We've Moved to Substack

I have decided to abandon this very short-lived blog as it has been made impossible to monetise it. I will now be writing on Substack instead. I hope to see you there. 

21st Century Consensus Politics and the Decline of Britain

We are, at most, roughly 18 months from a general election. That is a terrifying prospect because, realistically, the Conservatives are going to lose. But then, every time we begin to despair, we must look to our left, well to our left, at the modern Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer. 

The problem that we Conservatives face is that the country seems now, despite the doubts Starmer engenders in us all, to be ready to hand Labour the benefit of our considerable doubt. It is up to us, over the coming year and a half, to convince as many as possible how extraordinarily dangerous simply handing a chance to Labour could turn out to be when it is based on little more than a whim and a shrug of the shoulders. 

The country is in a difficult place economically, socially, culturally and politically. The great economic crisis of 2008/9 damaged us and we had still not recovered properly by the time of the Covid crisis that saw us go on a kind of general strike that some in the public sector are still engaged in. 

Some will claim that Brexit has been another contributory factor to this general malaise, betraying a desire on their part to see the country enter a period of decline simply so they can say 'we told you so.' In reality, Brexit was delayed and then diluted to such an extent by our combined administrative and political classes it is hard to make any such claim. But I will deal with Brexit separately in another post another time.

For now I want to deal with the place the country is in largely thanks to Covid and our absurd overreaction to it. Many of us were warning of this when the world panicked at the appearance of a nasty virus inflicted on us by China and for which they have still not been sufficiently held accountable.  

It was always inevitable that something like Covid would come along. Our governments had prepared for it for years. Unfortunately they prepared for entirely the wrong kind of pathogen and seemed to adopt a kind of copy and paste approach from what they had prepared for. But the blame does not entirely lie with the scientists who, as scientists are wont to do, proved hopeless at predicting the future, including in the modelling they employed which made opinion polling seem like less of a dismal science after all. The blame for our absurd overreaction must lie where it really belongs - with all of us. 

It tends to be forgotten now but before then Prime Minister Boris Johnson deployed worryingly neat hair and a straightened tie to appear on TV one Sunday evening and order us all to stay indoors, we had all taken leave of our senses and already done precisely that anyway. The streets were deserted days prior to us being ordered to desert them. Why, because of the rising panic at pictures coming out of Spain, Italy and the epicentre of it all, China. It was like living through a movie in which streets are deserted and nobody is about. The government merely acceded to the popular will and rising pressure. 

And so they shut down the economy and started spraying money around to ensure we all cowered indoors. All to protect us from this not remotely terrifying disease. Its novelty and occasional, seemingly random, aggressiveness towards certain individuals scared us stupid. The TV started reporting nightly death figures, figures that inevitably sound terrifying when reported so starkly but would sound considerably less worrying if set in context with other killers we lead our lives blithely ignoring. Every year two thirds of a million people die. The excess deaths figure hovered around the average throughout the whole pandemic - sometimes a little higher, often substantially lower. In short, we put our lives on hold for nothing.

Many of us, horrified at what was happening, pointed all of this out at the time. But the media was in full headless chicken mode, the public was staying at home and the government felt compelled to act and to ban, to talk about science whilst lacking clear evidence, close down non-essential businesses and, shamefully, even schools and universities and put the economy into a deep freeze from which it is still struggling to fully emerge.

And idiocy followed idiocy. There were the absurd forecasts based on little more than holding a wet finger in the air and seeing which way the wind was blowing. At no point did any of them come close to accurately predicting the path of the disease and yet we kept being scared into acquiescence on the basis of this voodoo science. There was the media which, at the outset, took a responsible approach and insisted that this was nothing to get too worried about before completely changing tack and pressing the panic button. From then on it was furore after furore. There was the 'scandal' over the lack of PPE, later to become the 'scandal' of why the government, desperate for PPE in a marketplace in which it was at a premium, sometimes didn't do normal due diligence. There was the 'scandal' over why care homes weren't looked after and why people were sent out of hospital without being tested and back into care homes. Later it emerged that this was not how the disease spread for the most part but because staff, also at a premium, were taking it in.  There was also the 'scandal' of the lack of sufficient testing until we were all given our own testing kits as a perfect excuse to take yet another week off work.

