Reform & Reclaim: The Lion Takes a Stroll
Laurence Fox is on his way to becoming a man of history, if he can build an alliance with numbers and a structured ideology. The UK may be led by Prime Minister, but it follows Nigel Farage. Both men have realised there is a huge population of classical British liberals - disaffected conservatives and libertarians - who are politically homeless.
Announcing: The Reclaim Party
This month, Fox lived up to his promise and launched the Reclaim Party - albeit in modest terms - with a rather magnificent speech.
In September, he announced he was launching a party to fight the so-called "Culture Wars" with a £5million war chest from Tory donors, including Jeremy Hosking.: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/26/laurence-fox-launching-new-political-party-fight-culture-wars/.
It's 3 objectives are:
- "to promote an open space through full protection of the fundamental freedoms of speech, expression, thought, association and academic inquiry. To stand in full opposition to laws and other measures which undermine those freedoms".
- "to reform publicly funded, controlled and operated institutions to ensure that they deliver on their primary purpose, free from political bias or agendas beyond their scope."
- "to preserve and celebrate our shared national history, cultural inheritance and global contribution."
Well now, we all know a few types who aren't going to be happy about that; the ones who have spent so much time trying to do the opposite.
It's important to choose your enemies, and he's pissing off all the right people in advance of the inevitable "cut n' paste quotation" smear campaigns:
- Woke Fundamentalists
- Anonymous Twitter accounts
- Anonymous Westminster "sources"
- The Guardian
- Metro
- Piers Morgan
- Left-wing digital blogs
- BBC apparatchiks
- NHS fundamentalists
- Social science "academics"
One of its promises is to enact legal protections for freedom of speech as proposed by the Adam Smith Institute.
"The UK Free Speech Act should be modelled on the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and relevant jurisprudence that protects all political speech from state interference unless it is part of longstanding categories of low value speech which are not protected anywhere in the world (such as criminal threatening, harassment, malicious defamation, perverting the course of justice, or perjury) or is direct incitement, i.e. a statement which is directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
https://www.adamsmith.org/research/sense-and-sensitivity-restoring-free-speech-in-the-united-kingdom
https://www.adamsmith.org/s/Sense-and-sensitivity-Preston-J-Byrne-Final.pdf
That alone is one of the most beautiful things to happen to British politics in years.
Considering: The Brexit (Reform) Party
In November, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice sniffed blood in the Boris Johnson camp after the departure of arch-villain Dominic Cummings and relaunched a renamed Brexit Party as Reform UK.
https://www.thebrexitparty.org/reformuk/
After packed conventions and a stunning sweep in the European Elections, the failed to win a single seat in the UK General Election, by committing electoral suicide, and for the same reason as any new party has failed any time it has tried in a hundred years: the FPTP system. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/01/relaunching-brexit-party-fight-cruel-unnecessary-lockdown/
Its objectives are, roughly-speaking:
- Adopting the Great Barrington Declaration about Covid-19: https://gbdeclaration.org/
- Dealing with "Badly run, wasteful quangos" and a "waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash".
- Dealing with "cronyism";
- Cancelling HS2;
- Cancelling 50% of the foreign aid budget;
- And so on.
And of course, we all know a few people who won't beb happy with their pro-business belt-tightened ideas either. The people who want to spend a lot of money and make everyone dependent on government as their entire life focus.
They too are pissing off all the right people, and are well-versed in the inevitable "cut n' paste quotation" smear campaigns:
- Woke Fundamentalists
- Anonymous Twitter accounts
- Anonymous Westminster "sources"
- "Hope Not Hate" (Extreme-Left Searchlight Magazine)
- The Guardian
- Evening Standard
- Left-wing digital blogs
- Far-Left think-tanks
- Labour MPs
- Far-Right UKIP dissidents
How exactly these two are going to cannibalise the conservative vote is anyone's guess, but without an electoral pact it's going to be difficult to see how they break the mould.
20 Building Blocks For A Revolution
Unlike certain authors at the Spectator whose entire argument is nobody should even try to usurp the current order if they believe they have no chance in the first place, the battle is in the hearts and minds of the electorate and their perceptions around tactical voting.
To win, these parties need numbers. And seriousness. And commitment. And smooth presentation.
1. Housing. Housing. And Again, Housing.
Marxism is always correlated with economic disparity. Generation Rent can't afford to buy a house or even see the housing ladder, and as a result aren't going to be fans of capitalism. The resentful activist cancel culture followed the Housing Crisis Recession of 2008, which created the Occupy Movement, which created the Extinction Rebellion Movement, which created, ad nauseam.
Property keeps on going up and up in price with age. It's an intractable problem which needs a clever mathematical solution which is compatible with free markets.
2. Acknowledge and Confront the New Trenches: Individual vs Collective
Exponential population increase and economic gerrymandering has concentrated people into cities, who, as would be expected, tend to make decisions collectively. Conversely, those in rural and suburban areas who live at distance from one another, tend to view the world individualistically. After 60 years of radicalism, the battle lines are less tradition vs reform, and now about me vs them.
