The reason the Conservative Party is dying, is that they have come to believe that their task is to run the Socialist State more efficiently than Labour.
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Samizdata quote of the day – The reason the Conservative Party is dyingApril 16th, 2026 |
 51 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – The reason the Conservative Party is dyingLeave a Reply |
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The reason the Republican Party is dying, is that they have come to believe that their task is to run the Socialist State more efficiently than the Democrats.
It works on this side of the pond, too. At least until the great disrupter came down the escalator.
We can make fun of the triangulation methods of the parties, but doesn’t this really come down to the voters? What good would hard-right candidates do in constituencies that really want free stuff?
The answer is, hard-right candidates cede the district to the hard-lefties. At least a centrist wimp keeps things closer to center than the lefties would.
It’s not the parties or the candidates. It’s the voters. They – we – are too far removed from personal knowledge of what communism really does.
I can’t speak for the USA but in Britain, the Conservatives have consistently lied to voters. Starting with Cameron and ending with Sunak, they have promised lower immigration, a smaller state (eg the promised bonfire of the quangos) and a more business-friendly environment. They lied on all these counts and more.
You might criticise the voters for taking too long to catch on, but they’ve got it now, which is why the Tory vote is disappearing.
It’s so true. The problem is they’re not dying fast enough. The Zombie Conservative Party is in the way of a new party of free enterprise, small state and low taxes. If it was the patriotic party it once was, it would disband.
“Sargon of Akkad”, Carl Benjamin, had made the opposite argument – claiming (in a recent Youtube film) that most Conservative Members of Parliament are “Randian libertarians” (Ayn Rand did not like the word “libertarian” – but let us leave that aside) on economic policy.
I do not think that what Mr Benjamin says is correct, although he does cite an opinion survey to back up his position – but what Steven Barrett says is not correct either.
The post and the comments MISS THE POINT – the point being that it does not matter what Members of Parliament believe (although NO most Conservative Party Members of Parliament do not believe in socialism – the post is not true), what matters is the power of the unelected state.
As former Prime Minister Liz Truss (whose very name has been made a sneer – with an intense agitprop campaign seeking to program people to have a conditioned sneering response whenever her name is mentioned) has pointed out – neither the Conservative Party or the Reform Party (is that what Tom means by a “new part of free enterprise, small state and low taxes”? IF so there is no evidence yet that the Reform Party is anything of the sort) is pledged to get rid of the “independence of the Bank of England”, get rid of the “Office of Budget Responsibility” and all the rest of the power of the unelected state.
Till people suck and Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage understand that the power of the unelected state must be destroyed (“the beast must die”) then we are all wasting our time looking at British politics.
By the way – this does not mean that there are not some dreadful Conservative Members of Parliament – Jeremy Hunt (a former Chancellor) springs to mind. He is not a socialist – but he is not much of a conservative either.
I meant to type “Till people such as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage understand that the power of the unelected state must be destroyed”.
Till they understand that, we are all wasting our time.
“Promising” XYZ policies is pointless – if the real power is in unelected hands, which-it-is.
… the power of the unelected state must be destroyed.
Agreed. But how would that be done? For one thing, the whole of the civil service is unionised. A minister who is dissatisfied with the performance his department is not free to sack those who actively work against his programme (supposing he even has one). It would take one or more acts of Parliament to change the playing field. And while that Act of Parliament was making its way through its three readings the union(s) would almost undoubtedly go on strike in ways calculated to cause the most disruption to the lives of British citizens and to stir up discontent with Parliament and put pressure on MPs to recant.
It would require a government and supporting majority with balls of steel to withstand that and to drive it through Parliament. Unfortunately, we seem to have a predilection for electing invertebrates.
I can tell you all something else that is ‘not correct’. Paul Marks’ repeated claims that the Conservative Party holds conservative values and had conservative policies but were prevented from enacting them by unelected civil servants. They were and are a party of social democrats.
Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak were all in favour of mass third world immigration, but lied to the voters about it. Suella Braverman said in a fairly recent interview that she wanted to restrict numbers but was overruled, not by some mandarin, but by Sunak. Like other Tories he wanted to boost headline GDP by growing the population.
The Tories were 100% in favour of the Net Zero Madness for 99% of their time in office but had a mini-reversal before the 2024 election. I didn’t believe it and, in the unlikely event that they had been re-elected, the lunacy would have continued. Remember Gove fawning over the Swedish Doom Goblin?
