figcaption></figure><h3>There is still just time to manoeuvre this election to include a referendum on real reform and Real Democracy.</h3>Maybe @elonmusk would like to step up and offer to work with his smart developers on the secure voting platform - and then offer to do the same with any country that wants to clean up voting systems that range from dubious - to outrageously and obviously corrupt.

The WOTE.uk Federation 2025

Blog: the Revolution starts here...

Politics with endurance is hard work

Defence basics

A climate control switch

Fit for purpose conservatism

The Sharia thought police

The illegitimate election