All of these shortages and issues were dealt with and usually with impressive speed. We forget now how quickly we sorted out the issues of PPE, testing and how we built those entirely unused Nightingale hospitals with nearly as much speed as the Chinese had. 

Meantime this was all doing intolerable damage to an economy that had been or life support for years since the financial crisis of 2008. The years after had seen austerity of a sort, but it was very austerity lite as far as much of the public sector was concerned. And what little gain we saw from that short moment when the public accepted that we had to live within our means, was wiped out the moment Covid happened. Labour had lost the 2019 election because they were promising to spend spend spend and thus undo what few gains had been won by our tightening our belts a little for a few years. They lost in 2019 but then within months a Conservative government was printing money, nationalising railways and pumping endless billions into a still unreformed NHS that just kept on asking for more and then went on strike. 

The lockdowns were a knee-jerk reaction that did more harm than good when simple social distancing would have done the trick. We were lied to about face masks, so much so that some of our more credulous fellow citizens are still wearing these pointless garments. Masks were imposed on us for no better reason than the national government in Westminster didn't want to look less safety conscious than the then goddess of sanctimony and gesture politics, Nicola Sturgeon. There remains no evidence, none, that masks made any difference whatsoever. Yet as talk emerges of another less than scary new Covid variant, some people who identify as scientists are urging we impose the damned things again. As Mrs Thatcher might had said: "No, no, no!"

And of course there is the great debacle that is working from home. It even has its own abbreviation now and a dedicated band of believers in the public sector who haven't done an honest day's work ever since. Much better for productivity we were assured by the sort of experts that newspapers quote without ever giving their credentials for their alleged expertise. The figures very much suggest otherwise. Britain has had a problem with productivity for years which no alleged experts can explain (I'll have a go in a post still to come) but WFH has made matters so much worse. Unaccountable agencies like the DVLA or Passports continue to work from home and to take as long as they please to do their jobs. Apply for a licence from DVLA which does not need human intervention and you will have delivered unto you your licence with days. Do anything that involves one of the WFH brigade and they will take months and then lie to you about why. 

But even were that not the case, a nation cannot prosper with us all, or at least those of us who can do so, holed up at home constantly saying 'oh go on then, one more coffee, one more segment of This Morning.' What about the human need for social interaction? What about the provably solid case that meetings done by video lead to greater misunderstanding, worse communication and much worse worker development? What about the fact that humans, being social animals, are better at problem solving, idea generating and general consensus creating when in a room or building together, communicating face to face? What about our obligation to train future generations, the poor sods we will expect to work to pay our pensions and to fund the NHS? 

The Work from Home counter revolution has been seized upon most enthusiastically by the public sector as I say. And yet our useless government has not likewise seized upon this opportunity to lay thousands of them off. You want to work from home? Then become authors, indeed many of you probably already have. Jacob Rees-Mogg left polite notes on people's desks, perhaps not spotting that they would need to come to work in order to read them. Was I alone in screaming at whatever device I read this on, 'get on the phone to them and tell them to be in at 8am on Monday morning or have their P45 mailed to them.' 

The pandemic has been over now - to the considerable disappointment of much of the civil service and the BBC, which for a time actually managed to grow its audience - for over 18 months and arguably much longer. Still there are thousands of people insisting that they have 'the right' to work from home. They have no such right and should be told so forcefully. Try an experiment. Apply for a new job. If granted an interview, turn up in your PJs or maybe naked and tell them that this is how you dress for 'the office' because you insist upon your right to work from home where you are much more productive. If offered the job and this 'right' is inserted into your employment contract then you have established a right to work from home and do nothing for a salary. Those who formerly were engaged in the rat race prior to Covid do not enjoy that right and employers are perfectly entitled to tell them where and when they will work regardless of their perceived right to slob about at home. 

We are all paying the price now for our credulous indolence. The Conservative Party is paying the price for giving us all exactly what we expected and demanded. The opposition parties, despite the fact they frequently urged the government to go further and faster, to have additional lockdowns and extensions of furlough, get to enjoy sky high poll ratings, massive by election wins and are on a smooth ride to a likely election win in the near future. 

