Feb 2nd – One man’s civilization is another man’s jungle, yeah.

Two important things have happened in our project to upend the UK political system. The first, is that it now looks pretty certain that there will be no general election until the autumn, and providing there is no Trump-Putin-Musk AI-backed plan to turn the UK into Northern Airstrip 1 by then, we can still take part; and the second is that our political mission, to create a radical centre, first set out here in November [https://dickiewhitesdiary.com/2023/11/24/nov-24th-misty-watercolour-memories-of-the-way-we-were/], has now entered the mainstream. See Janan Ganesh’s article making exactly this point, in this week’s Weekend FT.

In that post, we said that we’d be setting out our case over three articles; a job which has now been completed. Each successive piece reached a wider audience, and through them we have established the three core elements of our project:

              Part I sought to reposition the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, from that of the bringer of an economic miracle, to one that presents her as the easily duped mouthpiece, who unwittingly asset-stripped her nation on behalf of the grandees of her party, and her husband’s colleagues. We drew the contrast between her use of North Sea Oil revenues (to sell licences and reduce taxes, for short term gain), and Norway’s (to increase taxes and retain a stake in oil exploitation, to finance a sovereign wealth fund which is now the largest in the world). Her project is presented as one which has now run aground, in a country facing up to a life with a hollowed-out infrastructure, no more assets left to plunder, and a bereft populace from which it can no longer raise taxes.

              Part II, put the opinion that Rupert Murdoch is the single most damaging thing to have happened to the UK in last fifty years – despite the acknowledged competition for that accolade, and his own recent pre-occupation with fomenting civil war in the USA. It sought to pivot away from the established view of the centre being the place which too frequently listens to both sides, towards one which proposes that the new centre will hold each pole in disdain.

              Part III, was concerned with taking the fear out of the future. It made two points: one, was that all politicians, especially those of the Right, trade on nostalgia, peddling a lazy nonsense about a golden age that never existed, and which soon becomes the obsession of cretins, like MAGA and the reclaiming of Ukraine. A fiction, to be resolved by our second point: that for politics and power to work, it must be reassuringly boring.

The route to this, we suggest, is to establish thirty-year ministries, run by competent technocrats, where important policy decisions are informed by professionally run people’s assemblies. The goal being two-fold: to reduce executive government to one of slow-changing, unexciting, competence; and to rid UK politics of snakes.

Now all we have to do, is to create a movement, and go viral.

*

Janan identifies the first obstacle to our plan – Trump’s MAGA Trumpanzees, and Corbyn’s Millenium Momentums, are successful versions of that which was not quite replicated by Macron’s En Marche. In the way that everybody once derived a sense of community and common purpose, without necessarily adhering to all of its doctrines, from belonging to the church, the winning schemes here demand a blind faith commitment, which people like Trump, and evangelical preachers, seem better able to extract from their adherents, than those who try to appeal to the reasonable middle.  

What happened to that nation of complacently contented churchgoers in the UK? As organised religion lost its lustre, what replaced it? Well, nothing – it filtered away slowly, first through fidelity to competing national causes, like sports teams; and from there to the BBC light entertainment department; eventually, running out into the sands of Eurovision and It’s a Knockout, until finally breaking up into splintered factions on the rocks of self-interest. And those moderate masses, now in thrall to a different kind of preacher – one that came through the television, were persuaded to join a different group: social mobility.

And social mobility was never a movement in the same sense. It was open to everyone, but it did have rules, and they were: that you didn’t come with grievances about exclusion, you had no causes to fight, and once on board, you suppressed any lingering instincts for straight-talking and shooting from the hip.

And so, their offspring, the newly aspirant, freed from the tyranny of Christian recruitment of school assemblies, and the yoke of manual work, were raised to this new religion. The new working-class deference was to our educated betters, but it now came with a promise of an opportunity to be cashed here, on earth. We could be just like them, as long as we played the game properly. Elevated by prospects to be whatever we determined ourselves to be, many of us became possessed of a reticence to demean ourselves by a label, we were on our way somewhere, and we didn’t know what that somewhere was just yet. We looked down on those that did, as low achieving, biddable idiots; “I am a Punk rocker; soul-boy, disco dancer, electro-pop magnet; indie-pendent minded like; House with integral garage; a girl-power ranger.” To us was the language of the inadequate.

