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My review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”

Before I started reading this book, I really, really wanted to like it. I held a desire to say something contrary to so many of the reviews I had read of it; I wanted to absorb the politics of the novel and, even if I disagreed with them, find a better way of understanding Rand’s “objectivism” nonetheless. After all, I love the novels of Jean-Paul Sarte while finding most of his politics appalling – mostly but not limited to, his defence of Stalin long past a point where that was an even remotely defensible intellectual position given what was known about Soviet crimes already. Yet I still think L’Age De Raison is a masterpiece, even though Sartre’s politics are inevitably weaved into the work. I can love a political novel whose politics I disagree with.

I wanted to be a contrarian on this one. To be able to say, ‘Yes, Rand’s politics are weird, but I found the book engaging nonetheless’. I was eager to enjoy Atlas Shrugged as a novel. It’s inordinate length not only didn’t deter me, but was one of the things about the work that I found interesting; I have a fascination with novels which are epic in scale. A lot of my favourites fall into the category – Infinite Jest (yes, I’ve read the whole thing and genuinely love it), War and Peace, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.

All right, I’ve stalled long enough: I really, really hated Atlas Shrugged. Detested it to the very core of my soul. In fact, I am baffled as to how anyone in the world can like it. To expand on what I mean by this, take another example: I’ve never really liked Ulysses by Joyce. There are portions of Joyce’s book I enjoy, but I can never get into the thing as a whole somehow. It isn’t the experimentalism of the prose or the structure that’s the problem for me – that’s actually the thing I like most about it. It’s just I can never really absorb Joyce’s writing; his Catholic guilt thing just bounces off me (I was raised Catholic but rejected it at a very early age, so I struggle emotionally to relate to it haunting you into adulthood).

Yet I still get that Ulysses is a great work of art. I understand how there could be a whole group of people for whom this was considered the best thing ever. On the flip side, I can also understand why a lot of people find Infinite Jest indigestible – I love the book because at heart it is about addiction, the things ambition can drive a person to do, strange geopolitics and dysfunctional families. Those happen to be topics I am endlessly fascinated by; if you were far less interested in those things, I can understand why delving into them for over a thousand pages might not be enjoyable.

Atlas Shrugged, however, is a whole different kettle of fish. It is, simply put, a lousy novel. As in, it fails to do what any novel worth the name has to do just to tick some basic boxes: the world building is awful, the prose is turgid, it is completely devoid of either humour or drama, all of the characters apart from Dagny Taggart are one or two-dimensional at best, and the only reason Dagny works as a fully fleshed out character is because she is clearly just a fantasy version of Rand herself. But worse than all of that, it’s incredibly boring. If I was going to try and compare Atlas Shrugged to any other piece of narrative based art I have ever previously experienced, it would be the Star Wars prequels, in particular Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. This is because a lot of Atlas Shrugged consists of people either walking around or sitting down and explaining the plot to each other for a long old while.

The dialogue is almost as bad in Atlas Shrugged as it is in Lucas’ turn of the century turds. Take this one line – it’s in a very early scene in the book. A character named Eddie Willers has shown up unannounced in the office of James Taggart, brother of Dagny and, well, the dialogue will tell you for me:

“I appreciate our childhood friendship, Eddie, but do you think that that should entitle you to walk in here unannounced whenever you wish? Considering your own rank, shouldn’t you remember that I am the president of Taggart Transcontinental?”

At least with the Star Wars prequels, Lucas was stuck with trying to get exposition across in the medium of film, which is always tricky. With Atlas Shrugged, it’s like no one ever told Rand that in a novel you have loads of ways of getting information to the audience. One might have been to simply insert a paragraph explaining James and Eddie’s relationship with one another. If Rand wanted to be more creative than that, she could have had there be more straightforward dialogue with no direct mention of what the power dynamic between the two characters was, letting us infer it by what takes places. Just please, I thought at this point, on page 11 of a 1,168 page book, please don’t have this be the way the story is told from here on out.

No such luck. The plot revolves around a bunch of railroad lines in some weird version of America that is often described by reviewers as dystopian – but as far as dystopias go, it’s very poorly established. It seems to involve a version of the USA in the near future from when the book was written – 1957 – in which the country has become mildly more socially democratic (at least until the end, when it all goes a little haywire). There is some nationalisation of things like railroads – which features heavily given the focus of it within the plot of the book – but for the most part, it’s difficult to see what’s so terrible about this reality. Rand clearly thinks it’s terrible – we have lots of characters talking to each other about how it’s a living hell – but there is no indication as to why that really is the case across the novel’s massive length. Shortages of some material goods are discussed, as is the fact that there is an economic depression, but we never feel it since almost all of the novel takes place in the offices and homes of the dynastically wealthy, and they seem materially unaffected by any of it. At least, until the final couple hundred pages when they lay it on thick, but by then its too late to be affecting.

