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FR‘Whoever is in power, the issues they face are structural. Politics feels stuck because it is stuck.’ Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
I was expecting Starmer to be awful. But less than six months into his premiership, his government’s prissy authoritarianism, student-union self-righteousness, and vindictive taxation has plunged Labour from a net favourability rating of +6 on taking power in July to just one point above the hated Conservatives today. Two in five Britons actually believe they’re worse off since Starmer’s election.
Over the weekend, a petition was launched calling for a new General Election. It has now passed two million signatures — including a surprising number of MPs. Elon Musk hailed it as evidence of Britain’s dislike of the Starmerist “police state”.
And yet, we might retort: who cares? As the PM pointed out on Monday, e-petitions aren’t how we choose governments. But, in any case, what difference would a General Election make? Surely we haven’t already forgotten that Starmer owed his landslide not to voters’ love of the Labour Party but to their hatred of the incumbent Tories. And whoever is in power, the issues they face are structural. Politics feels stuck because it is stuck. And what’s sticking it is a cross-party consensus: certain features of the political landscape are categorically off the table in policy terms.
In this sense, our predicament today is comparable with that of the Seventies. In that unhappy decade, post-war recovery proved so difficult because Britain had recently lost many of its former imperial markets and supply chains. We’d nationalised major industries, leaving the country with a vast state apparatus responsible for almost everything, and with dwindling funds to pay for it. Meanwhile well-organised trade unions responded to any effort to constrain wages in these industries by going on strike, effectively holding the taxpayer to ransom — all while a civil service raised to govern a global empire set about justifying its much-reduced existence by inventing new problems to solve. Each stakeholder had, from their own perspective, a legitimate set of interests; but the aggregate result was stasis. Rubbish went un-collected in the street. Dead bodies weren’t taken away. There were rolling blackouts across the country, as miners picketed power stations and railway workers refused to move fuel around the country.
Today, this winter promises to be every bit as discontented. And that won’t change, no matter how many prime ministers we go through, so long as both parties remain committed to the beliefs and institutions that make change impossible. It’s just the pillars of stagnation that are different. In the Seventies it was national ownership, industry, and the unions. Today it’s non-contributory welfare (including the NHS), and a morality industry shaped by a monolithically progressive “third sector”, and enforced by an activist judiciary armed with “human rights”. It’s all underwritten by the third pillar: the mass immigration that keeps the whole show on the road.
Much as in the Seventies, the livelihoods of millions depend on these pillars remaining politically off-limits. And much as then, today’s settlement is running out of road, via its own internal logic. We can’t cut taxes because how else are we supposed to fund the NHS? But we can’t raise them either, because otherwise we’ll plunge people into poverty and then they’ll be on benefits, which requires raising taxes and sets off a shrill chorus from the “third sector”. Meanwhile, the wider economy that sustains it is a confected, empty thing of bum-wiping and consumer credit, kept in fragile homeostasis by increasingly punitive demands on a shrinking base of real businesses and productive workers. This is shored up with borrowing and what Starmer (like the Tories before him) calls making Britain “a world-leading hub for investment” and everyone else calls “flogging national assets to Blackrock”. In this unwelcoming climate, then, productive sector after productive sector crumples, sells up, or moves overseas. The Tories immiserated SMEs; under Labour, it’s the turn of farmers. After that, who knows? Perhaps HMRC will resort to robbing ice cream vans.
Then, whatever colour their rosette, the appetite of successive governments for deferring disaster by importing warm bodies is the most consistent revealed preference of all. Boris Johnson has admitted he opened the spigots with the aim of tackling inflation after Covid. And to date Labour seem to be continuing this long-established Tory policy, of making rude gestures at would-be immigrants with one hand while holding the door open with the other. Then, too, you can’t challenge this or you’ll set the morality industry off, and you can’t even point out its potential deleterious effects on welfare because the government doesn’t collect those statistics. And meanwhile the social solidarity and shared cultural references that comprise a polity’s real unwritten constitution continue their long, slow dissolution, assailed by the second-order effects of this human quantitative easing.
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SubscribeExcellent essay. MH identifies the issues very well, and offers some potential solutions. Good stuff.
Tory bedwetting after spending 15 years destroying the country and appointing ever more bug eyed loons to make things worse.
She and Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of them had their shot and made an almighty balls up of it. Time to sit down and keep quiet. Some hope..
They did idea make a shocking mess, so bad, indeed, that they’ve let in something worse.
I don’t recall Jeremy Clarkson ever holding a role in the government.
CS hasn’t got to the modern history part of his GCSE yet.
I might be losing my memory, but I’m struggling to remember when Mary Harrington and Jeremy Clarkson led the government.
Sadly they never have but I’m all for giving them a chance
Some hope indeed. Things can only get worse for you guys, I’m afraid. A roaring US economy, driven by cheap energy, de-regulation and AI, is going to suck every last penny of investment capital out of Europe and the UK. We’re all going to get massively poorer whatever Starmer and his colleagues do. Even if Labour survive in power until 2029 they’ll never be elected again. Watch and learn.
FYI GB is in Europe ..not in the EU for sure, but neither is it in Asia, America or Africa..
The coupling of champagne and socialist seems like an oxymoron. I associate champagne with wealth and prosperity, and socialism with misery and poverty. As Churchill said in the House of Commons in October 1945, ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.’ Socialism claims to be kind, but really, like an intravenous drip of euthanasia, it kills the patient.
Great comment. Thank you for highlighting a Churchill quote which is still relevant. I call socialism Levelling Down.
Everyone wants to eradicate poverty and violence. We just disagree on how best to deliver upward mobity and prosperity for the most.
