I just came across your substack through Matt Goodwin's latest piece. Absolutely love what you have to say. As a former idealistic leftie, I am now politically homeless. As many people have said 'I didn't leave the left, the left left me!' I now live in Hungary and despite all the bad press about this place, and our populist PM, I can tell you it is nothing like the MSM make it out to be. It's the safest, friendliest and most socially harmonious place I've ever lived in. Hungarians are unashamed to prioritise their country, traditions, family and value education, hard work, and social mobility. What's more, we've been mostly insulated from Wokemania here in Hungary, especially since Hungarians my age and older really do remember when words were policed and people reported on.
Great piece that comes eloquently from your own background.
Interesting to highlight the lack of connection between the 2 main parties and the 'working class'. My own view is that this disconnect is not because of a lack of interest but a lack of definition of who stands behind this label. I would suggest that the 'working class' as a label is hopelessly out of date to the point of being almost meaningless.
If I can find the time, I may start my own Substack to explore this idea. In the meantime, good luck with your writing. BW Phil
I suspect I would have been a traditional Labour voter - after all they were founded to represent the working class. But they’d vacated that stage before I could vote. I’ve spent my adult life voting either abstaining or when forced to because the alternative was even worse, voting for the lesser of two evils. A party that offered the wish list you give would get my vote as a positive thing. I see the word “Populist” as being used by our elites to tarnish the reasonable desires of the majority with the unreasonable prejudices of the extremes, in order to discredit the former. Parties such as Reform are essentially used as protest vehicles to try to drag one of the two main parties towards a particular stance. No one is actually making an offering that would have appeal to the majority of the public. Given the current power that the elites wield across most of the institutions in the UK, they probably don’t think they need to, but in doing so, they are creating a political vacuum that will eventually be filled. My fear would be by what.
Meanwhile across the pond. . . Exact same issues. Do you ever wonder if the covid virus or perhaps the mandated vaccine included a virus that caused mental dysphoria of sheeplike symptoms for some and authoritarianism for government officials?
A dose of 'populism' is, as you say, overdue. Someone I read recently described the Tory Party as "Left Liberalism with a slight time delay". That, for me anyway, pretty well sums up their record in office both before Thatcher and since Thatcher. Both they and Labour (when they have held office) have been a kind of monocultural party serving the perceived interests of an ever growing 'socially liberal' and 'economically liberal', university-educated section of society. Serving the interests of anyone else has largely been confined to disingenuous sloganising and platitudes.
I like Mr Clouston but his party is just too small to make any inroads. They've got a working arrangement with Reform UK who are much bigger and are capable of having candidates everywhere. The SDP's PR is poor they need Reform to give them a leg up.
I'll be voting Reform as they're bigger and could have a greater impact but I suspect it'll be the disaffected Tories in 2024 closely followed by disaffected Labour by 2026/27. The election 2028 with PR in place might be exciting.
I’m catching up on my Low Status Opinions. You are a great writer and I find you challenging because I disagree with you so much. You are making me think.
I made plans to leave the USA after 25 years because they elected a populist president who is a charlatan and a malevolent conman. His toilets are made of gold. Trump is who I think of when you say we should vote for populists. Berlusconi, maybe. Or Erdoğan. Mussolini, perhaps. I cannot imagine voting for any of those people. And yet, your list of populist policies that regular people might vote for are appealing to me. Am I regular people? But I think the NHS and the BBC are both national treasures that have become tarnished in recent years and they are under attack from people who you would probably think of as populists. I would like to restore the NHS and the BBC to their former glory. Am I regular people yet?
I mentioned on another post that I think we came out of WW1 with a particular alignment. We did away with the aristocrats (at last!) and politics divided us roughly into rich and poor, officers and privates, people who owned their houses and people who lived in council houses, people who owned factories and people who worked in factories. For all those dichotomies, you belonged to one team but not the other and you voted Tory or Labour. That all changed after Thatcher and Blair and we never figured out the categories to replace them. We don’t have a new alignment.
Regular people go to university these days and they own their own houses. They also leave school at 18 and they rent shared houses because they can’t afford to buy. One of the richest men in the world owns 100s of newspapers and the most popular TV stations in America. He is a populist and all of his newspapers supported the War in Iraq (coincidence, no doubt). Another populist calls himself a Viscount and his newspapers tells constant lies on the front page. It seems like many of the populist politicians went to Eton or Winchester or Dulwich College. I think of them the way I think of Trump and Berlusconi. All these populist leaders seem to be billionaires and I think they are pulling a fast one. I don’t think these populist leaders are regular people but I think they have figured out a way to con regular people into supporting them.
