Sunday West: January 8

A new year, a new dawn

Happy New Year, and I hope everyone had a relaxing Christmas break. This week I started the year on a happy note by writing about asymmetrical multiculturalism, and how we have come to accept completely different standards in the way we treat different groups. I also wrote about the cruelty of sending children to school, following a new report showing that kids seemed to actually like lockdown.

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Elsewhere, Joe Hackett’s substack post on the Conservative Party’s people problem was very good.

The Conservative Party may be adaptable, but fundamentally it’s a right-of-centre conservative party (clue being in the name). The underpinning principle of wokeness is that Western society - its culture, traditions, institutions, and prosperity - is built on racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; and is designed to perpetuate that bigoted oppression. If it has another principle, it’s that all inequality is the product of systemic oppression and social conditioning. How can you reconcile that with any potential form of conservative or right-of-centre politics? What would you even want to conserve?

This is one cultural wave that the Tories cannot ride, and the party’s terminal unpopularity with young voters, while exacerbated by other factors, reflects that. The only option is to snip the other wire - try to make wokeness less popular.

There’s no avoiding the ‘culture war’ because what we mean by that is the existential question of how to best run a happy and healthy society. And those commentators who have accused Tories of ‘starting a culture war’ tend to be the most ardent culture warriors themselves; they’re just such strong believers in their cause that they barely even see their beliefs as political question at all.

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Another problem the Tories seem unable to grapple with is that a lot of culture is downstream of law, as this very good piece by Charlie Peters argues. I tend to think it goes a bit more in a cycle but Peters’s broad point rings true; much of the stuff we conservatives complain about is related to things like the Equality Act, and after 13 years now the Tories have made no attempt to repeal it.

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On a similar theme, at the Spectator Stephen Daisley writes about how Tory voters want the party to suffer at the next election.

While I don’t expect anything so dramatic come next polling day, I suspect the Tories will have a worse night than even their gloomier MPs are predicting. Setting aside card-carrying members of the party, I know no one under 40 who is planning to vote Tory next time. Not a single one. Not in Scotland, nor London, nor Wales, nor the Midlands, nor the North. 

The breadth and depth of the revilement is breath-taking. I know blue-collar small business owners who spend their days inveighing against crime, mass immigration and wokeism but would sooner see a gang of non-binary Albanian drug-dealers move in next door than vote Tory. I know graduate professionals champing at the bit to elect a Labour government that will clobber them with higher taxes. I know people who despise the SNP and yet are determined to withhold their vote from the Tories in blue-yellow marginals. The Conservatives are at the worst point a government can reach: the voters don’t just want to boot them out, they want to hurt them. 

The Tories are on 16% among people under-50. As I’ve said before, I told you we were doomed!

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Having said that, there is a reason why the Church views despair as a sin, and why we should never give in or give up. On a more serious note that the future of the Conservative party, there is climate change: what I know about this subject could fit in a stamp, which is why I outsource my opinion to science writers whom I trust, who tell me what I believe is the consensus view: it’s terrible, and will kill a lot of people, but it’s not the end of the world. I dislike the apocalyptic tone because, firstly, I think it causes children unnecessary anxiety, but also because it just invites apathy. If you think there’s no hope, you won’t bother.

This sense of despair often comes with variations on the lament ‘why aren’t we doing anything about it?’ But, as Alex Massie points out, we’re doing loads! Telling people it’s the end of the world is counter-productive, because the inevitable response is to just give up. Climate change is bad, and for some countries it’s going to be extremely bad — but it’s not a reason to despair.

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At the Critic, Niall Gooch on the family.

The family is at the heart of our civilisation. As the site of the raising of the next generation, it is crucial to our ongoing survival and flourishing. It precedes all our political and economic arrangements and it will, hopefully, outlast them. At its best it is a place of unconditional love and rootedness. This is what we mean when we talk about Home. It is where we learn the arts of humanity: compromise, forgiveness, tolerance, humour. It is where we find consolation and rest among those whose bonds with us go deeper than choice or shared interests. The value of this way of life is literally immeasurable.

It is a haven in a heartless world, as a great and wise man once said. 

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Here’s an interesting piece by Chris Clarke in UnHerd about the cultural-music tribes of the 2000s. It was quite similar everywhere, I think; I remember around 1994 being chased by a much bigger group because we were ‘indie kids’, aka middle class and badly dressed. That was when we ventured out to the suburbs, but where I grew up in west London the ‘townie’ equivalent was much more multicultural, and heavily influenced by black culture, so neither tribe would have ended up as particularly Brexity.

Via JonS

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Speaking of indie kids, here’s an interesting piece by Michael Collins on Morrissey. The story of the former Smiths singer is partly the story of how the revolution went full circle, a strictly regulated society giving way to libertine excess returning to a strictly regulated society — except with different taboos. A few years back, Collins wrote an outstanding book about the working class of south London.

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More than 45,000 people crossed the Channel in 2022, and there is no sign of this global age of migration ending. (The United States, of course, has a similar issue). On the subject of the age of exodus, Noah Carl writes about the sheer numbers of potential migrants we’d get with open borders, and from before Christmas, Fred Skulthorp on why people are fleeing Albania.

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Finally, it looks like we’re going to get a Labour government before too long, and Daniel Finkelstein suggests that Starmer may be more Left-wing than he makes out.

So, successful opposition leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, play down the change they are offering. They are reassuring. Some of their activists begin to worry they have given so much away it will hardly be worth winning at all.

But it is. Because once you have won an election, voters will let you finish what you have started. They begin to rationalise that your new bolder policy — privatisation is a good example — is what they always thought you would do, even though you didn’t say so.

While it is often suggested that oppositions talk big but become more moderate in government, this is, in fact, the opposite of what usually happens. Governments are more radical in power than the same party was in opposition. Only reality acts as a brake.

I can see us getting a lot more stuff like this. Things can only get worse.