"Thangam Debbonaire, Labour’s Shadow Culture Secretary, supports teaching children about ‘white privilege’." Love being lectured on my privilege by the privately educated politician who went to Oxford.
I am about to permanently mute the local neighbourhood WhatsApp groups I'm on - the Fuck the Tories droning and glee from the hipster dads (all on 70k plus, all who will all continue to be taxed to the hilt under Labour) on election night will unbeatable. The Tories deserve to go, but Labour will be unbearable.
A good question for a future blog is that the entire establishment is now poised to support Starmer's "Project" and the overton window has moved so far that even mildly right wing opinions like 'our universities are running a scam project to import immigrants to fund themselves' is regarded with horror and shrieks of disgust.
The question is that the 'blob' has not been challenged in 14 years other than briefly, the Overton window moved with no resistance whatsoever, Ofcom is a barely disguised project to stop any right wing opinions appearing on TV and a left wing judiciary is poised to act against any opponents of the left; how did 14 years of "Conservative" government allow this and even facilitate it in some cases.
Laziness? Conspiracy? Desire for an easy life? Fear of the BBC? What has caused this calamity?
Will it be, in the words of Houellebecq, "the same but worse"? Or are we now going to finally enter the age where the last remnants of old Britain melt away and we truly become the modern internationalist, American left vassal state.
(I don't think completely as I just can't see the monarchy being abolished but everything else is up for being reorganised down progressive lines with no space for any other view e.g. National Trust.)
Worse, because the veneer of old Britain will still be there, but used to make sure that it stays buried, and nothing can grow in the wasteland underneath.
I woke up resigned to voting Tory, after several years of being determined not to, and this has not helped me at all!
There must be so many people in the same boat as me, wanting to go the whole Peter Hitchens and make straight the paths of a new right-wing party but also concerned about giving Starmer and friends a stonking majority with which to hit us around the head. What are we to do?
If you live in the constituency of Neil O'Brien, Miriam Cates or Danny Kruger, then I'd suggest voting for them. I'm sure there are some others, but not many.
I have the honour to be represented by the current Defence Secretary. He's a good local MP but I don't know if I want him to be one of the chaps tasked with rebooting the Right come the Inglorious 5th.
I find myself in the same position as yourself, though from the fitfully beating heart of the red-wall. Current chap defenestrated the Beast himself (Oh thank you Lord), and is a pretty good constituency MP, to boot . Still, it seems to me that good constituency MP is not good enough; the Tories need, and thoroughly deserve, a good kicking.
Never a been great fan of PH, though, especially since that 'Phoney Victory', book. Damned unpatriotic smartarsery, I reckon. Some combination of Douglas Murray and Lee Anderson, will do up here in 't North.
The trans may have retreated, but this come after years of relentless advances. Time was when the panel shows and Frankie Boyle all made fun of transgenderism. None of this matters now as the regime comics are gearing up for the July 4th Tory massacre. It will be unbearable. Nevertheless, I don't think the trans lot are that upset about recent setbacks. They know "Brexit Britain" is TERF Island anyway. The place that really matters is the USA, or maybe even, the Internet. Transgenderism is pushed most by Digital America. Social media, digital news and culture are never going to be GC strongholds. There is far too much potential money in trans for that.
I went to Cambridge in the early 2000s and we had a RAG (student charity) event in our college where four of us dressed as women. We needed industrial amounts of alcohol to buck up the courage to go on stage. One lad was so drunk he passed out in a bath. He had to redo it the next year.
Imagine that now - I was in Cambridge during lockdown and there was a street full of pride flags. College have to fly the trans flag at the behest of their students. Jesus College has so many they had to tell students to take them down.
The things that enabled trans - feminism, atheism and digitalisation - are still there. The GCs don't oppose these so to say they *really* oppose trans is a stretch. Most of them even have a favourite trans person and most would not cede any ground on feminist secular liberalism which they think they can magically reverse to 2012, just like all the tedious talking heads on Twitter. The Olympic ceremony as the apogee of British civilisation.
I work in employment law and find the prospect of a Labour government profoundly depressing. The Conservatives failed to do anything meaningful and have just given in to minority lobbying groups, pushing through a deluge of small changes in recent months. Labour will most likely be even worse. I find myself contemplating my pensions and wondering if I can afford to retire early. I probably have 2 years before the insanity of new laws hits the ground. What to do...