The alignment that seemed to divide us recently was Brexit but my hunch is that the vast majority were casting protest votes against the awful state of our politics. Sure, there are plenty of sincere and thoughtful Brexit voters like Mr LSO but there were a lot more who were just fed up with status quo. I barely missed the Brexit vote so I missed all the arguments for it. I still barely understand it despite reading several books on it (I recommend Professor Tombs’). From my point of view, the Brexit campaign was the worst kind of populist campaign. Brexit was going to save us from all those Muslim refugees and immigrants but Brexit did the opposite and immigration went up and Muslim immigration went up and refugee arrivals went up under the watchful eye of the populists who campaigned for Brexit. We have a billionaire prime minister now but it’s the other people that we accuse Of being elite.
A final thought. I am a patriotic Englishman. I served in the military. When America elected a charlatan, all I wanted was to come home to my country - Brexit and all. I crossed the class line when I was promoted to officer, when I bought my own house, when I worked on Wall Street and now I’m studying for a degree. But that line doesn’t exist any more and we haven’t yet figured out where to draw the new line yet. One thing I am sure of: it’s not populists vs elites. Not when the populists are billionaires and politicians who went to Eton and Australians who own all the media (except the paper owned by a Viscount). Those people are conmen.
I’m a member of the SDP. So appreciate you mentioning the party.
You’ve written a great article of which I agree with. I’m commenting here after your reply to Matt Goodwin’s article on 31st August 2023.
It really is desperation stakes for this country and like you see only one of the smaller cultural conservative parties who have the policies we could support. Most people are sleep walking into a despotic future, where like in the Soviet Union there’ll be different levels of truth you’ll have to juggle. Worst case the real truth will be in your mind only, which you dear not mention even in your own home. A truly sad and frightening state of affairs.
Dominic Frisby is a genius. I thoroughly recommend his books 'Daylight Robbery' (re taxation) and 'Life After The State'. He is so right: the State is now humongous; it taxes more, borrows more, prints more (money) and spends more. And everything is worse. But it's difficult to see what catalyst will enable change where (as of 2022) 54% of adults in the UK take more from the State than they give. That's an awful lot of people with a stake in the status quo.
Tories slid into the void created by leftward lurch of Labour party (after changing their internal voting system). Starmer appears to be reclaiming that void but Tories have not, correspondingly, moved back to home turf. That'll take a dose of Labour government to effect.
So true and so amusingly expressed, I laughed out loud. Even though the future looks very unfunny.
I just came across your substack through Matt Goodwin's latest piece. Absolutely love what you have to say. As a former idealistic leftie, I am now politically homeless. As many people have said 'I didn't leave the left, the left left me!' I now live in Hungary and despite all the bad press about this place, and our populist PM, I can tell you it is nothing like the MSM make it out to be. It's the safest, friendliest and most socially harmonious place I've ever lived in. Hungarians are unashamed to prioritise their country, traditions, family and value education, hard work, and social mobility. What's more, we've been mostly insulated from Wokemania here in Hungary, especially since Hungarians my age and older really do remember when words were policed and people reported on.
Great piece that comes eloquently from your own background.
Interesting to highlight the lack of connection between the 2 main parties and the 'working class'. My own view is that this disconnect is not because of a lack of interest but a lack of definition of who stands behind this label. I would suggest that the 'working class' as a label is hopelessly out of date to the point of being almost meaningless.
If I can find the time, I may start my own Substack to explore this idea. In the meantime, good luck with your writing. BW Phil
I suspect I would have been a traditional Labour voter - after all they were founded to represent the working class. But they’d vacated that stage before I could vote. I’ve spent my adult life voting either abstaining or when forced to because the alternative was even worse, voting for the lesser of two evils. A party that offered the wish list you give would get my vote as a positive thing. I see the word “Populist” as being used by our elites to tarnish the reasonable desires of the majority with the unreasonable prejudices of the extremes, in order to discredit the former. Parties such as Reform are essentially used as protest vehicles to try to drag one of the two main parties towards a particular stance. No one is actually making an offering that would have appeal to the majority of the public. Given the current power that the elites wield across most of the institutions in the UK, they probably don’t think they need to, but in doing so, they are creating a political vacuum that will eventually be filled. My fear would be by what.
Interesting (i.e. bizarre and insane) article in today's Financial Times, by notorious Janen Ganesh. "Don’t blame the elites alone for populism".
Their deplorable Populism is the rabble's own fault, don't you see.
Meanwhile across the pond. . . Exact same issues. Do you ever wonder if the covid virus or perhaps the mandated vaccine included a virus that caused mental dysphoria of sheeplike symptoms for some and authoritarianism for government officials?
Good article Dominic. Any party promising to bring back the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy gets my vote.
A dose of 'populism' is, as you say, overdue. Someone I read recently described the Tory Party as "Left Liberalism with a slight time delay". That, for me anyway, pretty well sums up their record in office both before Thatcher and since Thatcher. Both they and Labour (when they have held office) have been a kind of monocultural party serving the perceived interests of an ever growing 'socially liberal' and 'economically liberal', university-educated section of society. Serving the interests of anyone else has largely been confined to disingenuous sloganising and platitudes.