A great number of the smartest and most talented people have deserted society to live in “Galt’s Gulch” (aka Atlantis), named after John Galt, the still living alpha male who first organised this removal of these hyper-productive members of society to take their enormous talents out of the mainstream, to…..well, do some quasi-random stuff that is supposed to make Galt’s Gulch utopia, but we are never really made to understand why Dagny thinks it is so superior to the rest of America as portrayed earlier in the novel. The big difference is there is some sort of new currency and everyone prefers to be paid in gold and it’s really unclear as to how the economy of the gulch actually functions. It’s supposed to be wonderful since everyone only pays for people’s objective time and effort, although how this works in practice to make life better for all the poor geniuses who ran away from everything isn’t clear. In fact, a lot of their lives seem materially worse than what they would otherwise have been back in the rest of America.

Let’s compare Atlas Shrugged with 1984, another book about a dystopian future which has a political point to get across. In the first chapter of Orwell’s masterwork, we are introduced to Winston, our protagonist, and see through his decrepit lifestyle how lousy things are in Oceania in the year 1984 first-hand. We are introduced to his job – continually changing the past on behalf of the Ministry of Truth so that history is always in line with what The Party, which controls every aspect of human life, wants to be the narrative. We are also told about all of the other ministries, their names handily introducing us to doublethink. The idea of telescreens is established – two-way TVs that monitor your every movement. Finally, we see Winston starting his diary and understand, since the world has been so effectively brought to life already for us already, what a revolutionary act this is in a place where just having any independent thought whatsoever is a crime, never mind committing a series of them to an external, permanent form.

The world of 1984 and the character we are going to follow the story through are completely set up in the first fifteen pages of the novel. You also understand how exactly freedom is curtailed in the world of the book and the real consequences of that fact. The tension at heart of the novel is Winston’s irrepressible individuality rubbing up against the harsh collectivism of life under Big Brother.

By contrast, in Atlas Shrugged, the best and the brightest aren’t directly persecuted but rather storm out of society altogether in a huff out of their own free will. And it’s not really clear why. If they are so alpha, how did the mediocre ones manage to get so ahead of them in society anyhow? How did the solidly average collectively manage to take over everything under the noses of these ubermensch in the first place? How and why did the brilliant alphas allow it to happen? Part of the problem, I suspect, sits with the fact that Rand seems to think that mild social democracy and the USSR at the height of the purges are essentially exactly the same thing, both being societies that hold back the brilliant from doing whatever the hell they feel like. Yet in portraying everyone who is in charge of America as useless and without talent, she has unwittingly set up a major flaw in her narrative – how did this society become what it is if the John Galts of this world are so flawless?

It’s like Rand couldn’t bring herself to understand that someone like Josef Stalin was a brilliant alpha himself; it’s why he was able to manoeuvre to the top of the pack and have all of his rivals fold around him. The problem with Stalin wasn’t that he was mediocre and not up to much; it’s that he was a ruthless, ingenious psychopath who operated in a system with no rules, nor any checks and balances on power. Checks and balances that Rand seems to actively look down upon, seeing as how she seems to view a society in which the most talented and ambitious are allowed to do pretty much whatever they like with as little regulation as possible as being ideal.

If Atlas Shrugged were set in a remotely believable world, John Galt wouldn’t have moved to a cloaked-from-view gulch and set up some rival society – given his ambitions, talents for invention and leadership, as well as his charms and other high-functioning capabilities, he would have taken over society altogether and installed himself as dictator. By the rationale of the book and the ideology that powers it, wouldn’t this be of benefit to everyone in society if the charming and ambitious took over completely?

Yet not only does Galt not do this, the powers that be torture him with electricity in a bid to force him to take over America as its dictator – and he refuses. This makes zero sense in the context of the novel. If Galt thought society was so terrible he had to leave it and set up a parallel community, why wouldn’t he want to mould America into the country he clearly had a vision for it being if given the chance? He could have taken over and then made America the libertarian fantasy he wanted by deregulating the shit out of everything. Instead, he escapes back to the gulch only to then announce at the very end of the novel that all the alphas are returning to the world again – on his command. Why, I just couldn’t tell you. It is one of the least satisfying ends to a book I’ve ever read.