As sure as eggs are eggs, it won’t be by demonising or disincentivising the people who invent, design, make and sell things.
I think you get a buzz from downticks. Still, whatever floats your boat.
Socialist bedwetting after being found wanting so soon, and feeling stupid in believing there was a magic money tree.
Great essay – but one that somehow forgets or avoids the untouchable pillar of Net Zero.
Yes, of all the threats to our society, NetZero is the worst. For some reason, people are frightened of tackling this one. Maybe because of the confusion between climate prognoses and attempts to tackle them – two completely different things.
My reply to Brendan should have been made to you Caradog. Churchill always found World Peace an unimpeachable objective, only believed there must a way of getting it other than simply demanding or expecting it.
NET Zero policies are a non-solution to a non-problem.
It’s the Sun that influences the weather: the Solar Flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), the Coronal Holes and the Electromagnetic connections that transfer the Energy that varies most from the Sun to the planets, including the Earth. What ever Carbon Dioxide does, it’s effects have been saturated: it’s past the point of changing the Earth’s temperature.
And the NET Zero policies, although they may work at very small scale, with subsidies, turned into the country’s main method of Energy production, will only destroy Industry, Manufacturing and make the country poorer, very poor indeed.
I assume you have read the book by Vinós, which is undoubtedly correct. But knowing you are correct is not enough – you have to convince other people. I am a physical scientist and I found the book difficult – not because of the science but the jargon.
Non solution yes, non problem, no! Climate change is very real but it’s doubtful it’s (all) man-made.. It needs to be catered for, not defeated as the latter is impossible.
Sure, when a dangerous animal approaches, the most effective solution is to close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and chant ‘La-La-La’. More sophisticated actors can spend their time proving that the animal does not exist, and that anyway it is immortal so there is no way to avoid it. Either way you can feel happy and content and be free from any uncomfortable need to do things you would rather avoid, right up to the point where reality – and the animal – bites.
No, when a dangerous animal approaches, the most effective solution is to take the safety off your rifle and put a couple of k-ll shots into the animal. My parents thought me to be prepared and be a survivor.
As an astrophysicist, I can categorically say that the Sun does influence climate, but that since the 19th century, human-caused drivers have had in inceasingly greater effect and are now more important. However, the biggest climate problem now is the industrialisation of China, India, Brasil and other developing nations, and the solution has to involve all countries. Furthermore, an even more immediate threat is the imperialism of Russia and the need to defeat this sick rogue state and its culture, just as Germany and Japan had to be comprehensively defeated and re-educated some eighty years ago. This more immediate threat actually requires more hydrocarbon energy production and transportation, as well as massive non-GHG producing development.
It starts with repeal of Climate Change Act 2008.
I re-read The Gathering Storm recently. The experience was a bit like reading fiction, only instead of being transported from the present one was transported to it. Replace “World Peace” with Net Zero – and I found it hard not to confuse the two – I thought I was reading the news.
It’s about 20 years since I read that. Good idea!
A two-day climate conference in Prague, organised by the Czech division of the international Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), which took place on November 12-13 2024 in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague, “declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary ‘climate emergency’ is at an end”.
The high-level scientific conference also declared:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, and should be dismantled.”
The conference also: “calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion”.
How come nobody in the press reported about it or did I miss it? Wonderful news!
In Canada, Trudeau wants to make it illegal to even question aloud his net-zero mandates. Similarly, he will make it illegal to question the official narrative about reported harms relating to “residential” (First Nations) schools.
It is what you would expect from the literal love child of Fidel Castro. His mother was a rock-and-roll groupie at the time. Pierre Trudeau introduced them.
Did that conference conclude there is NO climate emergency? ..or that it does exist but is not man-made?
And did recommend any action to cater for (as against halt) climate change? I know I should research it myself but I’m lazy…
All of this is admirable, I suppose, but it is also just arguing from authority: replacing one authority (the IPCC) whose narrative you don’t like, with another, (clintel) whose narrative you prefer. CO2 is incontrovertibly a greenhouse gas. There is a significantly higher concentration of it in the atmosphere than there was 100 years ago. That should be the starting point for any discussion about whether climate change is real or not. The focus now should be on how best to deal with the coming effects of it.
Please explain the causes of the Medieval Warm and subsequent cooling.
It’s telling that this conference has occurred in Eastern Europe. Due undoubtedly to their experience of CommuSocialism, they seem to have more Common Sense.
An interesting piece,ignored by the media,as is the paper by Professors Lintzen and Happer in July 2024 stating that additional C02 will have little effect due to saturation and that net zero policies will have trivial effect on temperature and disastrous effects on people worldwide.Noone is better qualified than these two
I now see that Prof Lintzen is a signatory to the Clintel paper
I agree it is a great essay, but I am not sure about Thatcher breaking the unions “by closing the mines and de-industrialising the country, in favour of the service economy that now dominates Britain” and this a question that deserves an answer.
As Mary says elsewhere in the article “In that unhappy decade, post-war recovery proved so difficult because Britain had recently lost many of its former imperial markets and supply chains. We’d nationalised major industries,..” Might these two factors have been significant in the demise of British industry?
Add to that joining the EEC in 1973, and consequently having to abolish the import tariffs on manufactured goods imposed in the aftermath of WW1, and throwing British markets open to European countries who had been able to reindustrialise after WW2 while the UK continued to spend disproportionately on defence.
Also there was the impact of north sea oil which made the pound a petrocurrency and British Industry uncompetitive in much the same way as the Euro made German manufacturing more competitive than it should have been. I remember Nigel Lawson recounting being asked by representatives of British industry “Can’t you keep the bloody stuff in the ground”.