I like Mr Clouston but his party is just too small to make any inroads. They've got a working arrangement with Reform UK who are much bigger and are capable of having candidates everywhere. The SDP's PR is poor they need Reform to give them a leg up.
I'll be voting Reform as they're bigger and could have a greater impact but I suspect it'll be the disaffected Tories in 2024 closely followed by disaffected Labour by 2026/27. The election 2028 with PR in place might be exciting.
I’m catching up on my Low Status Opinions. You are a great writer and I find you challenging because I disagree with you so much. You are making me think.
I made plans to leave the USA after 25 years because they elected a populist president who is a charlatan and a malevolent conman. His toilets are made of gold. Trump is who I think of when you say we should vote for populists. Berlusconi, maybe. Or Erdoğan. Mussolini, perhaps. I cannot imagine voting for any of those people. And yet, your list of populist policies that regular people might vote for are appealing to me. Am I regular people? But I think the NHS and the BBC are both national treasures that have become tarnished in recent years and they are under attack from people who you would probably think of as populists. I would like to restore the NHS and the BBC to their former glory. Am I regular people yet?
I mentioned on another post that I think we came out of WW1 with a particular alignment. We did away with the aristocrats (at last!) and politics divided us roughly into rich and poor, officers and privates, people who owned their houses and people who lived in council houses, people who owned factories and people who worked in factories. For all those dichotomies, you belonged to one team but not the other and you voted Tory or Labour. That all changed after Thatcher and Blair and we never figured out the categories to replace them. We don’t have a new alignment.
Regular people go to university these days and they own their own houses. They also leave school at 18 and they rent shared houses because they can’t afford to buy. One of the richest men in the world owns 100s of newspapers and the most popular TV stations in America. He is a populist and all of his newspapers supported the War in Iraq (coincidence, no doubt). Another populist calls himself a Viscount and his newspapers tells constant lies on the front page. It seems like many of the populist politicians went to Eton or Winchester or Dulwich College. I think of them the way I think of Trump and Berlusconi. All these populist leaders seem to be billionaires and I think they are pulling a fast one. I don’t think these populist leaders are regular people but I think they have figured out a way to con regular people into supporting them.
The alignment that seemed to divide us recently was Brexit but my hunch is that the vast majority were casting protest votes against the awful state of our politics. Sure, there are plenty of sincere and thoughtful Brexit voters like Mr LSO but there were a lot more who were just fed up with status quo. I barely missed the Brexit vote so I missed all the arguments for it. I still barely understand it despite reading several books on it (I recommend Professor Tombs’). From my point of view, the Brexit campaign was the worst kind of populist campaign. Brexit was going to save us from all those Muslim refugees and immigrants but Brexit did the opposite and immigration went up and Muslim immigration went up and refugee arrivals went up under the watchful eye of the populists who campaigned for Brexit. We have a billionaire prime minister now but it’s the other people that we accuse Of being elite.
A final thought. I am a patriotic Englishman. I served in the military. When America elected a charlatan, all I wanted was to come home to my country - Brexit and all. I crossed the class line when I was promoted to officer, when I bought my own house, when I worked on Wall Street and now I’m studying for a degree. But that line doesn’t exist any more and we haven’t yet figured out where to draw the new line yet. One thing I am sure of: it’s not populists vs elites. Not when the populists are billionaires and politicians who went to Eton and Australians who own all the media (except the paper owned by a Viscount). Those people are conmen.
I’m a member of the SDP. So appreciate you mentioning the party.
You’ve written a great article of which I agree with. I’m commenting here after your reply to Matt Goodwin’s article on 31st August 2023.
It really is desperation stakes for this country and like you see only one of the smaller cultural conservative parties who have the policies we could support. Most people are sleep walking into a despotic future, where like in the Soviet Union there’ll be different levels of truth you’ll have to juggle. Worst case the real truth will be in your mind only, which you dear not mention even in your own home. A truly sad and frightening state of affairs.
Happy to subscribe and support. 👍🏻
Excellent article Thank You. I agres that the SDP is the onlyknly party wothey
Dominic Frisby is a genius. I thoroughly recommend his books 'Daylight Robbery' (re taxation) and 'Life After The State'. He is so right: the State is now humongous; it taxes more, borrows more, prints more (money) and spends more. And everything is worse. But it's difficult to see what catalyst will enable change where (as of 2022) 54% of adults in the UK take more from the State than they give. That's an awful lot of people with a stake in the status quo.
Tories slid into the void created by leftward lurch of Labour party (after changing their internal voting system). Starmer appears to be reclaiming that void but Tories have not, correspondingly, moved back to home turf. That'll take a dose of Labour government to effect.