God that was depressing. What state the country will be in by 2029 is enough to make one start to research emigration. On that topic, I take issue with one point - 685000 is not 'moderate' level of immigration, it is horrifically too high. A moderate level would be less than 100,000. We cannot keep stuffing a low income Sheffield into the country every year and expect that anything will improve....
I remember those grim years under Gordon brown and how they radicalised me into a right wing lunatic (your great articles at telegraph blogs helped). I never could have imagine that after 14 years of Tory rule things are the same but worse.
Starmer is a creature of the blairite system that has hegemony over all public institutions regardless of who is in Downing Street. He will follow Biden in deferring to his culture left flank whilst obeying orders from the treasury to keep the big banks happy. Plus he will never threaten any of the unions tied to the public sector, especially in education and the NHS. given how disastrous the social and political situation is, his government will become very unpopular very quickly.
I am gambling that Dominic Cummings’s start up party will bulldoze the blairtie order out of westminister in 2028. But I believe there needs to be a complete implosion of the British administrative state before that happens. My guess is that a debt crisis followed by an IMF bailout could do the job, or perhaps an escalation into a conventional war with Russia could also do it.
Looking forward to many years of brilliant substacks Ed! I am sure you will have much to write about
The Telegraph Blogs was good fun, and had a big influence on a lot of people I think. like a lot of things though, they were too early to monetise the idea.
I think in any case the window is no longer looking out over a green and pleasant land, but over a landscape being covered over with troglodyte dwellings for our ever increasing number of low-skilled, low-productivity inhabitants.
Neither Britain nor America has learned anything of the danger of discarding wisdom and leaping 'forward' into progressivism. Magellan and Columbus launched Europeans across uncharted oceans to discover 'new' worlds only in the sense that the world was larger than Europe imagined it to be. The exuberance of youth ignores the reality that there have been billions of people who were here before, were just as intelligent, and wrestled with the same issues.
To ignore history is to approach the future without the knowledge gained by the billions of people who have been there before. The raging ocean of the future is less fearful in a modern ship, with modern maps and navigational tools, than it was in the wind-powered, tiny, wooden vessels of hundreds of years ago. Not less dangerous--modern ships can still sink, still get caught in storms, sailors and passengers can still get sick--but less fearful. But only fools go to sea without caution.
Modernity repeats too many of the errors of the past by entrusting leadership to those unschooled in history. It's not that history is all that difficult to learn from. But when one assumes that all of history was in error simply because it is old, and everything new is better, one is navigating without tools. How can future Marxes, Lenins, Maos, or Hitlers be steered clear of? How can future Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adams, and Madisons be steered toward?
Modern students are blindly taught the formers' ideas are to be judged without reference to their acts, and the latters' ideas are to be dismissed because they are dead white men. And, besides, the past is irrelevant to the future. “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit?" Modern politics is a blind repetition of the past.
'The raging ocean of the future is less fearful in a modern ship, with modern maps and navigational tools, than it was in the wind-powered, tiny, wooden vessels of hundreds of years ago. Not less dangerous--modern ships can still sink, still get caught in storms, sailors and passengers can still get sick--but less fearful. But only fools go to sea without caution.'
I couldn't tell if this was allegory or a warning about the dangers of seafaring.
I am starting to see that the single biggest failure of the Tories is the anti-democratic distribution of very wide ranging, Damoclean power over rights of speech, association and political expression to the quango apparatus aka the longhouse state.
After reading your description of Starmerism, I can only exclaim (as a fervent prayer) "God help us !"
Now the country only has a choice between corrupt and doltish Tories, versus extremist Loons at Labour, the only hope for Britain seems to be outright national collapse.
Which won't be pleasant, but at any rate preferable to a Tyranny of Loons.
btw We've heard little about the Greens or Lib Dems, since they have both now been comfortably Out-Looned by Labour.
"Thangam Debbonaire, Labour’s Shadow Culture Secretary, supports teaching children about ‘white privilege’." Love being lectured on my privilege by the privately educated politician who went to Oxford.
She's vegan
Even better. Will Labour look to enforce veganism in the name of Net Zero through a myriad of rules and Quangoes?
I've just taken a look at our Thangam. She looks like a cross between Tracy Emin and Fatima Whitbread.
After a threesome with Eddie Izzard.