I would be very interested to see these issues addressed
As to “Perhaps HMRC will resort to robbing ice cream vans.” I do not think they would dare do that any more than they would look at taxis, Turkish barbers, and takeaways, all of which are key to laundering the proceeds of crime.
“European countries who had been able to reindustrialise after WW2 while the UK continued to spend disproportionately on defence.” Meaning Britain was stuck with its old industries and tooling? I remember all the different companies making warplanes – three types of nuclear V-bomber, just to be on the safe side. Was that the fault of Europeans (apart from their war)? “… north sea oil which made the pound a petrocurrency and British Industry uncompetitive”. I believe Norway had some oil too. I remember when you could get four Swiss Francs to the pound. Now you are lucky to get one. Is Swiss industry uncompetitive? The thing that stands out about Britain (and even more its close cousin the USA) is its social inequality.
Four types of strategic bomber… don’t forget the Sperrin as the less ambitious “spare” in case the others didn’t pan out.
I totally agree. NetZero is the biggest folly of all, which is already destroying our current life in the West. I put my hope in the new Trump Administration and that it will tackle and smash this pseudo-science. We need some brave people to swim against the huge tide of foolishness. All our current and future ventures will depend on reliable cheap energy and this will certainly not come from nature destroying windmills or solar panels.
The biggest threat to our society is the slavish adherence to a ‘net zero’ policy which fails on every single level. Watch the Yanks champion cheap energy again and see their productivity rocket.
..not to mention spending billions on a hopeless war and an expensive genocide.. oh, yes, and bloated corporate profits and the lack of wealth tax..
Obviously most Unherd readers approve of fighting an unwinnable (and dangerous) war, approve of the costly genocide, approve of bloated profits and are opposed to yhe obscenely rich paying tax.. How odd? Are 16/23 Unherd readers billionaires??
What hopeless war and expensive genocide?
Net Zero is a part of the second sacred cow you mention.
The sad state of affairs in Britain and the West are that the longer the can is kicked down the road, the worse the solution will have to be. The more bitter the pill is that we will all have to swallow if we as a society want to survive this “call it what you will”. And this pill will be reimmigration. History is littered with such events and to think that it will not happen here is ludicrous. The question will be carrot or stick? The carrot will be the lure of wealthier parts of the world (UAE, Saudi, Singapore, perhaps even India) or the stick of the far right. While the carrot is preferred, it holds no guarantee. The far right on the other hand leaves a very bitter taste in the mouth because they are unpalatable. I personally put the far right under short term pain for long term gain. There is no way that the far right could ever enthrall a population for long enough. With time, the far right will become more moderate. They are certainly not the evil boogeyman that the MSM portrays them to be.
It is a bitter pill to swallow, but multiculturalism just does not work. Rather than see it as a horrible thing thought by racists. We should open our mind to the possibility that humans are capable of being very culturally diverse and that this is a wonderful thing.
I might not have put this as eloquently as others do, but before you crucify me, have a think about it.
What an inane comment. Multi ethnic societies have been the norm for thousands of years. Our problems don’t stem from immigrants but the stupidity of our leaders. That’s the entire point of the article.
It’s both of those things.
That’s because you don’t see the really important difference between multi-ethnic and multicultural.
Whilst I am fully in favour of deporting people with no right to be here and foreign born criminals who through their criminality have forfeited their right to be here, I do not see significant re-migration as remotely realistic. The answer has to be putting significant effort into integration so that we return to being a more mono-cultural society, whilst remaining multi-ethnic.
I’m curious: “monoculturism” What does that actually look like? I’m thinking of how people spend their time, culturally that is:
Are you saying: read only GB literature, read and speak only English, eat only English food, drive GB built cars, watch only GB made TV and films, only GB news media?
I’m curious as to how it might all work, especially as the biggest employment sector in GB is Indian restaurants!
Rather than “mono-cultural”, I think you mean “integrated”. For some reason, the “integration” which was so much the goal of 1960’s activists has become a forgotten or dirty word, perhaps due to the essentialist nature of today’s ideology. Integration does not necessarily mean the “assimilation” feared by defenders of multi-culturalism, but the ability of immigrants, or at least of their children, to participate in and fully absorb the history, culture and society of their adopted home (the two most recent Tory leaders being good examples of integration).
In my long experience as the son of refugees, and of living in several countries, I conclude that this requires that immigrants not be so concentrated as to form enclaves or “ghettos”, in which contacts with the general population are limited. It’s always easier to speak one’s own language and to behave in the same old way than to have to make the effort to really learn a new language and culture. With the advent of worldwide cable TV and the Internet, even the living room (or pocket) media can be in one’s old language and culture. Integration is harder to achieve than it used to be. Nevertheless, socially it is easier to integrate outside one’s ethnic bubble. That does infer that lower rates of immigration should lead to better integration by reducing the concentration leading to such bubbles or enclaves.
Not on this scale. Perhaps only in smaller mercantile trade cities and city states – but never on a large scale at this volume at the nation state level.
This is new territory – to say otherwise is wholly misguided.
Actually I will correct myself – though it’s hard to compare like for like with (almost) ancient history.
It is probable that the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain was not unlike this – large volumes of immigrants arriving over time that were to replace the native Britons/Romans/Celts.
No idea what stage we are at – and no direct comparisons as relatively little is actually known about the Anglo-Saxon migration except that it wasn’t sudden, and probably wasn’t particularly violent/bloody.
How many ‘Brits’ immigrated into other countries? We have 5 million Irish on our island but over 70 million in other countries, including yours btw!
How many place names in England are Celtic? None.
And in many of the historic multi-religious polities there was a milet system.
