Saturday 27 May 2023

Shifting to the right

Brexit is the child of nationalism, or perhaps it’s the other way round. Either way, the two are closely connected as we saw from the National Conservatism conference the other week, sponsored by the right-wing US think tank, The Edmund Burke Society, and the sort of British attendees. They were all the most ardent Brexit supporters. Brexit couldn’t have emerged from the left. No Labour leader, not even Corbyn, could have proposed it and hope to survive. 

So, as the project is seen to be failing, we shouldn’t be surprised that the result is a shift even further to the right among Conservatives. It’s perhaps a natural first reaction.

When you’re driving a nail into a piece of hardwood if a few light taps don’t succeed, you tend to apply more force, and then even more, until you do or the nail bends. 

Brexiteers are divided among themselves about what comes next, but they all seem to be in favour of a mass scrapping of regulations (albeit they still don’t specify which ones) and slashing taxes, anything that might give us a competitive advantage. It makes a nonsense of course, of all the talk about sovereignty being the goal when clearly the objective is to boost output and productivity. 

Somebody named Fred de Fossard (never heard of him) in The Telegraph argues that by now we should have seen a "wave of reforms" so that we could "gain immediate benefits from Brexit, ranging from financial services to medicines regulation and gene editing" and that "Britain was going to pursue a policy of competitive divergence, finding advantages in a more nimble and flexible economy, able to combine regulatory reform with the world’s most ambitious trade policy."

That we aren't doing any of it is the government "making the remainer's case for them."

What’s preventing the government from diverging is the certain knowledge that ditching key pieces of EU law will only make matters far worse and not better. So, other Brexiteers have taken to blaming the Blob or even the Woke Blob. Allister Heath, also in The Telegraph, writes that: The woke blob is about to achieve its greatest triumph: its final takeover of Britain.

Britain according to his doctrine is virtually ungovernable. The civil service is giving "odious briefings" and "targeted leaks" to make trouble and work in opposition to "the government’s own policies on immigration, Brexit and tax: who do these people think they are?"

But he also says our "Civil Service and technocracy has been overrated for decades, if not generations, but the average calibre of Whitehall and quango staff has drastically declined over the past 20 years."

None of this is new. However, what’s striking about the piece is his proposed solution: this is the ultra-conservative American politician and 'culture warrior' Ron De Santis. 

Heath says:

"One man who gets it, and who has shown how centre-Right politicians can defy the Blob, is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, who is declaring his candidacy for the Republican nomination for US president.

"As it immediately became obvious when I interviewed him, he is pioneering a new, more robust form of conservatism that recognises that winning elections and then tweaking a few laws isn’t enough to truly make a difference. Trump tried that, and shouted loudly, but achieved little. The Left has changed the rules of the game, and the Right must adapt or die. It has now become essential to reverse the Left-wing capture of public and private institutions to truly shift the culture in a more conservative direction."

De Santis is said to have 'targeted' immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, Black Americans, and women and one Democrat, Maxwell Frost, has said, “What’s been happening … in Florida should scare every single person across the entire country, governor Ron DeSantis running for president and even being within striking distance of the Oval Office should frighten anyone who values democracy, voting rights, civil rights, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What has he achieved for Florida?  Almost nothing according to Time magazine:

"Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society."

Anyway, apart from all that, Heath says the next Tory government should adopt De Santis' approach and "legislate to end the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service on its first day in office, and appoint new management teams on short-term, performance-related contracts to run every single government department and quango. These new teams would report directly to ministers, and take instructions from them. All would be contractually bound to deliver the Government’s agenda."

Heath may not live long enough to see a 'next Tory government' and I certainly won't, but his solution assumes Brexit is still something worth pursuing despite all the evidence stacking up every day against it. And more than that, British voters, even those on the right are actually closer to US Democrats than Republicans like De Santis.

Many years ago, I remember someone telling me that whereas we have Labour and Conservatives in the UK, in America they have Conservatives and conservative Conservatives (aka Republicans). Almost nobody in the US political system is on what we think of as the left, not even Bernie Sanders. This thread from Burns-Murdoch at the FT shows the problem with Heath's solution:
As you can see, on some issues, British Conservatives are actually to the left of US Democrats, such as on whether being Christian matters to being truly British or American, and whether abortion is justifiable.

No, De Santis' policies won't work over here but you can be sure the Tory party will shift further and further to the right for a few years yet.

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