Just when I am feeling a bit gloomy, I come and read Ed West, to feel even gloomier but at least in some company.
my work is done
I am about to permanently mute the local neighbourhood WhatsApp groups I'm on - the Fuck the Tories droning and glee from the hipster dads (all on 70k plus, all who will all continue to be taxed to the hilt under Labour) on election night will unbeatable. The Tories deserve to go, but Labour will be unbearable.
A good question for a future blog is that the entire establishment is now poised to support Starmer's "Project" and the overton window has moved so far that even mildly right wing opinions like 'our universities are running a scam project to import immigrants to fund themselves' is regarded with horror and shrieks of disgust.
The question is that the 'blob' has not been challenged in 14 years other than briefly, the Overton window moved with no resistance whatsoever, Ofcom is a barely disguised project to stop any right wing opinions appearing on TV and a left wing judiciary is poised to act against any opponents of the left; how did 14 years of "Conservative" government allow this and even facilitate it in some cases.
Laziness? Conspiracy? Desire for an easy life? Fear of the BBC? What has caused this calamity?
Complicity in half the Tories, blinkered stupidity in the other half.
Will it be, in the words of Houellebecq, "the same but worse"? Or are we now going to finally enter the age where the last remnants of old Britain melt away and we truly become the modern internationalist, American left vassal state.
(I don't think completely as I just can't see the monarchy being abolished but everything else is up for being reorganised down progressive lines with no space for any other view e.g. National Trust.)
Worse, because the veneer of old Britain will still be there, but used to make sure that it stays buried, and nothing can grow in the wasteland underneath.
I woke up resigned to voting Tory, after several years of being determined not to, and this has not helped me at all!
There must be so many people in the same boat as me, wanting to go the whole Peter Hitchens and make straight the paths of a new right-wing party but also concerned about giving Starmer and friends a stonking majority with which to hit us around the head. What are we to do?
If you live in the constituency of Neil O'Brien, Miriam Cates or Danny Kruger, then I'd suggest voting for them. I'm sure there are some others, but not many.
I have the honour to be represented by the current Defence Secretary. He's a good local MP but I don't know if I want him to be one of the chaps tasked with rebooting the Right come the Inglorious 5th.
I find myself in the same position as yourself, though from the fitfully beating heart of the red-wall. Current chap defenestrated the Beast himself (Oh thank you Lord), and is a pretty good constituency MP, to boot . Still, it seems to me that good constituency MP is not good enough; the Tories need, and thoroughly deserve, a good kicking.
Never a been great fan of PH, though, especially since that 'Phoney Victory', book. Damned unpatriotic smartarsery, I reckon. Some combination of Douglas Murray and Lee Anderson, will do up here in 't North.
The trans may have retreated, but this come after years of relentless advances. Time was when the panel shows and Frankie Boyle all made fun of transgenderism. None of this matters now as the regime comics are gearing up for the July 4th Tory massacre. It will be unbearable. Nevertheless, I don't think the trans lot are that upset about recent setbacks. They know "Brexit Britain" is TERF Island anyway. The place that really matters is the USA, or maybe even, the Internet. Transgenderism is pushed most by Digital America. Social media, digital news and culture are never going to be GC strongholds. There is far too much potential money in trans for that.
I went to Cambridge in the early 2000s and we had a RAG (student charity) event in our college where four of us dressed as women. We needed industrial amounts of alcohol to buck up the courage to go on stage. One lad was so drunk he passed out in a bath. He had to redo it the next year.
Imagine that now - I was in Cambridge during lockdown and there was a street full of pride flags. College have to fly the trans flag at the behest of their students. Jesus College has so many they had to tell students to take them down.
The things that enabled trans - feminism, atheism and digitalisation - are still there. The GCs don't oppose these so to say they *really* oppose trans is a stretch. Most of them even have a favourite trans person and most would not cede any ground on feminist secular liberalism which they think they can magically reverse to 2012, just like all the tedious talking heads on Twitter. The Olympic ceremony as the apogee of British civilisation.
I work in employment law and find the prospect of a Labour government profoundly depressing. The Conservatives failed to do anything meaningful and have just given in to minority lobbying groups, pushing through a deluge of small changes in recent months. Labour will most likely be even worse. I find myself contemplating my pensions and wondering if I can afford to retire early. I probably have 2 years before the insanity of new laws hits the ground. What to do...
God that was depressing. What state the country will be in by 2029 is enough to make one start to research emigration. On that topic, I take issue with one point - 685000 is not 'moderate' level of immigration, it is horrifically too high. A moderate level would be less than 100,000. We cannot keep stuffing a low income Sheffield into the country every year and expect that anything will improve....