I disagree; factor in the much smaller indigenous populations into the equation.. Angles? Saxons? Vikings? Norman’s? Irish?
The problems are built into social democracy. As the state expands, acquires more and more spending power and centralises, so it attracts growing numbers of parasites. Eventually the parasites become oligarchs, taking wealth from the state and reinvesting it via weak politicians like Starmer to get more. No matter who you elect what you get is Lord Alli, Dale Vince, George Soros and Nick Lowles.
The only remedy is to dismantle the whole apparatus and replace it with radically de-centralised, democratically accountable institutions along Swiss lines. Most importantly, the bureaucrats need to be divested of any control of education.
There’s some confusion over multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multicultural. By multiethnic I assume you mean a group which is racially and historically distinct (or believes it is), with a distinct sense of identity, culture and set of beliefs.
Assuming this is the case, could you give some examples where this has worked long term and peacefully. Preferably where this has not been as part of a larger more powerful empire that actively kept these groups in check.
ALL groups have to be kept in check! Just look at English football supporters! I think the system is called The Law.. with police and judiciary involved..
You expect our judiciary to do anything to protect our rights?
Look how it worked out for the native Americans, Australians, New Zealander etc.
if you’re advocating for ‘reimigration’ perhaps you should consider that maybe you yourself are far right.
It may well be that multicultualism does not work, but an aging society with few births and lots of jobs the locals will not take does not work very much either. As it happens, several European countries are making long-term plans for where they can import labour once the supply of intra-EU migrants dries up. Before you make grand plans for expelling all those immigrant workers you had better consider where and how to get the people who will keep the country running once they have left.
Well I really threw the cat in amongst the pigeons there!
First to address your point, and it is a great point about the workforce and low birthrates. Firstly, we really need to encourage larger families and encourage parenthood in general. It is one of those maturing steps that every person takes in their life. Children also bring a sense of possibilities, of a future. The upside far outweighs the downside.
The other side of the equation is the necessary workforce. Whenever there is an article about AI and robotics, it also mentions the scary thought about millions of jobs disappearing. Yet somehow, this point always disappears when the topic of immigration is raised. Just connecting just these two points shows that we most likely will not need the millions of migrant workers.
True, there are a lot of boring jobs, horrible jobs, jobs that many think are beneath them. I think that it is people like yourself and many of my critics here who need to have a good look in the mirror. Such snobs who think that poor little bastards from whichever s***hole can come here and do the jobs you are obviously too good for. When I left home, these kinds of jobs were almost a right of passage. I’ve done plenty of these sorts of jobs because I was not molly coddled through life and school. There is an honesty to such jobs that is character building. Something that obviously many are now too good for.
And still….
Most of you missed the bleeding point. Reimmigration is not about blindly kicking out anyone who can’t pass an ethnic test. So I suggest that you take a step back, acknowledge the brainwashing that we have all had, because we have all been brainwashed to think a certain way.
It is not about ethnicity; it is about those large groups of people who live in the UK like it is some far flung country and where white people dare not tread. You could take any random quiet little white English village and plonk a person from wherever in there and they would be looked after. There are parts of the UK now where you can’t plonk a random white person and they would be safe. We have to stop thinking that this is ok, because it is not.
We all have to stop worrying about being called racists because oddly enough, permitting such behaviour is actually being racist because you ARE treating them differently BECAUSE of their race.
We first need to dismantle the welfare benefits system and put our own parasites back to work before we consider importing labour to fill those jobs.
The “far right” , I see no Nazi extermination troops or Stalinist pogroms. I do see the ICC supporting Islamic terrorists , yes, they’ll be those perpetrating genocide against Jews and Christian’’s and whom Keir Starsi is only too keen to back in his DEI and Marxist policies.
A very good essay – which amongst other things points out the perils of British Socialism. But sadly the author omitted to say anything about the necessary driver of any modern economy (affordable and plentiful energy) nor the hugely damaging delusion which is Net Zero 2050.
Such a refreshing article. I feel almost cleansed! The big question is how? How will any of this happen? Will Kemi push the Tories down this road? Does Farage even get it? Or a backward looking Labour? But on the whole, I am in full agreement with the author. Radical change is needed now, not more sticking plaster.
Bring back flogging eh?
“…find a leader who is both in tune with vox populi, and also willing to ignore its protests. Who actually likes ordinary British people. And who will do whatever it takes — even the currently unthinkable — to free us from this death-spiral.”
Sounds like Mary is talking about a British Donald Trump. That person will, indeed, have to be unusual to withstand the onslaught of all the vested interests that will be challenged. Like Trump, he’ll also have to accept the real likelihood of an assassination attempt.
The question is whether Brits are willing to pay the high price of radical change?
I hope Britain has not already passed the tipping point which will make radical recovery impossible. The US would have passed theirs, had Kamala carried off the last election. But isn’t the BritTrump already on the stage? “Five minutes, Mr. Farage”.
Farage has no solutions. The fact is, these are all very difficult problems to solve no matter what party is in power. But Reform would have no idea whatsoever how to deal with them, even if they ever got near leading the country, which they won’t.
Kemi Badenoch is the answer. She’s already ‘said it how it is’ when talking about the fact that not all cultures are of equal value. It was a joy to behold when Laura Kuenssberg took the moral high ground about her statement and was then reduced to shuffling awkwardly in her seat when Kemi said what any reasonable person already knows.
She exhibits the same honesty about net zero, Britain hating race baiters and the lunatics that are the trans activists.
..but you already have Nigel Farrage??