The assault on small landlords was started by Osborne and continued by Gove, who continues to spout socialist nonsense as editor of the Spectator. Before taking that job, he wrote a few op-eds for the Times and if I showed you the text and told you Blair or Brown wrote it, you’d be convinced.
The Tory leadership was 100% behind the squandering of £400 billion of borrowed cash during the totalitarian covid period. And solidly behind the totalitarianism too.
The party only took on Brexit because it feared its imminent destruction but the majority of their MPs were against it and remain so.
The civil service may well be powerful and certainly leans left, but civil servants can be overruled. Thatcher managed it well enough.
Was it Evelyn Waugh who said that the problem with the Conservative Party was that they had not turned the clock back by even one day?
The rot runs very deep. Ever since Suez in 1956 the ruling elite in this country have been convinced that we are an irrelevant country which has to subsume itself to something “greater”. Hence the failed attempts to join the EEC in the 1960s, before Edward Heath (a Conservative!) got Britain in, without a referendum, by simply accepting every word of the acquis communautaire. What a statesman.
Even Mrs Thatcher was pro-EEC before she realised it was a racket, at which point the Conservative Party got rid of her. There is no point to this party any more. That much really should be obvious by now.
This truth occurred to me when a leaflet for the Conservative & Unionist candidate dropped through my door recently. He’s basically saying, “Elect me to the Union-weakening assembly and I’ll bolster the socialist system”. Well, no. I want someone to abolish Holyrood and end the socialist system.
“Oh, but we need the votes”. No, you need to be conservative and defend the union. If it costs you votes, so be it. If the founders of UKIP had taken the Tory attitude, they’d never have bothered.
You often say that but no, they are not missing the point, they are just not making the point you want them to make, which is something rather different.
With a Parliamentary majority, all laws can be changed, every institution that opposes the government gutted, it’s leadership replaced or the institution simply abolished. The advice of civil servants can be ignored or better yet they can be fired. The Tories had such a majority and did nothing of the sort. Why? Because many Tory MPs & grandees believe exactly what the quote indicates: their task is to run the Socialist State more efficiently than Labour, not to reassert Parliamentary power to crush the Blob… because they are an integral part of the Blob.
Perry – the post and the comments miss the point, and you know they miss the point.
If Kemi B. and Nigel F. do not commit to taking power away from unelected bodies – then we are all wasting out time.
Marius even thinks that elected politicians made the decisions about Covid – sorry Sir they did NOT.
Still Perry if you want to deal with the post itself – fine.
We do not have a “socialist state” (we have a horrible mess – but it is only half way to socialism)- and Conservative Members of Parliament do not support a “socialist state”.
So the post and the comments in support of the post is-and-are false.
Yet – again, it does not matter if Reform (which sent armed police to the home of a political opponent – on false charges), or Restore, or the Conservatives win – not IF power continues to be in the hands of unelected bodies.
Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe have to work together against the unelected bodies – but even if they do form a real pact, the next General Election is not likely before May 2029 – that is probably too late.
Presently it is academic – as neither Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage have come out against the unelected bodies – I am not sure where Mr Lowe stands on this matter.
USA citizen here.
Libertarians draw only single digits in elections here.
Why? Despite posts and protestations, most voters will settle for the comforting ilusion that their government will take care of them.
Musk and Trump were arguably the two most powerful people on the planet in January 2025. They took on the swamp with DOGE.
Who won? The swamp, of course. Musk was vilified for identifying fraud and waste, but really for forcing too many to confront their inane, illogical convictions.
What can change it? Only a catastrophe, unfortunately.
Economic, political, war, whatever.
As painful as this period is, we haven’t hit bottom yet.
But it’s coming.
“The answer is, hard-right candidates cede the district to the hard-lefties. At least a centrist wimp keeps things closer to center than the lefties would.”
If you are going to have non stop leftist policies you might as well have them good and hard. Then things might go to sh*t fast enough that people might vote for something different. Just allowing the left a default ‘win’ regardless of who is nominally in power isn’t really that much good is it? OK so the ‘right’ win now and again and very slightly reduce the speed of travel leftwards, but the direction is never in doubt. The right constantly trying to just make leftism suck less is pointless. If the electorate want leftism, give it to them good and hard. They need to learn their lesson.