A philosophical mechanism is needed which counter-balances the collective decision-making desires of those in densely populated areas legal rights in favour of the Individual.
3. Bring Back Intellectual Powerhousing For A New Age of Ideas
Movements need an intellectual backbone which is clearly defined. The Bible gave us moral fabric; Athens gave us Democracy; the legal system gave us the Individual; John Stuart Mill gave us the basis for Freedom of Speech; Darwin gave Biology; Adam Smith gave us Economics and Free Markets.
Who will help us decide the limits computer algorithms should have in our lives; how we should optimise the Pareto Frontier; how we can create unlimited free energy; or even how we implement cryptographic digital consensus?
4. Define When The Wings Go Too Far
We know when the Right goes too far: racial superiority. When this line is crossed, the conversation ends. If someone you are talking to claims they are neo-Nazi, the reaction is condemnation. Both sides exceed their mandate when they refuse to respect the need to achieve consensus and advocate their demands be enforced unilaterally.
There is no such line for the Left, despite 100 million being killed through their policies. If someone you are talking to claims they are a communist, the reaction is they must have "good intent" or be an idealist.
The line where the conversation ends is Equality of Outcome.
5. Confront the Supplanting of Life Meaning With Political Radicalism
As Douglas Murray points out, 2-3 whole generations have been left with a nihilistic sense of meaningless, impotence, and purposelessness. Rights without responsibility. A generation of 60s Boomer professors has foolishly inculcated resentful "activism" and "revolution" as life's entire meaning. The effects of decades of disparaging religion in favour of secular humanism has culminated in fundamentalist religious cult behaviour in our politics and culture.
Define a set of 100 open scientific and economic problems for these lost generations to solve. Tell them what they are, and what to build.
6. Acknowledge and Confront the Sense of Demoralisation Since WWII
Farage is often heard saying he desires the country "get its confidence back". However we ignore the conscious effort by specific groups and individuals to undermine that recovery, and the effects of neglect. Particularly malicious is the decades-long program of deliberately stigmatising a "Black Legend" of Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend .
People want to love their country and be proud of it. Give them the freedom to be unapologetic about it.
7. Set Out A New Vision of the 21st Century For Our Country
It's not enough to be against something. You need to excite people with a new world they can imagine and pursue which gives them hope as they escape the old. Without vision, the people perish; the culture perishes; our laurels can only be sat on for so long. Is it space? The oceans? An International British Federation? Free energy? A new Constitution?
The Imaginnaires and artists need to be inspired. Inspire them.
8. Acknowledge and Confront the 1994 Betrayal of Our Country
Our country was sold out and put under the political control of another country - the EU - by treaties secretly signed by Prime Ministers in 1994 and 2007; neither of which had our consent. The British people had their say 22 years later when they thought it we wouldn't care anymore. The wounds of that treachery will burn for many generations to come.
Provide new legislation which prohibits any public officer from making any agreement which places the country under the political control of any other organisation or country, with criminal penalties.
9. Attack the Scaling Problem
The British are without question the greatest innovators in history. Perhaps not now, where we are beaten by Israel, the US, etc, but historically speaking, we are extraordinarily productive inventors. What we lack is the ability to scale our markets globally, unlike the days of the Empire. The US, for example, has 50 countries-in-a-country which provide a continent to expand into.
Make the whole UK - and all 14 countries" - a "free port". Business has ideas.
10. Attack the Disposable Income / Social Mobility Problem
No matter how much you earn in the UK, your bills comes to 120% of it. Nobody has money to be someone else's customer. It's hard to get rich. Hundreds on a "TV licence", 40% of your paycheck gone without choice, 15% sales tax, business rates, it never ends. People need money to spend to become other people's customers. When an individual is forced to give the State more than 50% of any capital they have, they can't create new wealth.
Everyone wants to get rich. Stop treating it as if it's a stigma. Make it easy.
11. Acknowledge and Confront the Evil Rising in the East
China is not our friend. They run concentration camps, surveil their people, enforce breeding patterns, unleash diseases which destroy livelihoods, annexed Hong Kong, threaten Taiwan, predatorially trap old British colonies into debt slavery, steal our intellectual property, undermine our allies, subvert our universities with Confucius institutes, astroturf our social media, and attempt to admonish us in public.
Get China out of our infrastructure and prosecute politicians who give them safe harbour. We've beaten them twice; let's beat them again.
12. Acknowledge and Confront How Globalism Disenfranchises Ordinary People
Trump and Brexit weren't about populism, nationalism, or the rise of autocratic dictators. Nor is opposition to vaccines or resistance to reasonable ideas. Unaccountable global organisations - the UK, World Bank, World Health Organisation, World Trade Organisation etc - are now so high in political control and so far in political distance from the ordinary voter they have become subjugators of them. Our flaccid politicians take their orders from people we cannot remove.
Take us out of global or supra-national organisations until they have been de-politicised and reformed. We do not need the WTO to trade.
13. Deal With the Politicisation of the Military and Police
Both organisations have themselves been warning politicians of the grave folly of various polices such as elected police commissioners and "diversity training" for years. Since 2012 when they were enacted by political busybodies with no other ideas, both has become hopelessly politicised - exactly as they claimed it would. The chief of the Met is currently an anti-Brexit lesbian who ordered the shooting of Menezes and sends officers to investigate "transphobic" tweets.