Excellent. She’s really crystallised the core problems here:
“It’s just the pillars of stagnation that are different. In the Seventies it was national ownership, industry, and the unions. Today it’s non-contributory welfare (including the NHS), and a morality industry shaped by a monolithically progressive “third sector”, and enforced by an activist judiciary armed with “human rights”. It’s all underwritten by the third pillar: the mass immigration that keeps the whole show on the road”
Not sure if she’s originated the phrase “morality industry”, but it’s a keeper for the army of value destroying sanctimonious hypocrites constantly telling us how we must live and think.
She also nails the deliberate use of immigration ever since 1997 as a quite deliberate easy way out for politicians to fight inflation. I noted at the time that the sudden disappearance of inflation as an embedded structural UK problem was due to the decision to import huge quantities of unskilled labour. Of course, the underlying causes of inflation in the UK remain untreated and are all still there.
..do you mean bloated profits and the rip-offs that abound everywhere?
Oh, no bloated profits then? Really? No rip-offs either? Wow, you British are so lucky!
A textbook example of why MH is a gift for which we should be very grateful. An incisive, intelligent, well informed, and non-ideological common sense assessment. If only our leaders were mature enough to pay attention.
Not really. It’s full of flaws. For a start, she is following the Daily Mail narrative of 70s events – the winter of discontent and other catchy media hysterics like the burying of corpses only lasted a matter of weeks, they hardly define the 70s except for Tories to leverage as resistance to any rolling back of their atrocities since.
She also repeatedly refers to the NHS as non-contributory, which it isn’t in any sense.
Not media hysterics. Born in 1952, I lived through the seventies, and they were pretty awful. It’s quite true that individual strikes tended to last for weeks rather than months, but that was because the government or employers tended to give way pretty quickly. The worst thing was the runaway inflation, partly (though certainly not entirely) provoked by the circularity of settling strikes: prices rose, so workers struck, and their pay rises meant higher prices. Here are the figures:
1970: 6.4% 1971: 9.4% 1972: 7.1% 1973: 9.2% 1975: 24.2% 1977: 15.8% 1978: 8.3% 1980: 18.0% I didn’t vote for Mrs Thatcher, and disliked the woman intensely, but she did a reasonable job of curbing inflation.
I assume whoever started the petition was neither expecting a fresh election nor that Labour would rise to the bait, though the latter is precisely what Sir Keir has done. He’s right in saying it’s not the way our system works, of course, but he and his party did not respond in the same way to the Brexit referendum; far from it! Yet another instance of rank hypocrisy.
Labour did nothing to resist Brexit, at the time or since. You must remember events incorrectly.
Are you being serious? or is this a piece of irony?
Hey Mary, it called catharsis and you better get used to it, you appear to be getting there
: “ Pace Elon Musk, modern Britain is a long way from being a genuine police state. But if we continue on this track, that’s what we will have to become, to suppress with the fury that I already feel approaching boiling point — especially among the shrinking proportion of the population that makes things, pays up, pitches in, and picks up litter.”
I thought for a moment you had written “Hail Mary, full of grace……”
the Lord is with thee….
Maybe Britain will be the next thing Elon Musk buys.
It might not be long until Britain is worth less than Elon Musk paid for Twitter. I suspect he would carry out all of Mary’s excellent suggestions very quickly.
OK as long as he sells Northern Ireland to Canada.. they deserve each other!
Pray heaven, he would deal with the murderous Irish republicans. No one else seems to be willing to do so.
How would that help get him to Mars?
Haha, soon his money is going to run out
..not sure it’s a great investment though? Still, he bought Twitter and Trump wanted to buy Iceland remember? So, who knows.. it depends what price the Zionists set for the sale?
Most private sector workers (all included) can probably broadly agree on this assessment.
However, 5 short years ago, 13 million believed that Corbyn was a solution. That is just a hard fact, we cannot just ignore it.
If the people prefer fake security and status quo, why expect any politician to pelter alternatives? If in the popular perception being successful is wrong, and trickle down economics a fabrication, why bother?
That said, Thatcher didn’t just land as a PM. She was the spearhead of a think tank, she was at least 10 years in the making. In other words, there was within and outside of the party a powerful intellectual movement. Today? Who can doubt that 2TK will eventually follow the daily winds, a la Boris le Clown? The Tories in particular are an empty vessel, the upper deck has not mingled with the engine room in decades. At least Labour is faithful to the old recipes. They have never worked, ever, not once, anywhere in the world, not even by mistake, but hey, this time, they will. Er, well, until the next time.
Labour could save itself. It is in the tittle. Minimum wage workers pay over 50% in consolidated taxes. That is an obscene amount – and increasing. For ever dwindling returns. Which is a collective suicide pact.
My point is this: any of the political parties could and should tackle this road to nowhere. Nobody wants to listen. The reality is that it is too easy to hide our cowardice behind the traditional politician hate figure.
Timothy, have you just pointed to the way that large sectors of the British population have become overly dependent upon the state and psychologically dependent on remaining dependent? As if there is a deep character change in the British which will first have to be faced down and, if possible, changed somehow? I believe this was Frank Field’s finding, for which he was sacked by Harriet Harm.
State intervention, distortion, followed by more state intervention, more distortion, have made it impossible to see any other solution than further state intervention. The ones with state guaranteed revenues are living a totally different reality from the ones taking risks and exposed to free market economy. It is noteworthy that very few politicians anywhere in Europe have private sector experience. They have become remarkably negligent in how they spend without any understanding of how the wealth is created in the first instance. It inevitably leads to a fractured social fabric, with the return of the cast system (particularly France). The ones who see themselves as guardians of the status quo are increasingly intolerant and prone to state intervention to safeguard their intellectual claim to.. for want of a better word, “goodness”. Macron is a perfect example. A dangerous one at that. He does not represent any ideology, just his cast.