The advantage we (the right) have right now is things are perilously close to the edge. It won’t take much lefty nuttery to push us properly over it. There really isn’t much ruin left in this nation (the UK). An epoch defining national crisis is the only solution that stands a chance of completely redirecting the path of travel. It may not work, but what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn’t worked, and will continue not to either.
Jim: You’re dragging the right very close to the left’s desire to stoke revolution, to tear it all down so that rebuilding may begin. That IS the target on the hard-left side, after all. If it’s to be our target as well, then we’d better be sure that we can win such a conflict. I’m not sure we can, and I cannot equate “patriotism” with an unsupported optimism about it.
If that’s to be our goal, then we have a lot of work to do first. Heck, even Antifa trains.
” You’re dragging the right very close to the left’s desire to stoke revolution, to tear it all down so that rebuilding may begin. ”
Why would the left want to tear down what we have now? Its their creation, they’ve already built it. In the UK we get closer every day to actually Communism. Its only the importing of cheap foreign slaves (sorry, immigrants) and borrowing money off people who think the UK is still a serious country that plans to pay them back that is keeping the show on the road, for the moment. A few more years of this and we too will be Upper Volta with missiles (not that the missiles work, like the USSR, nothing works in 21st century UK).
Paul Marks: Yet – again, it does not matter if Reform (which sent armed police to the home of a political opponent – on false charges), or Restore, or the Conservatives win – not IF power continues to be in the hands of unelected bodies.
But this is the essence of it, Paul. The Conservatives are, were, perhaps the most successful political party in the history of the world precisely because they used to conserve things. But they have given up on that. They do not intend to fight the blob. They are NOT conservative, and therefore the people have decided to cull them and give somebody else a go.
There’s an old book by, I think, L. Sprague de Camp, in which the king is beheaded every 5(?) years and his head hurled at the watching crowd.
Whoever winds up with the head is the new king.
I’m beginning to think it’s a pretty good system, especially if applied to MPs and members of the house of lords as well.
How do we get it started?
Paul Marks continuing the fine Tory tradition of pissing in our pocket and telling us it’s raining. This is why your party is dying and why I will be glad when it’s finally dead.
@Perry de Havilland (Prague)
The advice of civil servants can be ignored or better yet they can be fired.
I’d refer you to a TV series called Yes Minister which suggests that this is not true. Certainly ministers can ignore civil servants advice, but how exactly can they enact the policies without the cooperation of the civil service? And how is legislation to be drafted without the civil servants who write it, or create the regulations that enforce it? They vastly outnumber the politicians, and have spent two hundred years working out how to get it their way. And as to being fired — it is almost impossible to fire civil servants. They delay, delay, obfuscate, mislead, withhold information, overwhelm with information, pit one politician against another. They are masters at getting their own way.
FWIW, it is why I am largely opposed to term limits for politicians. Not because I love politicians at all but because it gives them at least a fighting chance to enact what they promised. As Appleby once said of civil servants and politicians: permeance is power, rotation is castration.
This is a letter from the great Ernest Benn published in The Times on 6 March 1926. This is at a time when there is a Conservative government with a majority of over 200 seats in the House of Commons.
Some explanation is required. The “approved societies” are what is left of the friendly societies after the state decided to muscle in on healthcare and pensions. The BBC is the British Broadcasting Company soon to become the Corporation. Uncle Rex was one of its announcers. Don’t ask me what “fix his pension” refers to, I don’t know. The Food Council bit I think is referring to weights and measures enforcement. A new thing at the time apparently.
He could have gone on. At the time the railways had only recently been “grouped”. This measure also included fare regulation and wage regulation. The coal industry is – unbelievably – being subsidised – 73% of coal is being produced at a loss. The Food Council – as well at the measures stuff – is also setting the price of bread. In London private bus operators are being forced off the road; partly to help the bankrupt trams. And the government has set up a nationalised airline: Imperial Airways. And of course there’s Winston Churchill’s ridiculous and doomed attempt to fix the value of the pound against gold.
You start firing people at the top & keep working down the ladder until you get the result you need.
Frankly an AI can write most legislation & failing that you just do a Dominic Cummings & draft it with your own team people people.
Which is why you use the Parliamentary majority to change whatever laws are required so ministers can simply hire & fire whoever they want for whatever reason they want.