In the real world – our actual world, I mean – capitalism isn’t good because it allows the talented to do whatever the hell they want; it’s good because it forces the talented to channel their abilities into something economically useful. Here’s one of my main problems with the ethos of Rand as presented in Atlas Shrugged: if being selfish is always completely justified, then why exactly were Stalin or Pol Pot or Hitler or any other dictator in human history for that matter wrong? Sure, those maniacs just mentioned were all powered by an ideology, yet they ultimately thought they knew better than anyone else in the world about everything, including who should live and die. The notion that selfishness somehow always manifests itself in a positive way and never has any direct, negative impact on others is deeply naive about human nature at best.

I can see exactly why attempts to adapt Atlas Shrugged for screen have failed – having a bunch of boring people talk about trains for hours on end in the service of a completely unfunctional ideology wouldn’t make for riveting visual entertainment. The people who should hate this book more than anyone else are, oddly enough, the libertarians who praise it so heavily. If the book has any function whatsoever, it is reads as an unintentional denunciation of laissez-faire capitalism.

To summarise, Atlas Shrugged is one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. It is artless, one-dimensional, flat as hell and has nothing to recommend it. As far as its politics go, I think they impede the novel only in as much as Rand just had a poor grasp on what made humans tick and why societies work they way they do, and this fed into both her novel writing and her politics.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

The post My review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Could Ed Davey be a secret political genius?

Last August, I wrote a piece entitled “Layla Moran will kill off the Lib Dems. But I still want her to win” in which I described how I thought that if Layla became leader of the Lib Dems, they would ooze into a progressive alliance sort of space and be killed off fairly quickly – whereas I had greater questions about what would happen under Ed’s guidance. I said, “Ed isn’t good enough to make the Lib Dems nationally relevant again. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s true.” I believe that Chesham and Amersham might have proven me wrong – although time will tell – not just because the Lib Dems won by such a large margin, but because I can now see the whole of his strategy at play.

I’m calling the strategy the “Lib Dem sandwich” – it has meat in the middle that the whole thing would be nothing without, and yet the two pieces of bread that hold it together are just as vital because it would all fall apart without them. The meat is opposition to planning, house building and any infrastructure that enough locals don’t like – NIMBYism, essentially. The Lib Dems could run on this across the South East of England and there are around 30ish seats that this might work in. This would put the Lib Dems back in 1997 territory, meaning some level of national relevance again that has been missing since the aftermath of the 2015 general election.

The first slice of bread in the sandwich has been the slight distancing from anti-Brexit rhetoric. The party decided not to become the party of re-join after Ed took over, citing only that the Lib Dem aim to have the “closest possible relationship with the EU”. Back when they did this, I was confused – say what you will about Brexit being done, the Lib Dems had worked hard to establish themselves as the “Bollocks to Brexit” party and at least that was a portion of the electorate the party might have hoped to hang onto. I thought at the time, “Why are the Lib Dems throwing away their USP?” But after Chesham and Amersham, I get it.

A lot of the NIMBY crowd the Lib Dem strategy is seeking out could be described as “soft Remainers”. They voted Remain in 2016, would do so again if there was another referendum – but after five years of it all, are sick to the back teeth of the subject. They don’t want to vote for a party that is going to go on and on about Brexit. Ed has positioned the party perfectly on the subject – they retain the anti-Brexit brand but it’s firmly in the background now.

The second slice of bread that holds this strategy together is the rejection of the progressive alliance – or better put, the keeping of this concept at arms length that Ed is doing. In the wake of the by-election victory last week, Davey was asked repeatedly about two things: was this just a victory for NIMBYism? Or was this the progressive alliance at play? What Ed said about the progressive alliance deserves to be quoted in full:

“We don’t need stitch-ups and deals. I’m very sceptical about all that.”

“You can’t say all our voters prefer the Labour party to the Tory party. You can’t play around with people like that. I think it’s a really misguided analysis that some people are trying to push. I don’t buy it.”

This is absolutely vital to the Lib Dem strategy. The one weapon that will be the most deadly against the Lib Dems in seats like Chesham and Amersham come the next general election will be the Tories being able to paint a vote for the party as not just for the Lib Dems themselves, but for a progressive “stitch-up”, a collective that has a view to changing the voting system so that Labour can rule the country forever. Ed putting himself at a distance from this idea is absolutely necessary.