But that is probably more belief than fact, a case hardly worth presenting outside of a polite pint in the pub.
Maths are a much better tool, analysing 50 year old trends, following key indicators (ratio productive/ unproductive). Until we can as a country look at these numbers and understand what they mean, and especially, where they are leading us, there can be no consensus, unlike Scandinavian countries in the 90’s.
Consensus is the key to any future successful reform. I doubt consensus can be forced. It will happen naturally, but not soon enough to stop the adage “Afraid of very poor person coming in, afraid of every rich person coming out” being true for a few more years if not decades.
Nonsense. Your issue is binary thinking – anything remotely left-leaning is communism, which doesn’t work (I mean Cuba have a far better health service than ours so we could do with examining why). Many successful countries are far more left wing than ours – consider the Scandinavian countries.
Corbyn would have returned things more to the centre. The actual centre, not that faux centre that those who hold more extreme views than they would like to admit, wear. The thought that he or anybody else could suddenly revert the country to a state prior to 40+ years of mainly Toryism is ridiculous. And even if he could, he still couldnt because the world and the country have changed beyond belief.
The solution is, and always has been, balance.
(I mean Cuba have a far better health service than ours so we could do with examining why)
Is that why, when Fidel’s health declined, he left the country in search of better alternatives?
Belittling, passing judgement, assuming nostalgia before advocating balance?
I am not of the left or right, could not care less, have lived in Scandinavia during their reforms, much prefer the Swiss health system to the Cuban, it costs far less and delivers infinitely more, our NHS is absolutely without comparison with anything else in the world and communism on a small scale, ie, where data can be processed naturally by the individual within a collective consciousness works and always has.
In other words, there is plenty to chat about without being rude.
Such blind ignorance and bigotry!
..you think ‘trickle down economics’ actually works do you? I thought no-one believes in that garbage anymore.. unless of course by TDE you mean a wealth tax.. that kinda qualifies I s’pose?
“…the now widely loathed architecture of “human rights” that privileges the safety of foreign paedophiles over that of British nationals.”
Uh-oh. Mary’s going to get a visit from the speech Bobbies. Should we start collecting for the defense fund now?
I suggest a simple solution – look at those nations that have done well with far less, and perhaps change a few things along those lines. There are solutions – they must be found. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu said: “You must find the way.”
The problem with that thinking is that all nations have wildly different geopolitical contexts. The assumption that copying Singapore or the Germans or whatever will make our country be like them is deeply flawed. We have our own strengths and weaknesses, the key is to identify and work on them rather than trying to be somewhere else.
I see Starmer is wearing a North Face puffer jacket in the photo at the head of the article. That must be good for a bit of a drop in his popularity rating.
Starmer in North Face. Rishi in his adidas.
Maybe they’re on sponsorship deals.
What’s next, Kemi in a Supreme hoodie?!
.. driving the new electric Jaguar.
Depends who paid for it ?
Very well said, though I notice that the writer did not mention net zero as another self-inflicted and politically untouchable constraints. I noted the same issue reading commentary on the upcoming General Election in Ireland. Commentators were propounding the ‘challenges’ facing any incoming government, contrasting Ireland’s problems (severe housing shortage, pressure of high immigration, high energy costs and inflation generally, dysfunctional health system) with those of some of its EU counterparts (France: huge and growing budget deficit issues, Germany: energy crisis and resulting deindustrialisation) and all without even noting that most of these issues (whether in Ireland or the EU) were at root self-inflicted by the ridiculous self-righteous performance politics being practised by all parties. And any parties who do not perform these are cast out as populist or far right.
There is indeed a class war going on, but not the traditional one. There are only 2 classes still, but they are the responsible class, those who as Ms Harrington says are; ‘the shrinking proportion of the population that makes things, pays up, pitches in, and picks up litter.’ and, at the top and bottom of the social scales, the parasite class, which takes far more than it contributes. The parasites are now threatening the health of their host, which has the choice of sloughing them off or dying a long slow death.
Britain is actually fast becoming a police state!
We barely see the police, who were hugely scaled back under the Tories. More like we are fast becoming an anarchic state.
The reason you never see the police (other than rushing by in chequered vehicles) is because they are seated behind computer screens monitoring our social media posts for hate crime or Non Crime Hate Incidents!
I don’t think of this petition as pevish, particularly. I think it’s a signal of concern that needs to make its voice very much heard. I don’t think such a petition is going to “work” as such; and I very much doubt that many of the signatories thought that it would. Personally, I think the basic point is to send a clear signal of concern about incoherence and incompetence.
All it says is that people are impatient for solutions to long-standing issues that were mismanaged by the Tories. Anyone expecting immediate results is an idiot, as evidenced by the fact that they think it worthy of their time to sign such a petition believing it would actually have an effect.
I signed it. It took me seconds. Do you really think the signatories are dumb enough to think it will result in the calling of a GE? Most, like myself, signed it to cause embarrassment and to send a signal of discontent; they may even have to debate it in parliament.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700143
What is the “unthinkable”? .
Give priority to GB rather than to “influence”.Looking first at expenditures to cut when thinking budget.Simplifying tax: uniform 20% tax for all voters; 12% capital gains tax; no death tax; limited indirect tax.Clamp down on stealing, hooliganism, ditch woke crimesAssert British interests in the seas around the UK, revive fisheries(186 constituencies)5-6% gdp in defence, the aim being to speak politely but wield one hell of a lethal stick if any foreign power should be tempted.Say to international business, you are here because GB’s aim is to be the best place in the world to do business-especially for British-owned businesses.Rewind most of Brown-Blair “reforms”: Make sure that the Crown in parliament is sovereign, and that lawyers revert to implementing parliament’s laws rather than inventing their own.ie human rights do not trump UK security.Make clear that hard work, aiming for the best, reaps rewards.