Normally the criticism is the opposite – that most Conservative Members of Parliament have opinions that are far too free market.
The Carl Benjamin style attack (to be fair – backed by an opinion survey) that Conservatives are bad because they are “Randian libertarians”.
This post, and the comments, makes the opposite claim – namely that Conservatives are not too anti statist, but that they are too statist – indeed “socialist”.
But it is all missing-the-point anyway – as the point is that that elected people have little power, for example had the Reform Party been “in government” policy towards Covid (and so on) would have been the-same.
“But Nigel Farage hated lockdowns” – so did Alexander Boris Johnson, and Mr Johnson was still (as Prime Minister) made to enact Covid policies he thought insane (because they were insane) and to make endless statements he did not believe in.
Unless power is taken away from unelected officials and “experts” everything else is a waste of time.
The sheer arrogance of telling me what I know is remarkable. I don’t secretly agree with you & yet say otherwise, I am telling you you are wrong.
The weird argument going on here seems to be:
Optimistic Reformer: a future Reform government with a majority in Parliament needs to attack at the structural level, reshaping or destroying captured institution by changing laws
Pessimistic Realist: It doesn’t matter if Reform wins a majority because the real power is in captured institutions
Optimistic Reformer: That’s why a Reform government needs to reshape or destroy the captured institutions like the civil service and defund assorted NGOs
Pessimistic Realist: But the institutions, the civil service, will not allow that
Optimistic Reformer: Which part of reshape or destroy the captured institutions did you not understand?
Pessimistic Realist: But the institutions, the civil service, will not allow that
Optimistic Reformer: Which part of reshape or destroy the captured institutions did you not understand?
Pessimistic Realist: But the institutions, the civil service, will not allow that
Optimistic Reformer: Which part of reshape or destroy the captured institutions did you not understand?
Pessimistic Realist: But the institutions, the civil service, will not allow that
(loop ad infinitum)
Perry – when is the Reform Party, specifically Mr Yusef and Mr Farage, going to apologize for slandering Mr Lowe (claiming he had senile dementia and other false charges) and for sending armed police to the home of Mr Lowe – because of Mr Yusef’s false claims of death threats.
One should not “SWAT” one’s political opponents – i.e. send armed police to their home in the hope that they will killed in a confrontation, “SWATing” is a bad thing, even if the specific language is different in Britain – as the term “special weapons and tactics team” is not use here.
Turning to policy….
When is the Reform Party going to pledge to get rid of health authorities – whilst they remain in place, more antics like the Covid lockdowns are going to come.
When is the Reform Party going to get rid of the Bank of England? And when is the Reform Party going to get rid of the Office of Budget Responsibility?
“When is Kemi going to get rid if these things Paul?” – yes THAT IS THE POINT, no-one is going get rid of these bodies.
No one – not Kemi, not Nigel, not Rupert, NO-ONE – is going to rid of them.
Now do you understand Perry?
Meanwhile here in North Northamptonshire – the Reform Party Unitary Authority has decided to hand a lot more money to various youth organizations controlled-by-the-left – controlled by people who HATE the Reform Party.
Being “in office” does not mean you are “in power”.
I can guess how that decision was made – the Leadership of the council were given (presented with) the policy, they did not think of it themselves. I know the Reform people “in charge” – they would not have done this – IF they had any real choice.
It was the same with the Conservatives – I know, I was there.
And the Keir Corporation has been given an extension of yet more years on its road contract.
So a fortune will continue to be spent on the roads – and the roads will continue to fall apart.
I do not blame Reform – I know they were not really given any choice about this either.
By the way by “health authorities” I do NOT mean the local health authorities – I mean the various national bodies that make policy.
…and the plebs have become tired of being lied to about immigration by both the Tories and Labour, which is the real point.
I think it’s reasonable to consider the possibility that the executives in ‘captured institutions’ will refuse to follow rules given by legislatures, even if the legislature passes a law saying, ‘Institution A is no longer part of the government, so any rules A has made are void, as are any contracts it has signed. In fact, A actually illegal, so anyone who continues to claim to work for A is to be imprisioned.’ After all, police and military are captureable institutions too.
I have no clue if things truly are that far gone, of course, especially since I’m not in your country. I guess if you wanted to establish that it hasn’t gotten that bad, you’d start by finding cases where it looks like the bureaucracy has completely ignored the law. Next, you’d show that those cases were, in fact, examples of bureaucracy following the legislation, and that the reason it appeared otherwise is because the politicians who wrote the legislation lied about what the legislation said.
