Opinion
The peasants are revolting! From Hungary to Argentina, the Netherlands to Italy, the hoi polloi are arking up against their self-appointed meritocratic overlords. Urban workers and rural farmers alike are realising that they’re being shafted by the elites, and making common cause.
And the elite don’t like it. All those mucky commoners, spoiling the views on the flight to Davos, or whatever swanky global resort is designated for next year’s climate beano. It’s enough to put one off one’s wagyu and Moet in Business Class.
Which is why you won’t see the lickspittle mainstream media gushing over an “Argentine spring”, much less a British “colour revolution”. But it’s Britain, where Brexit did so much to upset the smug certainties of the Teal elite, that’s ripe for another “populist revolt”.
“Populism”, of course, meaning “popular ideas un-approved by the elite”.
The fault lines in Britain are much the same as across the rest of the Western world, where the political-media-academe elite live in a bubble more plutocratically insular than the court of the Sun King at Versailles.
The country’s political class has failed on all fronts. Almost two decades of ravaging decline has reduced the sixth largest global powerhouse to a “Frankenstein economy”, pock-marked with third-world characteristics: the average Brit’s salary after tax is closer to that of a Puerto Rican than a Swiss citizen. Britain’s macro-plan for surviving in a globalised world – to offset the collapse of manufacturing with cheap-wage service industries reliant on imported labour – has utterly backfired, as voters protest against the resulting, unprecedented migration flows.
And that’s just the legal “migrants”.
Neither major party has a viable plan for deterring illegal migrants from crossing the Channel. Law and order has all but disintegrated, as knife attacks surge and life-scarring crimes like burglary become virtually uninvestigated offenses. This is not to mention the fact that the NHS is approaching a tipping point, whereby it will soon be both unaffordable in its current form and unreformable due to its sheer size and advanced state of decay.
Cue the elite pearl-clutching about “right-wing populism” and many doom-laden intonations of curse-words like “Meloni”, “Wilders”, and “Orban”.
But the detachment of the British political class is so complete that even a so-called “populist” movement like former PM Liz Truss’ Popular Conservatism (PopCons) seems like just another Establishment crony, wearing a forged UKIP button. Even their supposed born-again commitment to border control has a whiff of fakery about it: PopCon head Mark Littlewood is “the former director of a libertarian think tank that has long advocated for relatively relaxed immigration policies”. Before Truss was dumped as PM, she is believed to have plotted an Anthony Albanese-style turbo-charged immigration flood in order to artificially bump growth a point or two per cent.
In any case, the Conservative party in the UK has, like National in NZ, been soaked through by “wets”.
Yet Britain, like much of the West, is fast skidding to a post-Enlightenment tipping point.
In some ways, the challenge facing the West is even more acute than in the 1970s. Economies once threatened by the infiltration of Soviet ideology from without are now being corroded by a “post-growth” mindset from within.
Not to mention a climate-deranged elite fanatically determined to cripple Western industrial society and hand over its hard-earned wealth to the mendicant Third World.
The antidote to all this lies in building sustainable healthcare and pensions systems, while seeking to regain our competitive advantage by excelling in high-value-added industries like tech – a goal that will require the kind of tax cuts and incentives the PopCons and Reform propose, but also infrastructure and skills drives. There is a way to make a populist argument for this. Rather than getting lost in abstract debates about “boosting GDP”, its main stated mission would be to increase real wages through the creation of more high-skill jobs, particularly in northern regions, where cotton mills have been replaced by call centres.
Well, they’re not going to get that from either of the Establishment parties. Having dodged the red bullet at the last election, Brits are apparently ready to throw themselves in front of the firing squad at the next.
The great irony is that, while Britain might be ripe for a political revolution, it is set to elect by a landslide a government even more technocratic, and further away from public opinion in many areas, than the Conservatives. That is a damning indictment not just of the “populist Right”, but of the entire political establishment.
The Telegraph
While Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives might be on the nose, Brits would do well to look to Australia’s folly in 2022. As odious as the Turnbull-Morrison governments may have been, there was always a worse alternative. And Australians duly elected it.
Learn from our mistakes, Britain — because as Australians have found, it can always be worse. A lot, lot worse.