Spot on. Hear hear.
You would have my vote.
Where is JW to explain to us that all is for the best in the best of all Orwellian worlds?
Excellent article; the best I’ve read so far from Mary Harrington.
Excellent, and then some. And one of the aha! moments is this – if I get MH right, that governments might do well to openly appoint their own senior implementers of policy in the civil service, to dispense with a supposed neutral civil service which is nothing but a facade of leftism, thicko leftism at that. This will require a leader with the nerve of that pilot who landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River, and followers who can stay firm in the face of an almighty onslaught from the thicko, degenerate left.
The civil service is politically neutral by definition.
The civil service might be politically neutral by definition; but it most certainly is not in practice – i.e. Left Wing Woke in its orientation and sympathies.
Just consider the trajectory of one former top, ‘politically neutral’ civil servant, who secured his civil service knighthood, and who currently occupies No.10 Downing Street!
Quod erat demonstrandum!
Mary is surely wrong on one count: Mrs T did not “de-industrialise” the country; that was well on the way before but certainly after WW2, partly because of the obduracy of the unions in resisting change to working practices; partly because of the old fashioned hopelessness of most industrial management, partly because Brits just hate success in business but prefer landownership and farming. Ship building, heavy engineering, and car building in particular utterly failed to modernise and faded away. Indeed, the successful battle against the miners actually increased industrial efficiency by removing capital from mining, hopelessly outdated in its production methods, and making us use new and cheaper energy sources, making viable new businesses in hi-tech, electronics, and chemicals. By 2000 we were making more cars and car parts than ever, after the Thatcher reforms.
It is the ghastly E Miliband who will deindustrialize us!
I’ll say it because no one else will; Mary Harrington is a holy woman.
if you ever wondered “how in the world did Donald Trump become possible, let alone elected?” the first part of this article covers it. When the usual suspects fail to deliver results, people start to look beyond party loyalties to anyone who can.
In Thatcher’s assessment, Britain’s problems could only be solved by tackling the power-bases that held the country to ransom. Before things can be fixed, it must be acknowledged that they are broken, and as with Thatcher, the results will not be all unicorns and rainbows. Every decision carries trade-off. Few things are universally beneficial; you just try to do the most good for the greatest number of people. But first you have to confront the problem, be it the blog, the moral scolds, or something else.
This is all so sensible I expect your name has gone on several lists and in time two constables with backup out in the street will knock on your door.
Wonderful essay, very even-handed in its overview, looking over the heads of political parties of all stripes as MH outlines the situation.
With “vision, radicalism, and courage….someone willing to exit our current care-home mentality and go directly at the sacred pillars of stagnation, based on a coherent, positive vision of Britain’s future”, she seems to clear the field of all current contenders – except one, but wisely does not offer an endorsement. Yet. A couple of more winters may be necessary.
There’s not much to disagree with in this article, but what I find bizarre about it, is that it is so out-of-date; Harrington talks as though we have only two parties to choose from. When it comes to discontent with wokery, two-tier justice, illegal migration and mass immigration, many voters – as evidenced by a string of recent local by-elections – are choosing a relatively new third party. I wonder what it’s called?
Mary you just made the case for Farage and Reform UK. I’m already in and I would love you to join us.
Net zero is avoided in the same way as the 70s industrial sabotage was avoided. Some of the workers struck for a better deal, more still for days off to do “foreigners” or “homers” as they were known. (Or even go fishing, to football or have a “green day”) The union leaders however had no such parochial concerns – most were allied to the USSR and hell bent on destroying this country to make it part of Russia’s “utopia”. Those that rejected the USSR were generally in with Hoxa and his Albanians or the Sandinistas LOL. So plus ca change (cba to the accents). Net zero is yet another trojan horse like the TUC in the 1970s and 80s and is traceable to the same violent, criminal scheme masquerading as ideology – socialism in both its National and International forms. If history is a guide i doubt it will end peacefully – hoping for a Thatcher figure TBH – tho we could be a lot worse off – how about poor Italy in the 70s with its red brigades adn “revolutionary nuclei” etc.
This is the problem with democracy as it currently is. Once vested interest groups have coalesced around each of the major parties it’s impossible to break their strangle hold and win an election without them. Only once we are in a state of complete economic collapse are we able to break these impasses and by that time it is far too late.
MH for PM even if XX?
I hope Kemi Badenoch reads this & takes it on board. She’s the only real hope I see a the moment, although if she has the clout to kick the Tories into shape is problematic, & she’s going to offend a lot of sensitive types (i.e. women) with her lack of touchy- feeliness.
We’ll see. I’ve got everything crossed.
Badenoch is a joke. Watch PMQs – she’s a kid in a room of adults.
When all else fail, we go to war.
Yes STUFF. You have the stuff you make or steal. The UK is no longer in a position to steal stuff so she must make stuff. When only perhaps a quarter of the population are making stuff, poverty is inevitable.
There’s an interesting convention at play here.
If a Party Manifesto is a contract between a British political party and its voters, then Labour have grievously broken this contract over the last 6 months.
These broken pledges on economic growth and tackling illegal immigration have been compounded by memories of a record low popular vote last summer. The 20% share of the vote for Labour caused by tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats and a big anti-Tory vote for Reform on the part of right-wing and working-class provincial voters.
Hence, in a roundabout way the 2024 British general election might be argued illegitimate for breaking one convention and highlighting the broken nature of the second one (the voting system).