Now, I don’t personally like the strategy. I am looking to back a party that is dedicated to many things, two of which are rejoining the single market and building houses – and the Lib Dems are not for either at present. At least, not in any outward facing, genuine sense. And I really don’t like NIMBYism, particularly of the SE English variety. I see it in London all the time – homeowners who don’t want any new houses on their doorstep thinking up bullshit, progressive sounding excuses for why they are protesting any development. A mixed housing development can be criticised for “not having enough affordable housing”. If this excuse doesn’t hold, say “We need more space for businesses – where are people going to work?”. If it’s a new housing estate, you can even block that on progressive-flavoured terms. “This will lead to housing estates that exist being torn down. This will disrupt communities.”

I hate this stuff, I really do, and the fact that the Lib Dems seem to be setting themselves up to be the party dedicated to going after this slice of the vote makes me feel even more distant from them than I already was.

However, the political strategy nerd in me can’t deny its brilliance. It works perfectly under First Past the Post, with the NIMBY vote they are going after concentrated in seats currently held by the Tories where the Lib Dems came second last time round. Continuing to be the anti-Brexit party might possibly see them riding higher in the national polls – but to no avail as this vote would spread much more evenly around the country, except for London where everyone votes Labour anyhow. In terms of just trying to get the Lib Dems some seats, it is almost certainly the best strategy the party could have possibly adopted. I’d go as far as to say there is a hint of genius in it all.

Having said that, there are pitfalls that await the party, even under their best possible strategy. If the polls are close between Labour and the Tories at the next election, the Lib Dems might feel their traditional squeeze. Yet if it looks like Labour are going to be crushed, with the choice a Tory supermajority or just a thinner majority, people in the seats the Lib Dems are targeting might feel they are being given a free hit and plump for a Lib Dem MP.

Of course, I can sit here and ask what the point is in the end. The whole strategy seems to be predicated on the idea of “survival by any and all means”. The Liberal Democrats can fool themselves into thinking they are helping kick the Tories out by taking seats off them but they must know they won’t take enough to make that really possible. I guess they can blame that on the Labour party and have at least half a point.

I have no idea if the Lib Dem sandwich will work. But I didn’t see it coming at all, it makes sense of a lot of stuff that seemed random pre-Chesham and Amersham and has at least some shot at success.

Of course, there is another problem the Lib Dems might not have considered yet – could planning reform become a tuition fees-like problem for the Lib Dems if they formed a government with Labour? What if that government started house building across the Home Counties, leaving those who voted Lib Dem feeling betrayed? Who knows – and time may tell.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

The post Could Ed Davey be a secret political genius? appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

My rant about Keir Starmer and the continuing idiocy of Labour’s position on Brexit

Keir Starmer doesn’t talk about Brexit much anymore. He’s desperate to leave the issue behind; for everyone to “move on” and stop talking about a subject that has bizarrely helped further destroy the Labour party while making the Tories electorally invincible. And yet, there are days when he can’t help himself. Yesterday was one of those days.

Speaking on LBC, Starmer started off by taking Boris Johnson to town on the issue of the Northern Ireland protocol.

“We do need to remind the prime minister that he signed on the dotted line: this is what he negotiated. If he’s saying it doesn’t work he should look in the mirror and say, well, did I sign something, then that wasn’t very sensible?”

“He didn’t read it, didn’t understand it, or he didn’t tell us the truth about it when he said what it had in it.”

As Jeremy Corbyn might have put it, “strong message here” – I don’t disagree with a single word from Starmer above. Boris Johnson either must have known that he was signing the UK up to something that was going to be highly problematic, all so he could position himself for a general election victory with an “oven ready deal” – or he had no idea what he was signing us all up to, meaning it was an act of extraordinary incompetence. There are no other options available; it can only logically speaking be one of the two.

But even in this section of what Starmer said on the radio, there were huge problems. For instance, given Starmer knew what the NI protocol entailed, not to mention all the other troublesome aspects of the Boris Brexit deal, why did he whip his MPs to vote for it? I can hear the excuses already – “But the alternative was no deal!” is popular. So is “If Labour voted against the deal, they would have thought we were trying to stop Brexit!”. These lame ass attempts at vindication are problematic on their own, never mind that when you put them together you are presenting two theses at the same time which are the precise opposite of one another. You can’t think that by voting against the deal, Labour would have been presenting themselves as no deal extremists and Remainers trying one last time to stop Brexit in the same moment, can you? Apparently, in this bizarre age we inhabit, this level of doublethink is possible.

But it got worse – a whole lot worse. What Starmer said next was exponentially more troublesome.

