When it comes to British politics, my go to guy is John Derbyshire. It’s not that he has a granular knowledge of every bit of maneuvering that is the staple of political coverage. It’s than he is properly skeptical and he gets the larger trends that have defined Britain for the last century or so. His roundup up of the UK election results is a nice summary of what happened and, to a lesser degree, what it portends.
When it come to European politics, including the UK, I enjoy Andrew Stuttaford. I don’t really think he fully grasps the nature of the global corporatists in the managerial class running Europe, but he is suitably outraged by what’s going on and does a great job underscoring the issues for those too afraid to read my blog. Here’s his latest and in the comments an exchange between Andrew and me.
That’s the warmup material.
My own view is the election, to the surprise of the people in charge and their attendants in the media, was about the national question. Specifically, will the English continue to have a nation of their own. Part of that is immigration and that’s what UKIP brought to the debate. Another part is England’s relationship with the Continent, the promise of the Tories to hold a referendum. Finally, the very idea of what it means to be British, English and Scottish, raised by SNP.
No one in charge, of course, wanted to talk openly about any of these issues, but the people in the streets did want to talk about them. Politicians go where the votes are and inevitably the parties all found a way to stake out their position. The most obvious is SNP, which may be the most cynical party in human history, but they ran on Scotland being for Scots, while Labour and Lib-Dems ran on formless internationalism, a sort of faculty lounge techno-fascism.
I say the SNP is cynical because if you read their position papers, they appear to be deliberately deceptive. The first graphs are all haggis and sheep buggering like a proud Scot. Then it devolves into academic jargon cheering on internationalism and multiculturalism. I suspect they know people only read the first two paragraphs.
Maybe it just sort of happened that way as the flag waving started to carry the party beyond their wildest imaginings. That’s not uncommon. We see this with candidates. When the crowd roars, it’s hard not to notice. Perhaps SNP sort of stumbled into becoming a weird fascist party that preaches international corporatism and good old fashioned patriotism. How they intend to square those is a mystery. Regardless, they made national identity a central issue of the campaign.
On the other side, UKIP made immigration a central issue. It was originally assumed that the Tories would suffer as a consequence, but it seem they may have benefited. The people looked at their options and ruled out the internationalists, Lib-Dem and Labour, in favor of the nationalist. The Tories may be weak tea, but they can be fortified. UKIP simply has too many weirdos for the average Brit. UKIP, inadvertently, dragged the Tory party into the nationalist camp.
That’s the first lesson of the election. Given a choice between the formless international corporatism offered up by Progressives across the West and even a mild form of traditional patriotism, the latter trumps the former and by large margins. Just imagine if Cameron was something other than a shallow twit who reminds most people of Piers Morgan.
What has been laid bare in Britain is the great divide is no longer between free market traditionalists and cosmopolitan socialists. No one is a Marxist anymore and everyone is some form of socialist. The competition these days is between parties claiming a better skill at running the welfare state. They quibble over minor aspects of the tax code and various nuances of the bureaucracy, but they agree on all of the big economic issues. Across the West, all parties have embraced managerial socialism as their economic model.
The great divide now is over culture and country. One side is post-national and post-cultural. The other is patriotic and rooted in the traditional culture of the country. You see this divide emerging everywhere in the West, outside of the US where the GOP keeps insisting it is 1978. The great political fights in the West will be waged between those with little or no loyalty to their host country and those who define themselves by the national and ethnic identity.
I think one reason this is blossoming in Europe and not in the US is the fact that Europe already has a lot of immigrants from alien cultures. Mexican carpenters sort of look like Italians, they go to church and generally fit into Western norms. Algerians and Pakistani Muslims clearly don’t belong and they are increasing making that clear to everyone. With a few million Africans poised to join them, the sense of urgency in Europe is greater than in the US.
There’s also the weird cultural ticks of Americans. We have romanticized immigrants and turned them into objects of worship. We also have a racial culture that makes it hard to say bad things about anyone not an albino. Further, both parties have embraced the American empire where the rest of the world is treated as provinces.
That’s the other lesson. What works in the UK is not necessarily going to follow in the US. Watch British TV and you see an unabashed parochialism that would be horrifying to American TV producers. Immigration policy in America must be discussed in economic terms, not cultural terms, at least for now.
On the other hand, American politicians look to Europe and they have felt the rumblings. The fact that Obama’s party is in revolt over his nation wrecking TPP plan is a good sign. They may not want to follow their analogs in the UK into the abyss. The GOP is going through an identity crisis that will be worked out in their presidential primary. For the first time in a long time, there’s hope.
Nearly a week now since the world collapsed around the commies ears and I’m still as happy as hell, moments like this don’t happen often.
The Tory win with the attraction of the UKIP plank appears to be an example of the “center of gravity” theory of politics, i.e. when you have two equally balanced groups (let’s say A & B), adding another to the extreme far side of one (B) pulls the center towards them (B).