And then what? There is no money. There was none in 2010 because Labour had squandered it and there will be even less this time because everyone squandered it but the Tories are getting the blame. The state of the public finances is truly terrifying. The bill to pay for our massive and still expanding public debt is looking ever more unmanageable. Taxes are already too high. And we are still borrowing. We have somehow managed to stay out of recession thus far but our economic growth is anaemic and interest rates have shot up thanks to the inflation created by our profligacy and the Bank of England's loss of control and groupthink vis a vis quantitative easing. Having voted to keep out the socialists in 2019 we went on a socialist style spending binge. And now we have nothing to show for all of that spending except a long Covid style hangover. 

This is all the consequence of a new 21st century version of consensus politics. The Conservatives have forgotten what it means to be Conservatives and tried to buy popularity. It never works. We have redistributive policies that our politicians never openly speak about because the Conservatives can't admit it and Labour have to pretend that the rich are still exploiting the masses. In truth were the rich, by which we mean anyone earning over £40k, to up sticks en masse, the country would be bankrupt because they are paying all of the bills. It's an oft repeated statistic, but clearly not repeated often enough. The top 1% of earners in the UK are paying 28% of all taxes. Most of us, those of us on average earnings, will take out of the state more than we pay in across our lifetimes.  

Millions of people across the country think they deserve the largesse handed out by the state in the form of triple-locked pensions, free bus travel, subsidised housing, endless entitlements if you claim to have some sort of disability, even the sort that nobody can see or test, not to mention the bottomless pit of entitlement that is the NHS. Yet few of us, in our working lives will ever pay enough into the system to afford our state pensions as we live well into our eighties let alone the costs of us keeping us alive. Britain is not alone in this state of affairs. It is common across the West. It is just that the pandemic and the fiscal and monetary response to it has made the numbers look all the more alarming. 

I have deliberately not mentioned in all of the above the idiocies surrounding global warming, net zero and the postures adopted by politicians who will be long gone when the reckoning comes. The reckoning will likely come when I am dead and buried. I have no children. It doesn't really affect me. But I worry about it nonetheless. Maybe we should hope and pray that AI comes along and solves some of these intractable problems. Because humans have proven hopeless at it. It isn 't even as if we don't know what to do. We just know that the solutions are unpalatable and unsellable in a democracy. Consensus politics is what happens when politicians on both sides of the aisle bury their heads in the sand, pretend that everything is fine, make all kinds of promises they cannot possibly keep and blame it all on someone else - the Tories, the rich, immigrants and the like. Consensus politics is when all of the main parties group around the centre ground and refuse to even discuss alternative policies or the problems with the evolving consensus. It is antithetical to democracy because it actively dissuades and even prevents proper debate. 

We are now increasingly governed, not by the government of the day with a majority in Parliament, but by a blob of unelected panjandrums residing in Whitehall, the judiciary, local government, quangos, across the vast bureaucracies of the NHS and agencies that provide our services and in the private sector which provides so much of what we rely on. A consensus view on issues like health and safety, transgenderism, HR issues, mask wearing during the pandemic, climate change and net zero actively works to prevent proper debate meaning that ideas are not properly tested. The recent horrendous case of Lucy Letby, the nurse who murdered babies apparently in an act of attention-seeking neediness, was a classic case of the health service blob preventing action for fear of reputational damage and of HR managers given a veto over the doubts of clinical expertise. The NHS and many other large organisations across the UK are run by managers whose every instinct is to cover up, to resist action, to worry about issues like inclusiveness to the detriment of public service. Inclusiveness started out as a perfectly reasonable desire to treat everyone the same in the name of fairness. But as ever it went too far and became a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Inclusiveness managers or variations on that term are employed in huge numbers across our public sector. Does anyone know what they do? Does anyone hold them to account? 

The solutions? As I say they are unpalatable. But the truth and reality often are. We are living beyond our means. The 'austerity' of ten years ago, that the left and part of the media loved to blame for everything in much the same way they now blame Brexit and climate change for everything now, barely qualified for the word. We need proper austerity, the sort that followed World War II. The public sector needs to be shrunk, not merely frozen, starting with anyone currently insisting that they have the 'right' to work from home followed by a bonfire of the inanities of modern life like inclusiveness and health and safety. Our out of control welfare state needs a dose of reality and for people to be told no. There are five million economically inactive people in the UK living on various forms of benefits who must be put back to work. The NHS has got to be fundamentally reformed and drastically pruned. Like the welfare system it started out as a good idea and has gone too far and is out of control. It is doing too much and not doing the important things well enough. 

