Like I keep saying, one of the weirdest myths in British politics is that the Tory Party is run by savvy super geniuses, while the conservative base are a bunch of shaved chimpanzees. Any rational assessment of how things actually work suggests the opposite is closer to the truth.
Take recent events: by now, just about everyone has weighed in on Humberside Police's attempts at literary criticism....
Oops... best make the everybody except the actual, paid, members of a party supposedly dedicated to small government and freedom.
Hey, this shouldn't be a tough one - even James Kircuck got it right - but, no, the Smartest People In The Room are hiding under the table whimpering.
Maybe they think it's a hot potato? Maybe they think there's a key demographic of swing voters who are ready to vote Tory but they're unsure whether they can trust the Tories to take a sufficiently hard line on unlicensed poetry?
Personally, I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm thinking anyone who is fine with the police pressuring employers to sack people who haven't even committed a crime is probably not a big supporter of individual rights. Just a hunch. And then there's the fact Labour MPs have decided to run silent, run deep as well.
Normally, most Labour MPs need sedating to keep them out of a PC witch hunt, but suddenly they've all collectively remembered they've left the gas on at home. More to the point, our fearless watch dog media has also refused to question them about this. Jacob Rees-Mogg constantly gets asked the equivalent of 'who would win in a fight between Batman and Darth Vader' (except with abortions), but no one is prepared to ask Islington Jesus if a woman can have a penis.
Hey, this might be the House of Dumb but even I know that there's no 'LGBTQ community'. Don't be shocked, but it turns out that the 'L' aren't so keen on the idea that any girl who would rather wear Doc Martens and fix her bike than play with dolls and make up is clearly - clearly! - a boy trapped in a girls body.
I know, shocking, right? At least it is if you're an idiot or - apparently - a member of Humberside Police or the Tory top brass.
The theory seems to be that that the Tory Party can spend the next four years avoiding saying anything at all and win by default as long as Labour are being run by Comrade Trampski. Here's the thing though. It doesn't even make sense on it's own terms. The assumption is that Labour can't make up any ground on the Tories, but they did that just last week when the crime figures came out. They managed to push the narrative that rising crime was all down to the Tori Cutz.
Well, here's the reality: the police aren't short of resources, they just choose to use them to wage culture war. If Humberside has twice as many officers that would just mean they spent time digging up tweets from 2012. That's why there's no hiding place for the Tories. They can face the (mostly mythical) political cost of taking on the SJWs in blue or they can face the political cost of rising crime. Those are the only two options.
2 comments:
[1/2] The Overton Window shifts ever-leftward. As ‘Moldbug’, father of NRx and the John the Baptist of Reaction preparing the way, wrote: ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.’
Remember our Peter Cuthbertson’s 2002 satirical piece, which sums up the situation still? ‘Then and Now: Conservative Candidate Selection’ (available from the Internet Archive, scroll down).
As Robert Dabney wrote over a century ago, but the words might have been written yesterday:
[C]onservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. … [C]onservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. … It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle.
Dabney, Robert L. Discussions. Vol. IV. Mexico, MO: Crescent Book House, 1897. 496.
Or as Mark Steyn put it in 2010:
In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect … The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
…
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists—sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfil the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
Steyn, Mark. “Obamacare worth the price to Democrats.” Orange County Register. 5 Mar 2010.
[2/2] Along with Ann Coulter, Steyn has repeatedly warned we’re playing our enemies’ game for them; and many others have noted that as Conservatives/Republicans keep chasing a (Left-shifting) ‘centre’, they alienate their natural base. Our """Conservatives""" do not even possess the spine to restrict the franchise to British nationals, which would be only in line with every other ‘democracy’ in the world. (Citizens of 53 countries can vote in all our elections and referenda (even if just passing through), few of whom reciprocate (e.g. Australia, Canada) or are recognisable democracies (e.g. Zimbabwe), and some are not even former British colonies (e.g. Mozambique, Rwanda); meanwhile, as of 2017, there are 11 seats with majorities of <100. It’s not a magic bullet that will deliver Tory victories forevermore; but it’s a minor tweak to our electoral system that will marginally enhance the Tory position—and the Tories stand there like a rabbit caught in headlights, completely powerless (despite holding executive power) in the face of the liberal-left-SJW onslaught.)
Conservatism has failed—there is no longer anything left to conserve; we need to start discussing ‘RESTORATION’.
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