In that sense it’s the opposite of the US elections. Nothing has been decided as neither clear approval or disapproval has been given for a governing mandate.
Do you want the job? I’ll vote for you in the basis of this essay.
Fantastic read. Thank you
Superb article. I can’t find a lot to disagree with here.
You’re speaking about our Nigel aren’t you . At the end of your article. He will be(I hope) the Thatcher of my children’s generation and boys o we need him
We could do worse than have Mary Harrington run the country! She must be one off the smartest most insightful people in Britain today.
Best article Mary Harrington has written.
Spot on!
I thought that the basic re-thinking of how to restore the fabric of society – beginning with the family and the local community, and not letting homo oeconomicus be the measure of everthing – was what got the new leader of the Opposition elected,
As an American I wonder what the British military is for other than patrolling the skies and coastal waters of UK. Bit of change there?
This is a call for an English Lee Kuan Yew
BTW I pay my Unherd subscription to get articles like this one.
Tremendous.
It would have been helpful if the author defined the “Anglosphere” she seeks. Does it include the US or not?
Excellent Mary, really excellent.
It’s not just Britain, discontent is coming everywhere, with tariffs and trade wars, unsustainable debt, cost of living and housing crisis, how can it be otherwise. The system is broken, collapse is inevitable
Mary should become the next PM.
All the structural issues you mention have been in play for a hundred years and havebecome increasingly intractable to allgovernments. What we now face though is an increasingly rapid erosion of our basic liberties as subjects.This process could begin to be reversed by electing a government committed to our historic rights and responsibilities even if the ecpnomic and systemic issues remain.
To add balance, what about the power of Property and un-earned income?
Soon as you say people who own more than £3 million worth of agricultural land have to pay inheritance tax – at half the rate of everyone else and have 10 years to pay it – the big agri lobby loses its mind.
And then it makes front page news.
Also, what about the rent seeking corporations who siphon off public money via PFI or massive state subsidy?
Or the £600 billion borrowed during Covid to keep the gravey train rolling, or the £137 billion to bail out the banks.
A lot of the state in recent decades has been redirected to corporate welfare through subsidy and contracting out.
It would have been great if we’d bought something with if, but it’s basically been a way of shifting money from the little people to the wealthy.
“That would mean making the case against non-contributory welfare, and for insurance-based healthcare. It would mean kneecapping the NGOcracy — from defunding the pseudo-independent “third sector” policy launderers to reining in an activist judiciary, and modernising the now widely loathed architecture of “human rights” that privileges the safety of foreign paedophiles over that of British nationals. And it would mean closing the borders, reforming asylum policy and naturalisation rights, and riding out the screeching that would follow from every vested interest.”
Only Reform UK will do this.
“find a leader who is both in tune with vox populi, and also willing to ignore its protests. Who actually likes ordinary British people.”
That would be Nigel.
As what I’ve come to expect from Mary Harrington, this article is thoughtful, informative, and well-written. In the 1920s, Churchill warned against socialism (see Vol. 5 of his official biography) but there were wiser men and women who knew better. One hundred years on, we can no longer ignore its bitter fruit.
Fantastic synopsis. Very real and totally believable. Please stand for Pariliament.
I’d like to forward this but your forwarding icon doesn’t work.
A very good analysis, with some wonderful turns of phrase.
The only element left out was the prickly issue of unrealistically high expectations regarding continued growth in prosperity, versus the effort that the current and future workforces are prepared to put in to achieve it.
Let’s see. But I think Kemi Badenoch is a serious contender to sort these problems out. She is genuinely working from first principles to do so.
There’s a possible fourth pillar to consider.
This is the legacy of the Second World War. This has become a moral scripture for Britain, Europe, Russia, and the USA. A justification for their existence in their present form. This burdensome legacy constrains thought and action.
Britain’s victory in the War is supposed to have come from the superiority of democracy; as if the war was a medieval trial by combat. Labelling any other country’s leader as a Hitler and the present time as forever 1938, the past is brought into the present and recreated. Recreated to the point that it is almost taken for granted that Europe is in a ‘pre-war’ situation. Diplomacy and negotiation are appeasement, or even surrender.
That this is a pillar can be seen in the way it is still impossible to have a dispassionate discussion about Britain’s activities in the Second World War, such as Air Marshal Harris’s area bombing campaign. What was unacceptable to most people in the 1930s is defended today by people who are constrained by this legacy.
If there is no elected political leader who will, like Samson, bring down the other three pillars of the temple, who will dare to bring down this fourth one? Not when a minor army officer is marketed to bolster the government’s healthcare strategy; complete with sentimental crooning about meeting again some sunny day (a rap version wasn’t even necessary).
Not when a new public holiday is to be created to commemorate the victory in 1945. An event, that being a lifetime ago, should be even more of a distant myth than the Iron Lady. Who among the public celebrates Waterloo Day or Trafalgar Day? (Though we can now travel on a railway line named after the bombers of the WSPU). A new public holiday at a time and in circumstances when, if all else is failing, there can be war and the memory of war.
How strange – and yet how revealing – is the constraint of this burdensome legacy that the victory of 1945 is not seen as something that unifies Europe and the USA on one hand with Russia on the other.
Russia was on the other side for 40% of the war (mid 1939-mid 41). They started WWII in alliance with Germany by invading Poland. No getting away from the facts here.
But I agree that there’s a certain amount of mythology about WWII that may be holding us back and that what we have chosen to remember may not be telling us the whole story and some of the lessons we’ve learned may not be that helpful.
Britain had a ‘piece of paper’ on the eve of WWII too:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time