The slippery slope
Fighting to be leader of the Tory party at the moment reminds me of William Hague seizing the opportunity when John Major stood down to spend more time with his cricket club.
It was the worst career move he could have made, he could easily have supported Michael Howard, let him suffer for a couple of years and then maybe backed another loser and then taken over in time, with the experience to lead the party to victory.
If you want to be leader now you must think that Labour will implode in a most spectacular manner, because otherwise you will be just another half forgotten nearly man.
It is not like you are inheriting a united party or one that is even willing to consider the right direction to head.
But then this might be your last time to be leader of the Tories. At this current rate the Lib Dems will move into the countryside and start eating the Tories once untouchable rural base. Reform can just sit there and spout ever nastier filth and the Tory party cannot win by copying them.
It also has to be said that the Tory party leaders have been on a downward slope ever since the ones who actually served in the Second World War started retiring. The ones who actually lived with the poor bloody infantry and saw them die for a country that had done nothing for them.
It has had 45 years of being increasingly two nation, Tory policies benefit the rich, and the powerful but ignore or even punish the poor, the poorly educated and the disadvantaged; and it boasts about it.
Its leaders have got worse since at least Heath, but it and they still have much further to fall.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
The left has always been a rationalist critique against which conservative thinking rightly warned that we should be careful of thinking that we know everything; tradition may contain wisdom we had not appreciated until it is lost.
But "conservatism" since Thatcher has consisted of the remorseless application of a narrow economic logic with no compunction in destroying institutions and upheaving local social relations. In this it has been the handmaiden of global capital. It carries with it the expectation of the monied individual for complete freedom.
The more recent nativism of the Tories has been an attempt to gain votes from a population whose cultural and economic references have been destabilised by this process and which is casting around for cultural identity and economic security. Strikingly, both in narrative and reality (Brexit), it has abandoned the interests of global business as its dominant narrative.
In the meantime the not so new anymore left has attacked traditional narratives about how to live in pursuit of another form of radical individualism.
In international relations, the UN security council no longer functions. Resolutions of the general assembly and judgements of the International Court of Justice are ignored.
The signs of fragmentation are present from top to bottom.
We have taken our eye off the ball. These problems are dwarfed by the growing realisation that a climate and ecology crisis which will destroy us is being ignored.
How much coverage was given to the July 23 paper in Nature - "Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation" - which set out an analysis showing with a 95% confidence level that there will be an AMOC shutdown between 2025-2095 - and what that will mean.
Responding to this requires us to address the need for radical change in our international system of production and distribution. It requires a redesign in which all
perspectives need to be heard but with a sharp focus on results. But to achieve this we must come together. Paris is being ignored, not least because governments in western democracies feel unable to be honest with the voters. We are asleep at the wheel. The future of politics on left and right is to wake up, otherwise what has been foreseen will come to pass.
At least Heath, like Macmillan, made a reasonable pretence of the 1 nation crap, but since Thatcher it’s been downhill all the way, devil take the hindmost, etc. god knows how political historians will explain it - a sort of Jonestown mass suicide in slow motion (and it’s not even as much fun to watch as I’d hoped)