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June 6, 2024 - 4:00pm
It is a standing joke among Right-wingers exulting in the prospect of a Tory calamity next month that Rishi Sunak has already booked a flight to California for the evening of Friday 5 July. The Prime Minister spent much of his pre-Parliamentary career in the USA. He owns a home in Santa Monica, and met his wife while studying at Stanford. It is widely expected that he will retreat across the pond after leading the Conservative Party to perhaps its worst ever showing in a general election.
Reports this week that two American businessmen, former Google chair Eric Schmidt and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, are in line for British honours do little to contradict the impression that Sunak has had his head turned by the glamour of the imperial centre. It is hard to imagine him settling in for the worthy but dull work of an Opposition backbencher once he has handed the keys of Number 10 to Sir Keir Starmer. Much more plausible that a Big Tech or venture capital firm will pay top dollar for his insights — and his networks. In that case, Sunak will have spent less than a decade in the House of Commons.
Increasingly short periods in the Commons, before moving on to other things, is a striking trend among modern senior politicians. Lord Cameron, for example, spent only 15 years as an MP, including his six years in the top job. Boris Johnson notched up a similar length of service in two separate stints. David Miliband abandoned British politics for the New York-based International Rescue Committee after just 12 years. By way of comparison, Margaret Thatcher was an MP for 33 years in total, James Callaghan for 42, and Ted Heath for 51.
This illustrates one of the defining characteristics of our contemporary ruling classes in Europe and the English-speaking world: their alignment with international concerns and aspirations, rather than the national interest. Becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom, or obtaining one of the Great Offices of State, was once the summit of a long career in public service — what the Romans called the cursus honorum, the established pathway through elite jobs that normally preceded the great prize of a consulship. Now, it seems to be a mere stepping stone to other things: grandiose global projects or supranational organisations that do not have to concern themselves with the normal mundane realities of national democratic politics.
Even if one looks at local nationalist movements, such as the SNP or Sinn Féin, they seem increasingly less concerned with promoting and safeguarding particular national cultures and peoples, and more focused on carving out a role for themselves as the local administrators of the universalising progressive agenda. Whether Sunak has booked his US flight is besides the point: Britain’s ruling class is, mentally at least, already there.
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The author omits the most glaring example to date: Nick Clegg.
Too true.
What’s also missing from the analysis is a sense of how complex systems are subject to Emergence. Seemingly only a very few predicted, or believed it possible, that the post-WW2 developed world order – fueled by unlimited money printing – would create the conditions and incentives that would “auto select” a particular kind of human psyche for leadership, both political and corporate. The arena is now dominated by individuals – a curious and emergent subset-species, even – driven my egotism and dreams of self-enhancement. Solipsism, even. Elite global leadership has broken free from the “surly gravitational bonds” imposed by representative democracy. The founder of “Cliodynamic analysis”, Peter Turchin, modelled all of this over 2 decades ago based on the simple proposition that good times produce an oversupply of elites, who then invariably go to war with one another at the public’s expense.
That voters went along with this creeping neo-feudal dispensation, and mostly willingly, is testament to the power of hyper-materialist, digitally massaged mass delusion in the age of Frankl’s “existential vacuum”. But (some) people seem to be waking up. Whether anything of the “old” order is reclaimable is an open question. More likely this generation will have to ride the storm until a new breed emerges from the ruins.
The key to national renewal is for the public to learn to identify these shysters that are only concerned with being part of the global elite club and not electing them to office. They are not hard to spot. Starmer is one for sure – being a “human rights” lawyer essentially means believing that “universal human rights” should be outside the control of the national parliament. Sunak is obviously one. I guess it is just another way of saying Globalist v Nationalist. Perhaps you spot the Nationalists by seeing who the well known Globalists despise and then voting for them.
For the most part, I agree with you. That said, I don’t know if Sunak’s problem is that he’s a “globalist.” I think the problem is just that many public servants just use their public perch as a step-ladder to the private sector.
I’m of the opinion that the term “Neoliberalism” is being misapplied. Participating in global markets is not inherently bad for National interests. Global commerce keeps up the supply of goods and keeps down prices. I think the Nationalist/Globalist binary sometimes promotes too much protectionism and ignores the functional necessity of global markets. Trade is also necessary to promote global stability. You’re less likely to go to War if you have a working relationship with another country.
Again, I don’t disagree with your underlying point, I just think there’s a tipping point where the Globalist/Nationalist distinction gets cloudy. Some “Nationalists” engage in the revolving door plan as well.
