Know thyself
Readers will be pleased to know that I consider it my duty to read the commentariat in the Telegraph, so that you don’t have to. Recently this has become an even more onerous undertaking because the commentators seem to be having a collective nervous breakdown.
Seriously I worry for the mental health of some of them, but it is possible to understand what they are going through. They have invested decades and all their intellectual capacity, suspended their disbelief and drunk the Cool Aid for far too long and yet everywhere they look their grand scheme, their mission, their City on the Hill is descending into a complete mess, an utter failure and a disastrous example of totally failed policies.
Their reaction is also easy to understand if not forgive. It is blame everyone but themselves, it is to see traitors and enemies everywhere, to blame Atlee’s welfare state (I am serious), the NHS, wokery, left leaning media, the Bank of England, the OBR, the ECHR…. well just about anything that has nothing to do with the state of the nation.
Their solution is therefore deeply flawed and quite dangerous, “It will all just have to go”.
Human rights? We don’t need them. Independent Judges? We need political appointees. The ECHR? It has changed not us. The police? Left wing wimps, (seriously?). And so on and so on. Nothing is sacred, the welfare state, the NHS, the civil service, the OBR, the Bank of England.
The rationale is simple, we are totally right but it is not working so we must be being betrayed and hamstrung by traitors, the left etc.
This surely means that if the Tories lose the next election they are in for a long period of opposition because the first rule of a return to power is that you have to understand where you have gone wrong. Why you failed, why your policies were disastrous, why the economy was so bad, why your shibboleths turned out to be false idols, why you lost connection with reality, why the ultras took over your party and why you and no one else is responsible for what went wrong under your tenure.
The current evidence is that the Tory party will, if it is in opposition, head in completely the opposite direction. It will head ever rightward, will come up with ever more conspiracy theories, propose ever more extreme solutions (drowning babies anyone?) and talk only to itself.
In part, of course, Brexit is to blame for this. When you believe in something so strongly you are willing to lie and lie again to make it a reality, it is almost impossible to step back and see that you were wrong and the people you lied to and about were only too right about what would and did happen.
But the wider issue is that Brexit is not the only thing that the Tory party is in denial about. What about the sick note culture or all those lazy 20 year olds, or the damage caused by human rights, what about trickle down economics, or the Laffer curve?
On current trends the Tory party will head off into the wilderness to examine why it has lost an election and come back knowing even less about the world and itself than it knows now.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Brilliant again Jonty. The only problem I have with this is that, if you are right that the Tories will be out of power for over a decade, then the Labour Party, in its current state, will get things badly wrong as well, and the country will continue its post-colonial decline. We need some radical systemic reforms, starting immediately, after the next GE, and none of the opposition parties seem capable of delivering that.