I was joking!
I remember those grim years under Gordon brown and how they radicalised me into a right wing lunatic (your great articles at telegraph blogs helped). I never could have imagine that after 14 years of Tory rule things are the same but worse.
The idea of Labour being the only party that can reform public services is an old one, it’s stunning to read the same point in this Peter Oborne article from 2003 https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-tories-should-support-tony-blair-s-magnificent-defiance-of-his-own-party/
Starmer is a creature of the blairite system that has hegemony over all public institutions regardless of who is in Downing Street. He will follow Biden in deferring to his culture left flank whilst obeying orders from the treasury to keep the big banks happy. Plus he will never threaten any of the unions tied to the public sector, especially in education and the NHS. given how disastrous the social and political situation is, his government will become very unpopular very quickly.
I am gambling that Dominic Cummings’s start up party will bulldoze the blairtie order out of westminister in 2028. But I believe there needs to be a complete implosion of the British administrative state before that happens. My guess is that a debt crisis followed by an IMF bailout could do the job, or perhaps an escalation into a conventional war with Russia could also do it.
Looking forward to many years of brilliant substacks Ed! I am sure you will have much to write about
Thank you!
The Telegraph Blogs was good fun, and had a big influence on a lot of people I think. like a lot of things though, they were too early to monetise the idea.
I had trouble believing Thangam Debbonaire was real, and I'm partly right:
"In her twenties, she changed her name by deed poll from Singh to Debbonaire, borrowed from a relative from her first marriage."
She should give it back. Either her birth name, Singh, or her husband's name, Walton, would be far less goofball.
As Debbonaire, she sounds like a character from some US chicklit novel.
Exactly. Swayve and Debbonaire.
Is it possible for an Overton window to move so far left that it is no longer attached to the house but is instead floating in mid-air?
I think in any case the window is no longer looking out over a green and pleasant land, but over a landscape being covered over with troglodyte dwellings for our ever increasing number of low-skilled, low-productivity inhabitants.
Neither Britain nor America has learned anything of the danger of discarding wisdom and leaping 'forward' into progressivism. Magellan and Columbus launched Europeans across uncharted oceans to discover 'new' worlds only in the sense that the world was larger than Europe imagined it to be. The exuberance of youth ignores the reality that there have been billions of people who were here before, were just as intelligent, and wrestled with the same issues.
To ignore history is to approach the future without the knowledge gained by the billions of people who have been there before. The raging ocean of the future is less fearful in a modern ship, with modern maps and navigational tools, than it was in the wind-powered, tiny, wooden vessels of hundreds of years ago. Not less dangerous--modern ships can still sink, still get caught in storms, sailors and passengers can still get sick--but less fearful. But only fools go to sea without caution.
Modernity repeats too many of the errors of the past by entrusting leadership to those unschooled in history. It's not that history is all that difficult to learn from. But when one assumes that all of history was in error simply because it is old, and everything new is better, one is navigating without tools. How can future Marxes, Lenins, Maos, or Hitlers be steered clear of? How can future Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adams, and Madisons be steered toward?
Modern students are blindly taught the formers' ideas are to be judged without reference to their acts, and the latters' ideas are to be dismissed because they are dead white men. And, besides, the past is irrelevant to the future. “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit?" Modern politics is a blind repetition of the past.
'The raging ocean of the future is less fearful in a modern ship, with modern maps and navigational tools, than it was in the wind-powered, tiny, wooden vessels of hundreds of years ago. Not less dangerous--modern ships can still sink, still get caught in storms, sailors and passengers can still get sick--but less fearful. But only fools go to sea without caution.'
I couldn't tell if this was allegory or a warning about the dangers of seafaring.
I am starting to see that the single biggest failure of the Tories is the anti-democratic distribution of very wide ranging, Damoclean power over rights of speech, association and political expression to the quango apparatus aka the longhouse state.
I think the take away message from this is, let's hope World War III starts and scuppers Starmer's plans.
After reading your description of Starmerism, I can only exclaim (as a fervent prayer) "God help us !"
Now the country only has a choice between corrupt and doltish Tories, versus extremist Loons at Labour, the only hope for Britain seems to be outright national collapse.
Which won't be pleasant, but at any rate preferable to a Tyranny of Loons.
btw We've heard little about the Greens or Lib Dems, since they have both now been comfortably Out-Looned by Labour.