DOES NATIONAL ‘GET IT’? Or, do National’s electoral strategists still regard the rigid ideological battle-lines of the past 70 years as indispensable and unchangeable? Are Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett watching and learning as Boris Johnson breaks the United Kingdom, or will the old tribal loyalties obscure Dominic Cummings’ revolutionary lessons?
What are these lessons that Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Machiavellian political adviser, is attempting to teach the British prime minister? What does he want him to learn?
The first thing Cummings would have all contemporary conservative leaders learn is how to be radical.
Fewer and fewer people are interested in practical, evidence-based policy. They want to be offered something huge; something dangerous; something absolutely lethal to everything they despise and everyone they hate. They don’t want leaders who are cautious and judicious; leaders who insist on looking before they leap. In their experience it was leaders like that who obliterated their hopes and ruined their lives. What they’re looking for is a leader who will listen to them – not the experts. Someone ready to fight for them – not the elites. Someone willing to die for them – and more!
What else has Brexit ever been but a huge “Fuck you!” to the relentless engines of history? The EU is the only viable option for a post-imperial Britain. “Fuck you!” If you look at the facts, you’ll see how much EU membership benefits the entire British population. “Fuck you!” Far from being a drain on the country’s resources, immigrants from the EU are net contributors to the country’s GDP. “Fuck you! – and fuck them, too!”
When Cummings settled on the “Leave” campaign slogan: “take back control”; he knew exactly how his target audiences would finish the rest of the sentence. Take back control from the immigrants! Take back control from the posh gits peddling ‘Project Fear’! Take back control from all those bastards who look down their noses at us and sneer at our values!
Johnson seems to get it. Why else would he be framing the looming snap election as “The People versus Parliament”? Consider what that might mean for the future of parliamentary democracy in the UK. What sort of parliament would be acceptable to an electorate which had just returned Boris Johnson and his purged Conservative party with a thumping majority in the House of Commons? The frighteningly obvious answer is: a parliament content to be the Executive’s unquestioning servant. A parliament content to be Boris’s rubber-stamp.
The old divisions: city versus country; lord versus commoner; proletarian versus bourgeois; none of these matter anymore. The only divisions that still matter in the rich western nations of the twenty-first century are the divisions separating dumb from smart; young from old; white from black; the people impelled by dreams, from the people comforted by memories. These are the hardest human divisions to bridge. Electoral victory is much more readily achieved by exploiting and exacerbating the conditions which drive voters apart than by searching for the issues that draw them together.
So, do Simon and Paula get it? Will they, like Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, announce “the end of austerity” and loosen the purse-strings for more spending on police, schools and the NHS? Or, to put the question into a New Zealand context, stop worrying about the “debt burden” and declare National’s intention to spend like a sailor on shore leave?
Will they promise to employ and house the young and the dumb? Will they boost the pensions of the elderly, and give the beneficiary a fistful of extra dollars to spend? More importantly, will they demonise all those who insist that what they’re proposing to do is reckless and wrong – concocting a story about a narrow but powerful layer of the population who have grown fat by emaciating the hopes and aspirations of everyone else? Will they declare all-out war against the ones who got there first? The ones who pulled up the ladder after them? The ones who, forgetting all the things they had and did, are forever telling the next generation what they can’t have – what they can’t do?
Can they be so radical? Dare they promise to take back control? From the politically correct? From the Climate Change alarmists? From the Treaty fanatics? From the batshit craziness and impotence of MMP? From powerlessness in general? Can they think that far outside the box?
Because, if they can’t learn and accept the Gospel According to Dominic Cummings, there are plenty of others who can. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
