We Are Where We Are

There is an old joke about a Dubliner, who is lost in the Irish countryside on his way to his cousin’s wedding. He asks a random farmer for directions.

The farmer sucks in his teeth and replies: “I wouldn’t have started from here.”

Britain, like the lost Irishman, is where she is. Our country in 2024 is not where we would have wanted to start from.

As the great philosopher and Oasis front man Noel Gallagher said in an interview a few years ago: “I loved the 1990s”, noting “it was a great period, a great moment in time. We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves.”

Indeed, the nineties were “brilliant” and, partially, a product of a Conservative Party that had restored the patient to good health.

In the 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservative Party transformed the United Kingdom from a country humiliated at home and abroad to one that had regained her mojo and much of her prestige.

Internationally, the nadir for the United Kingdom found expression in a Labour Party begging the International Monetary Fund in 1976 for a loan to meet deteriorating economic conditions. In exchange, the IMF demanded and got large cuts in spending, not least an acceleration of coal mine closures.

Nationally, it was the state’s inability to govern. The Labour Party funded by the Trade Unions, and beholden to them, could not reign them in.

Pay increases were sought but could not be met for fear of rising inflation.

The series of debilitating strikes led to what became known as the Winter of Discontent and, some say, to Thatcher’s eventual victory in May 1979.

By 1997, the country’s finances were broadly back under control at around 40% of GDP. She had caught up with and overtaken peers such as Germany, France and the United States in terms of GDP per capital. And, crucially, from today’s perspective, the economy grew with a very stable population, with much of the population growth being homegrown and natural. In terms of demographics, the Britain of 1979 looked and felt very much like the 1997 one.

In addition, Thatcher had managed to keep the culture war hydra at bay, protecting a few generations from its nihilism. Organisations such as the Paedophile Information Exchange, which campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, were much in vogue in fashionable Labour circles during the 1970s but became rightly, some might still say, shunned in that great two-decade period of social and economic recalibration.

Just as importantly, we were patriots, regardless, mostly, of party affiliations.

In short, while some mistakes were made, the Conservatives, broadly speaking, implemented conservative policies.

The same cannot be said for the period 2010 to 2024. The Conservative Party, humbled in 1997, learnt the wrong lesson from its defeat.

Party grandees came to believe that the rejection they suffered at the ballot box was a sign of their failure rather than a combination of factors, including time in office, which, in democracies, leads sometimes to defeat, regardless of past performance.

Mesmerised by the seductively destructive magnetism of Blair, they came to believe in the modernisation mantra. To beat their opponent, they would become him. They would be Blair’s heirs.

While they bought Labour’s culture wars, specifically the politics of race and gender and the party’s innate belief in supranationalism – Davos over Parliament – hook, line and sinker, they knew that they could only gain power by promoting mainly conservative policies.

In other words, they prepared themselves to lie big. And so, they did.

They would sell Thatcherism, or something like it, on doorsteps but they would deliver its very opposite, not least incontinent spending, gender and green politics, and mass immigration among other things.

For that, in 2024, quite rightly, the party was annihilated. The Conservative Party died at the polls because it did not live up to promise or expectation.

Labour, on the other hand, will shrivel like an organ in ice cold water to minute proportions, like many socialist parties across Europe and despite its superficially impressive victory last July, because it will live to up to expectation and deliver what it always does: moral and financial bankruptcy.

The Labour Party, intellectually fuelled by groups like the Fabian society – perpetually wrong but always self-righteously so – will enforce its self-destructive policies on the country regardless of cost or consequence.

However, with the country’s finances shot through, Labour is facing a problem.

There is not enough money for Labour to distribute to its multiplying and ever more demanding constituencies. Ultimately, spending will be constrained by financial markets.

As a result, the Labour Party will have to double down on culture wars – heart and soul – and make themselves unelectable in the process.

Cheap in the short term, they will force-feed cultural Marxism with the vehemence of cult members across all state funded institutions, alienating all and sundry. The costs of accelerating social destruction will be borne by all later.

It must be understood that it is the sine qua non of their intellectual lodestars, not an accident. The worse the better as Lenin used to say.

As examples, Ed Milliband rushed to close the North Sea to the exploitation of oil, banking all on renewable energy, seemingly welcoming accelerating de-industrialisation and de-agriculturalisation.

Anneliese Dodds, Minister of Women and Equalities, with no irony, refused to update the Equality Act 2010 to protect women from “transgender women” entering female lavatories, changing rooms, and all-female sports teams.

She, and the Party, also back the introduction of quasi-blasphemy laws by proposing to criminalise theological criticism of the creed of peace. A position that might be a root cause behind Lord Alli’s largesse towards Starmer and friends.

In addition, at a time when much of Europe is moving towards reinstating proper border controls, Starmer, true to form, will deliver full open ones, wishing to atomise what Socialist Alternatives, a charmless publication of which he was editor in the 1980s, called the monolithic society of “white, married, middle class” Britain into a projected majority of minorities, in which race and gender would be the basis for new and artificially created oppressed classes, throwing the old inconvenient white working man under the bus in the process, and turning the white majority into the de facto class enemy.

To make matters worse, based on his deeply held ideology, Two Tier Free Gear Keir will instinctively put international agreements ahead of domestic obligations – a core tenet of the Labour Party since inception.

Thus, Labour will self-destruct for being true to itself.

It is not where we would have wished to start but it is where we are: halfway down the hell shaft.

 

Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.

This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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