Granted, this won’t be conclusive enough to convince anyone convinced otherwise, but it might halt someone from concluding if they’re still undecided.
fred z, “The unbeheaded King”. The best alternative to communism.
!Perry de Havilland (Prague)
You start firing people at the top & keep working down the ladder until you get the result you need.
Two things, first you cannot fire civil servants, it is almost impossible. And second, who are you going to replace them with? Of course you could go for a dramatic reduction in the civil service, which I’d totally be in favor of, but the public would not, because the civil service would make it extremely painful for them. What happens when voters don’t get their benefit checks, or when their schools shut down, or when they can’t get what they need from the DMV, or their pension cheques stop coming and they can’t get anyone on the phone. We see this all the time in the United States where there is a “government shutdown”. As a libertarian I am totally in favor of shutting down as much government as possible, but of course the shut down the part the hurts the most, and the public is not AT ALL in favor of government shutdowns.
Frankly an AI can write most legislation & failing that you just do a Dominic Cummings & draft it with your own team people people.
You’ll find no greater advocate of AI than me, but AI writing legislation? Sorry that’s a bridge to far for me.
Which is why you use the Parliamentary majority to change whatever laws are required so ministers can simply hire & fire whoever they want for whatever reason they want.
You speak as if the civil service would benignly allow that to happen. They would not. They would use their very considerably power both legitimate and illegitimate to prevent that. For example, civil servants see all the shenanigans MPs get up to and would be happy to blackmail them, or alternatively create situations extremely detrimental to an MPs election prospects in other ways. And that is just the illegitimate ways. Legitimately, they will block, delay, manipulate, create higher priority crises and every other maneuver to prevent this specific type of legislation from being passed. I don’t doubt for a second that they’d create a war to prevent this sort of legislation from being passed, and let’s be clear, there is no doubt at all that they could create war if they wanted to.
So I suppose in theory it is possible, in practice all but impossible. The civil service are extremely powerful and have spent two hundred years consolidating that power and getting their tentacles into every nook and cranny of British life. And they will burn it all down rather than give up their power and budgets.
The firing of the unfireable is just a matter of taking pain. Do it and be damned. As Perry says, Heads of Departments first. Why only yesterday the PM fired one such to cover his backside.
And you plan and mark your targets. The recent Brexit palaver and an 80-seat Conservative majority was an open goal for a reorganisation of the Civil Service and a massacre of the quangoes. That’s if the Conservative Party had wanted the change. But it didn’t. And so it must die.
I think nothing of the sort & believe this will require literal force. Civil servants getting fired, judges fired, all manner of people arrested, riots etc. People are getting arrested now for expressing disfavoured opinions, so time for the other side to experience the downside of the rules of engagement they created.
Unless they are idiots, they will pledge nothing of the sort, they will just do it when in office, much the way the current Labour government & previous ‘Conservative’ government did all manner of things that were never in their manifestos.
I have always understood, but that meaning therefore the blob is utterly unbeatable is the essence of our disagreement.
But thanks to Frazer & Paul for giving a perfect example of the exchange I posited in my previous comment 😀
Thought about coldly, the people are in the process of doing to the executive right of UK politics – the Conservative Party in parliament – what it will require the new executive to do to the establishment blob and Civil Service.
Paul:
I do not think that Yusuf and Farage actively “swatted” Lowe. That is part of the standard overreaction of the British police these days. Any allegation which concerns someone who owns guns legally will lead to an unannounced raid by armed police to seize the guns. It makes them feel important. What is unusual in the Lowe case is that he got his guns back when no action was taken against him. Most gun owners who are not MPs find the police refuse to return the guns, and dare you to go to court to make them.
“I think it’s reasonable to consider the possibility that the executives in ‘captured institutions’ will refuse to follow rules given by legislatures, even if the legislature passes a law saying, ‘Institution A is no longer part of the government, so any rules A has made are void, as are any contracts it has signed. In fact, A actually illegal, so anyone who continues to claim to work for A is to be imprisioned.’ After all, police and military are captureable institutions too.”