Some of the solutions are more palatable but still controversial and difficult because of the resistance that will form against them. Slashing bureaucracy and regulations ought to be the default stance of a Conservative government, especially one elected to enact Brexit which was supposed to be about us governing ourselves once again and diverging from the European blob. Instead our own pro European blob has seized control and allowed to do so by a weak Conservative government afraid to do anything remotely decisive and difficult. 

Britain is in a state of near terminal decline. This has been accelerated by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the economic crisis before it. Our productivity has disappeared and even gone into reverse and economic growth with it. We are paying ourselves more for doing less. In the coming weeks I am going to publish a series of essays laying out what I think is happening and solutions. It is fair to say that many of my solutions are simply about slashing regulations and bureaucracy by sacking bureaucrats. But the government has to drastically reform whole sections of the civil service. Clearly there is no time for most of this before the next election. But it is what we should be saying in the run up to that election. Consensus politics is leading us to ruin. A Labour government after a Conservative government that has behaved like a Labour one is the road to economic ruination and disaster. We are on the cusp of a return to the declinism of the 1970s. It's not too late. But it's nearly too late.  

The Fightback Starts Here

 

I'm Paul Owen. I'm 57, single and a Conservative. That means I'm an active member of the party. I campaign, I knock on doors, I stood at the election in May (I lost) and of late I've started to do my bit.  There aren't many of us prepared to admit the latter at the moment, still less to defend the party and the leadership. We are currently being exhorted to go and campaign in the upcoming by elections in various parts of the country. This is pointless. We are going to get annihilated thanks to the selfishness and vanity of a few people in defence of a silly man who has been treated badly but also did much to deserve it. We have to move on from Boris Johnson. 

But to be fair to Boris, and I'm not entirely sure he deserves it, he is the victim of the angry remainers who have been out to get him since that fateful day when he declared for the leave side and went on to win it for us. Oh yes, did I not say? I voted leave and would do so again. No doubt we'll return to that vexed subject another day and then another day and another day.....Boris was brought down by cake. Yes he was stupid and yes he lied. But he was not alone. He is carrying the can for the absurd rules that his own government brought in at the behest of the medical establishment and the civil servants like Sue Gray who also broke the rules but always get away with it. Now Sue Gray is going to the Chief of Staff for Keir Starmer. He's welcome to her. 

But anyway this blog is intended to be my fight back against all that frustrates and angers me and many like me. I hope that you will join in with me. There will also be a YouTube channel, videos, maybe a podcast and posts galore. I have much to get off my chest. 

The bottom line is that, at present, we are heading towards a Labour win at the next election and that will be a disaster for the country. I will develop this point in my next post. We are all angry and frustrated at the way things are. I know I am. But we have to get out and campaign and get people to listen. It's down to us because we are being let down by the smug party establishment who are resigning themselves to defeat already. The infighting has to stop. There is a message or messages that will resonate with the country. Whether the leadership want to hear it is a different matter. But those of us near the coalface know what needs to be said and what people need to hear. More to come....

 

I'm Back!

 

I'm back! Did you miss me? Don't worry, I'm not offended. For whatever reason my previous blog, sent to the digital graveyard a few years ago, never really took off. I was probably trying too hard. I became a little obsessive over it truth to tell. Less would definitely have been more. 

Lesson learnt. I intend to post less often but to post regularly. It's not as if I lack things to say. And I know many out there agree with me. The title of this blog is deliberate. I'm a Conservative. I'm not ashamed of that even if I am a little ashamed of the party and its leadership right now. 

I know how people feel. I share much of what you feel. But I stood at the recent local elections because I'm a democrat and because I genuinely believe that proper Conservativism is what the country desperately needs. We are just not getting that at the moment from our supposedly Conservative government. At the AGM for West Worcestershire last week there was much anger and irritation expressed. This is intended to express that anger and give full vent to it. But more than that is the start of the fight back. I hope you'll join me.