Therein I think, is found the error that is so often committed by the would-be centrist populist. S/he cannot stand to think of their audience as fools. So often, the decent centre, becomes the apologist, scared, say in the case of cancel culture, as Janen identifies, even to call out their own children for their excesses. But it was not always that way.

Today, it seems, we have no one ready to call on, whereas others, at the poles, has them waiting in the wings. For we perceive it to be about speaking in an unguarded way – something that plays to populism. That is what demagoguery is; it’s not a compliment to call someone a demagogue; it describes a form of politics that is designed to appeal to the ill-thought through, easy-win, idiocies of the uneducated. It is beyond the capabilities of the reasonable middle to do such things because we are determined to win by rational debate. Our ability to produce a demagogic leader, is almost oxymoronic. It’s definitely off-brand.

But consider that for a moment. Did we not learn a form of what was required at our grandparents’ knee; by our teachers? Weren’t we often put in our place for acting with a lack of common sense, or grace; for exhibiting a win at all costs attitude; for not being sensitive to the needs of others? Once, we had no compunction about putting someone in their place for offending our sense of what we knew was morally upright behaviour, now somehow, it’s become the rhetoric of the marginal Right. And we had our champions. Nobody condemned Brian Clough for swinging haymakers at pitch invaders. We cheered him on.

Is this perhaps, the point? To step up to the position of demagogue, it requires a conviction in one’s rectitude that is arrogant to the point of intolerant conceit; an attitude that does not sit well with those whose church is broad. Well, yes. We’ve had a few candidates over the years: Christopher Hitchens; Richard Dawkins; Brian; but not many – and look how wrong it goes when you’ve only got a half-wit, like John Prescott, to do it for you. There’s a shamelessness that goes with the job, that only people like him, Trump and Putin, can easily embrace. Otherwise, you have to be so superior in your intelligence, and know it, like Christopher Hitchens, that the job would be unviable for all but the most able and eloquent – and they are usually busy with something else. What would our next leader look like? A retiring bishop, or an Oxford don, possessed of the common touch? Is our case failed, before it even gets going?

NO! NO! NO!
This is where it changes.

We need not lose the most persuadable of our people to the Murdoch brand of base populism. Why have people like him been so good at this, where the rest of us fail to gain any traction? What is their secret? What was the secret to the success of the church for so long, for Naziism in Europe? Why is there a cult of Trump, Putin, Hitler?

Look at Boris Johnson, he couldn’t do it. He tried to establish a sort of hybrid brand of Corinthian demagoguery. That it was doomed from the start, is not entirely explained by his trademark fecklessness; Trump is just as lazy, and possesses a similarly deluded belief in his own superpowers. It must be conceded that there is also a self-defeating asininity at the core of the idea of elite-populism – a term spent lying on the couch in the common room, pretending to read difficult novels, should have taught him that.

That it was a bad idea, is perhaps the best explanation of his hubristic spiral from public life, but imagine what he could have achieved had he received a regular clip behind the ear from, say, Alex Ferguson? Or even, to have lived in fear of that clip; of being outed in public for what he knew himself to be.

This is the answer: effective demagoguery rides on the back of fear. The church did that by invoking damnation; fascism, by othering, as Trump, and Putin have so effectively proved.

What if we could find a leader of our new movement, who could do all that? Someone who could sniff out a phony at ten paces? Someone, who, when told by a politician – a politician mind you, not the Governor of the Bank of England, or the Fed, or a law enforcement agency, that they (the MPs) are “…going to reduce inflation/knife crime by half,” that their response is not, “Oh really, can you tell us by which means, you intend to do that?” but instead, “Dry up, you idiot. Do you think we’re as stupid as you?”

That is how people were dealt with when I was a boy, and by people who would not have contemplated voting for a Tory, or a Communist, as long as there was a hole in their life. It’s a form of bullying, I suppose, one designed to have you fall in line, understanding the consequences of dissent, from an elder who tolerated no nonsense – a bollocking from someone who expected better of you. And it’s a movement that has at its heart, a fundamental goodness to motivate its actions – the desire to see the lives of its adherents improve.

That’s a nostalgia that I wouldn’t mind rediscovering. And if no one else will do it, I’m going to give it a go. If you think you can do it any better, tell me in the comments below.