Root and branch. Get rid of it. We do not need officers inspecting pubs or patrolling for "cultural offenses".
14. Acknowledge and Confront the Indoctrination Crisis in Education
Despite the "indoctrination" provision of the Education Act, our schools, colleges, universities, and educational authorities are now almost entirely populated by social "science" graduates steeped in Marxist ideology (Critical Pedagogy etc) who openly publish their intentions to operate their classrooms as training camps for manufacturing socialist revolutionaries. Science teachers should not be teaching there are "many" genders, or radical "feminist orthodoxy".
Children are being disciplined for opposing their prescribed "curriculum".
We need a top-down re-write of our entire education system. After 42 attempts and 100 million deaths, Marxist-inspired material is as unacceptable as Nazism, and there is no "democratic" socialism.
15. Acknowledge and Confront the Malignant Turn of the Humanities
It's not just the "pitifully derivative" US-inspired antics of radicalised students characterised by Richard Dawkins, the fraudulent journal publications, or the championing of bizarre puberty-blocking medications. The explosion in worthless degrees based on Marxist Critical Theory (anything with "Studies" at the end) has devalued, debased, and politically corrupted our academic institutions. There is little to no material in the social "sciences" which has any basis in reality nor contributes to our economy or culture.
Get tough: declare a moratorium on all public funding to the social "sciences" for 25 years. Let them pay for it privately.
16. Acknowledge the Need for Revamped Treason & Sedition Laws
A little-known fact is in 2009, sedition, seditious libel, and defamatory libel were all abolished in the UK by the socialist Labour party. Approximately 600 UK citizens traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS. And look where we are now. People attacking the Cenotaph. Seditious conspiracy is archaic, but it provides a useful bulwark of deterrence of people who want to harm our country.
Confront the central seditious thesis of Marxism and deal with Jihadism. It's not enough to pretend it doesn't happen.
17. Acknowledge and Confront Millenarian Environmentalism
A few bored members of our Royal Family - including the King-in-Waiting have a fetish for endorsing fringe environmental ideas and political movements like the "Great Reset" that provide intellectual fodder for cult organisations such as "Rising Up" and "Extinction Rebellion" our press have called a "Millenarian death cult": https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/10/08/extinction-rebellions-antics-not-irresponsible-have-hallmarks/ .
Keep the Royals out of politics and for the love of God, discipline Harry.
18. Acknowledge and Confront Addictive Technology Design
Social media websites are built upon behavioural conditioning techniques designed at Stanford University. Those in turn are derived from malignant use of psychological studies (e.g. Skinner's Operant Conditioning Chamber) which were used to design the casinos of Las Vegas. Californian technology companies have merged the science of addiction into their products.
Children are not allowed to gamble. It's time to make social media over-18s only.
19. Provide Legal Defences Against Cancel Culture
State military apparatuses all now have offensive astroturfing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing) units formed with the purpose of manipulating public opinion in their adversaries' societies, which includes divisiveness, and the "chilling effect" of silencing people through mob tactics. Anyone can lose their job through their employer being intimidated by a mob harassment campaign of anonymous accounts. What was extreme in the 70s is now mainstream.
It's time for laws criminalising "deplatforming" and/or firing employees who are victims of mob harassment.
20. Deal With Sir Humphrey and the Civil Service Shadow Government
We all know their tricks and their "house-training" tactics of rotating politicians, as well as their cynical "impartiality", intrigue campaigns to expel disruptors like Cummings (who described them as "Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers"), and their ever-increasing list of useless government departments who spend billions on stationery orders and "fact-finding" trips to the Caribbean. MI6 does not need "LGBT clubs".
Don't apologise for shut tingdown quangos and useless departments. It's time to replace the Civil Service with something better.
The Era of Wasting Time Has to Come to an End
Our greatest minds are currently spending all their time and cognitive energy on de-radicalising our stupidest and most resentful citizens, by explaining to them that the distinctions of male and female exist in reality. Our greatest artists spend their time hiding from online mobs who don't want to be upset by them.
China is switching on an "artificial sun" fusion reactor, scraping moon particles, developing a quantum computer which is 100 trillion faster than our quickest super-computer. The ideas for most of which they stole from us.
As we all police each other for not wearing face diapers to survive a disease with a 99.997% success rate, discuss expropriating other people's property and prescribing puberty blockers to children we booked drag queens for in open parliaments, as it's all watched by activists streaming it live on iPhones protesting capitalism.
This has been going on since the socialist governments of the 60s, who bought us the Winter of Discontent, the dissolution of the world's broadest empire, near-bankruptcy, and eventually, the outright sale of the country itself.
The price we pay for spinning our wheels on stupidity is progress: we all share misery and frustration in equal measure; a perfectly socialist notion. No-one should have happiness or success over any other, even if it means immiserating absolutely everyone in the process.
Our new political parties need to bring with them a new culture, which Fox gets it entirely right, and Farage misses.
What they both forgot is a new vision.