Or something. The important thing to remember is that immutable laws of politics seldom work twice.
Allow me to speak from among it all. I went along on May 7 to vote for UKIP (and did) because as a lad from a working class family — though I was born in a steel-making city and am eternally grateful I had other opportunities which meant I didn’t have to deal with pouring molten metal — I am able to recognise that my national and regional identity (I often joke about my tribal origins from 1200 years ago) matter to me.
I was under no illusion that UKIP would win, particularly where I live. My area is a staunch Labour stronghold which still resents the fact that Thatcher closed some pits in the 80s but carefully avoids remembering that a Labour administration in the 70s closed far, far more. But such is the memory of people. Labour, in my patch, got back in as expected. That will take long time to change and this election wasn’t any sort of turning point in that respect.
There is however a turning in the air. People do not want immigration. They don’t even care if people are poor elsewhere. Traditionally we give to charity to help them make their lives in some distant shithole better, not invite them here to show us how shitty it is close up. Nationally, the movement towards protecting what we have was strong but, the way the UK election system works, it meant that a lot of people though unhappy with unfettered immigration didn’t really get what they wanted, which is was a strong attitude and firm approach towards Euro socialism. Many listened to what Farage said and he didn’t talk about ‘A Fairer Society’ but about what is actually happening. as you can imagine this made him unpopular with the media, who are gayly dancing to the left. Farage said we treat more foreigners for HIV than Brits, but that angered the left (especially Plaid Cymru for some odd reason) and his contention that we should have a National health service rather than an International health service struck a chord with many but didn’t deter the left — which turned out to be everyone but UKIP because the Tories once again were pretty sure they would need a coalition with the left-leaning Lib Dems to carry on — from bleating about making equality central to everyone’s lives wherever they live. Most people don’t care about equality: I used to live in Rotherham and trust me, the whites there dislike the muslim ‘invasion’ as they see it. I have seen women in full burqas driving erratically and I feared for my life, and I once had a muslim male spit at me on the street for no reason. People don’t like those who aren’t like them, no matter how much propaganda we get from the fat culturalists in remote London.
The issue in the UK was, despite all the commentators clap trap, about what is real. Money and security (personal and national) is more real than airy-fairy ideals and fashionable dogma. Labour elected as leader a man who came across badly and while politics shouldn’t be about looks, the hopelessness of Ed Miliband was all too apparent. Labour’s record in 13 years of government, despite being lauded by the BBC, utterly destructive in all sorts of ways, and immigration was one of them. A lot of Labour supporters have seen their jobs go, their security threatened and their world changed by edicts on high. It is one thing to go on vacation to Turkey but quite another to have Turks living on your street. Thanks to Labour’s devious ways the people of the UK had to give up the former but accept the latter. That made a lot of Labour voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote Tory choose to vote for UKIP. At least the candidates were people like themselves, however weird some of them might have been.The voters could be sure they weren’t oily as well as weird, as they saw down in London.
Labour’s desperation meant that they would get into bed with anyone who would give them power. The Scots were the best bet for Miliband to get into No 10 but the English didn’t like the idea of the wild socialism they saw north of the border coming south. Actually, we never have much wanted them south of the wall. The Scots despise the English, and maybe with good reason but we Englsih still remember the damage that Scots like Brown and Darling have done to this nation. I always tell people I am a Yorkshireman first and an Englishman second, but the Englishman in me didn’t like the idea of Sturgeon having power in Westminster and shaping my life when all her loyalties lie north of the border.
So Labour shot itself in the foot, and in the leg and eventually in the head. I have no doubt they will bounce back in some way but the Party Of The Working Class took away the Work and they will have to reinvent themselves as something other than Taxing and Squandering.
I expect Cameron, feeble oaf that he is, was greatly heartened to gain a real, Tory-only majority. Not many people here are sure about the conservatives love of the EU but he promised referendum if he won and that may mean something will change about how Brussels — sorry, I mean Berlin — rules us. We shall have to see on that.
I have a relative who lives in London and was, by all accounts, in tears when the news came through that her wonderful socialist paradise would have to be postponed. But I could have told her that essentially, the English are cautious and conservative. They would always, given the chance, vote for better for themselves but not too much change. Progressive ideas might warm the odd dinner party in London but the people elsewhere don’t share them. Calls for ‘A Fairer Society’ was seen as so much hot air, especially when that fairness meant that the food on your table has to Halal and you wake each morning to an Arabic call to prayers.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, and castles were built to keep the invaders at bay.
People here are essentially conservative. Maybe not always Conservative, but one thing is certain: the left will never admit it and thus they will never get very far when it comes to the real world.
Like it or not, most of us trace our ancestors back to Ellis Island. That’s an important emotional piece of how many people think about immigration.
The next Labour leader is a black African named Chuka Umama or something like it.
The things will start to unravel in Europe and maybe the US in the next five years, my prediction is that between 2020-2030 the demographic shift will finally have a political impact in the big European countries.