You’re less likely to go to War if you have a working relationship with another country.
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You are not the first to think so… 🙂
I’m not a believer in “Nation building” but I’m a believer in free markets and it’s hard to have free markets without trade agreements. Wealth is obviously beneficial to a functioning society. How do you generate national wealth without mass exports?
Foreign trade like “Global Capitalism” is not going away. It’d be nice if every country had sufficient goods to produce abundance but due to geography they don’t. Most wars are initiated by Country C harassing or blocking Country A from trading with Country B because B and C are enemies. So A gets in on B’s side to protect its own trade interest. This problem is eliminated when A and C have a trade neutrality agreement and the existence of a mutual trade ally waters down tensions between B and C.
Otherwise you get a “multipolar system” where all the countries hostile to the West form their own trade alliance and tensions continue to grow because countries no longer have any shared interest.
“I’m not a believer in “Nation building” – seemed to work for quite a few countries, like the ‘Asian tigers’.
” I’m a believer in free markets and it’s hard to have free markets without trade agreements”. I suppose belonging to the WTO is a kind of trade agreement, but that hasn’t stopped some countries blatantly breaking the rules (stealing intellectual property, subsidising industries etc). Australia has a free trade agreement with China, but when our PM said something the Chinese government didn’t like they just cancelled a lot of contracts. How much are these agreements worth?
“How do you generate national wealth without mass exports?” Haven’t countries done this over and over? Think about China’s long economic history and its ups and downs, at times when foreign trade wasn’t a big part of the economy.
The problem with your analysis re free-markets is deciding at what point you decide that notional freedom commences. Essentially what most of the West’s free-market dogma involves now is just a way of restricting developing nations from using the very strategies they used (in spades) to develop in the first place. See Ha-Joong-Chong’s marvellous ‘Kicking Away The Ladder’ for plenty of details on this. The US would never have reached their globally dominant position under the strictures of the WTO, let alone their IMF and World Bank.
And be wrong. If you have no relations with another country you can’t have conflict. Reductio ad absurdum: if the US did not trade with Asia, there would be zero possibility of a war with China.
It’s called The Cathedral and you get far in it, not so much by doing good work, but by your connections and where you stand on certain issues. I’m of the opinion that the reason why so many of today’s politicians support nonsensical woke causes is not because they believe in them, but to show their overlords how willing they are to lie to the people to get ahead.
All of the individuals mentioned either wanted the top job but did not get to it (David Milliband – beaten by his brother to the Labour leadership) or had it and got turfed out unwilling (David Cameron – lost Brexit vote, resigned; Boris – got knifed, definitely didn’t want to resign). Rishi may recognize the inevitable, but he doesn’t give me the impression that he wants to be remembered as the PM when the music stopped for the Tories. And David Cameron accepted coming back as Foreign Secretary for a short stint.
I’d say it is more accurate that at their level an international job position is a nice way of making up for the fact that they can’t be PM. Or in Boris’s case he just goes on with his lucrative media career (fair enough). I see nothing in the career choices of these individuals to suggest that they wouldn’t still want to be “consul” instead of whatever sunny sinecure in the US they might be able to obtain. Cameron coming back for another round in a subordinate position is evidence of that.
Except that somehow one senses Cameron is not working for the UK but the US. Oh, I forgot, our interests are aligned.
Very true – being PM is not something to put on your CV.
As someone with a strong tendency towards idling I have never understood the sort of high-achievers who get into these jobs in the first place, but it is totally beyond me why someone like Sunak, richer than Choesus, should want to faff about making yet more money once he’s finished being PM. Surely that’s the time to do something important but not lucrative.
What to do? A return to government by landed aristocracy seems unlikely at this juncture but I do wonder if ways could be found of separating those aiming to rule from those aiming to make money, to put an end to this unseemliness.
As an aside, I find it harder to imagine a Japanese premier going on to behave like Tony Blair but I may be misinformed about that.
The reason millions voted for Brexit was, in part at least, to deprive the Kinnock-style globalists from escaping the UK for sinecures in the EU after making a mess of things here. Without Brexit, Nick Clegg would be in Brussels instead of California.
Well you can’t have it both ways. Professional politicians are a problem as well.
The western system seems to be a world elite whole world government apparently WOKE. It seems to be setting everything up for the Antichrist to run the world.
For massively wealthy people like Sunak, politics is a game they can afford to play. They are the ultimate cynics.