Which is why my suggestion is not to try to make civil servants enact Reform’s (or any right wing government’s) laws, just to repeal existing laws left right and centre and not replace them with anything else. Just give the power to the people to act as they see fit. Repeal Rent Acts and just let people write their own tenancy contracts. Repeal planning laws and let people build what they want wherever they want. Repeal the Equality Act. Repeal the Climate Change Act. Repeal Net Zero Act. Repeal all charity laws. Repeal employment laws. Ad infinitum. Neither civil servants nor the courts can stop laws being repealed.
This reminds me of the US.establishment narrative that the US is losing the war.
That the US is losing the war against the Iranian regime is, of course, more blatantly false than that DOGE failed.
OTOH, that the US would win quickly against the Iranian regime was, and is, a more reasonable proposition than that DOGE would terminate the Deep State in a matter of months.
If Elon thought that (which i doubt), then his intelligence is no match for his wisdom.
Perry:
Thank you for this. I am going to remember it the next time Paul Marks insists that compatibilists do not really believe that freedom* is compatible with determinism.
* freedom as understood by normal people, and by most serious (and non-German) philosophers; not by cranks.
@Snorri Godhi
This reminds me of the US.establishment narrative that the US is losing the war.
It depends what you mean by “losing”. The US has a pattern of utter military domination and totally failed political follow up. It is why they have consistently lost in the middle east. Did the USA lose in Afghanistan? Certainly, and not because the tribes rose up and defeated them militarily. They were defeated politically with the humiliating spectacle of the mighty US military leaving a howling wasteland of goat hearders with its tail between its legs.
I hope the most recent developments in Iran allow us to get out of there with some decent terms. But Trump is supposed to be a domestic agenda politician, not a foreign policy politician. That’s why I voted for him and why the guy who I loved and placed my hopes in now just grinds my gears. I hope he gets back to doing what he promised, and if so, he’ll have my support again.
OTOH, that the US would win quickly against the Iranian regime was, and is, a more reasonable proposition than that DOGE would terminate the Deep State in a matter of months.
If Elon thought that (which i doubt), then his intelligence is no match for his wisdom.
Musk had to leave when he did because that is what the law required. And to be clear DOGE failed because of Republicans not because of Democrats (who of course did not help.) It is the Republicans and the Tories in Britain who have no interest in a small government sensible soft libertarian plan. Republicans and Tories want massive power and massive budgets just as much as the left. They just figure a different route to that power. As far as I remember the last small government Tory was Maggie, and she is long gone.
Musk himself has declared that the US government is beyond saving, and he should know. However, upside? AI and robotics will probably save the US economy. Britain? Totally f–ked. Net Zero is probably the worst possible policy they could pursue at this time in history. Maybe Nigel can rescind that and that might be enough to save Britain, but there are a lot of people in Britain with a big vested interest in Net Zero, and, to Perry’s point earlier, Farage might have his heart in the right place, but is he willing to burn the whole thing down to bring about his policies? I doubt it. But I’d be happy to be wrong.
DID it???
SHOULD he???
Intelligence is not wisdom.
@Snorri Godhi
DID [DOGE fail]???
Of course it did. The goal was to save between 500 billion and a trillion dollars in the federal budget. It saved basically nothing, it couldn’t even properly close down the appallingly corrupt USAID instead transferring the corruption and waste to the department of state. Instead of saving federal dollars I guarantee you that this year the federal budget will be much larger than it has ever been and the federal workforce notably larger than it has ever been. And the waste and the fraud will go on unabated because nobody cares except for the people pocketing the proceeds. He couldn’t even kick the people who haven’t been born yet, or the people who are 300 years old off the social security system.
SHOULD he [know if the US government can be fixed]??? Intelligence is not wisdom.
Since you aren’t actually offering an argument or data, this is a question of judgement. Musk has created many companies, two gigantic ones that all together are worth perhaps $4 trillion. Musk has also worked at the heart of the federal government with a large team of extremely capable hackers and large amounts of AI from some of the premiere minds on AI in the world with essentially full access to all the government’s computers and data. And his task was essentially to analyze and find out the answer to that question. So I’m going to take his judgement on these matters over “some guy on the internet” any day.
Im around 10 years away from retirement. I bought my own house. Paid a relatively small sum into a private pension for a very long time. State pension us around 12k a year. I understand that you need a pension pot of 200 to 300k to provide that sort of money. People who earn 20 to 30k could never afford to put aside that kind of pot.
I have several great grand parents who died in the workhouse. They worked until they dropped. When you speak against socialism, do want a return to that?
Perry,
While I agree with you in theory, I’m curious about you see that approach working out. Assuming a bill makes it out of the committee stage, there are three readings, passing by the House of Lords, and royal assent. That normally takes months. Yes, there have exceptions when the whole process took only a day. The Royal Abdication Act of 1936 comes to mind. But such speed requires unanimous, or at least near-unanimous, agreement among MPs. Would a bill restricting the powers of the civil service union gain assent from Labour? And in those months what would the civil service do? Would they lie back and wait to see what happens or would they use their not-inconsiderable power to create chaos among the electorate?
You spoke of arrests. That’s a lovely idea, one I’d very much like to see. But on what grounds? What specific charges could be laid? It’s already legal for them to strike, the removal of which should be a first step in reform. Sedition, perhaps? That would be fun, but a bit of a stretch.
When it comes to the use of force, at what point does a government using force to compel its reforms, even ones we’d agree with, become no longer democratic or legitimate? Come to think of it, I wonder whether that’s the difference between Optimistic Reformers and Pessimistic Realists. That the Pessimistic Realists are working within the democratic norms while the Optimistic Reformers are willing to bust the norms down.
It entirely depends on the size of a Reform majority. If large enough, it doesn’t matter what other parties think. That will determine how effectively Reform can use it’s primary advantage: the Tories have a large Blue Blairite wing, Reform does not.
Misappropriation for the most part. Plus those that follow from what I see as the inevitable civil disorder.
Exactly so. And that is an unwinnable battle that will always been fought on ground of the enemy’s choosing. Reform has to be a literal revolutionary party or the blob will simply gum everything up & suffocate them.
@Stuart Noyes
I have several great grand parents who died in the workhouse. They worked until they dropped. When you speak against socialism, do want a return to that?
Add up all the amounts the government took out of your paycheck and the match your employer had to provide for social security or the equivalent in your country. Put it in a spreadsheet over the years of your work and apply the average return on investing in the market, S&P or equivalent in your local market, which is probably about 8% per year. Now take that total and take 8% of it. That is what your pension should have been based on just what the government took from you by force.
For example, if you contributed $2000 a year (remembering that your employer is required to match, so actually $1000 a year from you. or $20 a week), in 45 years that would be three quarter of a million dollars, of which you could withdraw $60,000 a year without decreasing the principal. If you instead actually contributed $20 a week instead of annually, matched by your employer the math would have you with an annual pension of $74,000 a year. Adjust for your local laws and situation.
The government can’t do this because they don’t invest your “pension” money, they steal it and spend it on stuff that gets them votes. These pension schemes are the very definition of a Ponzi scheme where new entrants pay out the old entrants, except it is worse, because the force you under threat of jail to contribute, and its economic viability is based on you dying sooner rather than later — something that is especially troubling in countries where your healthcare is provided by the same people providing your pension.
(BTW if you ask Grok to do the math on this it does it by writing a little python program and executing it. Which I think is incredibly cool.)
One thing is horribly obvious – there is (at least around here) a de facto electoral pact on the left, but not on the right.
In each council by-election around here (not just in Kettering – but near by as well) only one of the leftist parties has a real campaign – in Burton Latimer it was the Liberal Democrats – with the Greens not standing and Labour putting up a paper candidate (no campaign – not even a leaflet).
In the upcoming Kettering Town Council by-election – no Labour candidate, no Liberal Democrat (in spite of their win in Burton) – just a Green to take ALL the left vote.
And what are the Reform Party and the Conservatives doing? No pact at all – going hammer and tongs at each other.
If we carry on like this, without even an unofficial agreement, the right will continue to lose.
Fraser: I am sorry, but you just don’t get it.
Stating that “DOGE failed” implies that DOGE has stopped its operations; which is debatable.
And, _IF_ DOGE stopped operating, then it was doomed to failure from the start, because the Deep State has entrenched itself over more than a century: only a fool could hope to demolish it in less than a year.
To say that Musk thought it possible, implies that Musk is a fool. I don’t think so, but it is the implication of what you are saying.
PS: Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the current Iran war.
This remark made me think and worry.
But now i do not worry anymore: let the military depose a Reform government; then at least the world will realize that the UK is no longer a “constitutional democracy” (or whatever is your fav.label for what people think the UK is, right now).