“Having checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not the way forward. Having any checks between the Republic and Northern Ireland is absolutely not the way forward. So we need to make some real progress. There’s probably going to have to be flexibility on both sides, as ever.”

Of anything that Keir Starmer has ever said that I have been witness to, this is far and away the worst. It actually makes me think a lot less of him as a person that he would peddle such drivel. If we don’t have checks down the Irish Sea and none on the island of Ireland itself, what exactly is Keir Starmer proposing as his magical solution to this problem? You are left with rejoining the Single Market and Customs Union, the EU itself, or at the very least spending a long time, probably about a decade, negotiating some arrangement with the EU that solves this problem.

And yet, this is where it gets really annoying: not only has Starmer ruled out rejoining any of those things, he has ruled out renegotiating the post-Brexit settlement in any fashion. This is what Starmer said about it in January:

“I don’t think that there’s scope for major renegotiation. (The deal is) thin, it’s not what was promised, but whether we like it or not that is going to be the treaty that an incoming Labour government inherits and has to make work.”

Okay, so he doesn’t like the NI protocol and thinks checks either down the Irish Sea or on land are “not the way forward” – and yet he has pledged not to renegotiate the treaties in any way whatsoever, meaning even if he becomes prime minister, we are stuck with what we’ve got. The current post-Brexit customs arrangements are not the way forward, according to Starmer – but they must be by his own reckoning given he wouldn’t change them in any way.

I don’t know why Starmer or those around him think that in the face of a misinformation campaign on all of this by the government, the Labour party further muddying the water with complete and utter horse shit is going to help anything. All Starmer is doing with this stuff is annoying Remainers while Leavers have long since made up their minds about what he thinks about Brexit. It is difficult to put into exact words how much all this makes me think, “I really do get why people voted for the Tories”. If Labour are offering no change to the problems created by this government, and are swimming in the same false narratives anyhow, why should someone like me even think about voting for them?

Starmer said he wanted to leave Brexit behind and “move on”. I think that unless he wants to majorly shift Labour policy on Brexit back towards a Remainer friendly position – and it is questionable whether he could even pull that off now – he should follow his own advice. Whenever he talks about anything Brexit related these days, it comes across as a confusing mess that makes no sense on any available terms. All he does by bringing all this up in nonsensical fashion is remind Remainers he is no longer one of them. All he does is help the Green surge to grow.

Starmer wants Brexit “done”? Then he should shut up about it.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

The post My rant about Keir Starmer and the continuing idiocy of Labour’s position on Brexit appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

How Boris Johnson reminds me of 70s Elvis Presley

Before we go any further, in relation to the headline: no, it’s not not because they are both middle-aged men who experienced weight problems. Although it’s worth stating again an incredible fact about Boris Johnson: he is the only person I have ever come across that looks fatter in real life than on television. The truism about “the camera adds a stone” is actually correct for the vast majority of the human race, yet the reverse applies to our current prime minister – another example of BJ’s extraordinary exceptionalism.

Boris reminds me of Elvis in the 70s because no matter what Elvis did in his latter years, he couldn’t stop people idolising him. Every time he did something totally out there, which became more and more prevalent as the 70s advanced, people would just say, ‘That’s Elvis. What a legend.’ In fact, the more alienating the manoeuvre, the more people were likely to applaud it. It became a sort of, ‘No one but Elvis could ever get away with anything like that!’

He would ask for the house lights to be turned off, leaving himself and the audience in complete darkness for long stretches of a performance. He would not only forget the lyrics to well known songs, but the melodies as well. He brought out an entire album in 1974 that consisted of nothing but nonsensical stage banter like ‘Look at all these red things on my pants here’ and ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am the NBC peacock’ for forty minutes and gave it the darkly sarcastic title, Having Fun on Stage With Elvis. It still charted in America, even going top ten on the country charts.

Someone told me they thought it was insane that Boris flew to Cornwall this week for the G7. I wasn’t surprised by the move at all – if I was him, I would have arrived there via a lorry that was the size and width of a football pitch, running on leaded petrol, with a golden throne at the top of it. Hell, if I was Boris Johnson, I would have done all the meetings at the G7 summit in my pyjamas, delivering my speeches and media spots in an old school hip hop fashion accompanied by a drum machine from 1986. And had Boris done all this, 98% of people who support the prime minister now would have gone, ‘That Boris is such a card! No one else could get away with this stuff! Don’t you just love him even more?’

I think the big difference between Boris Johnson and mid-70s Elvis is that the inability to make people get angry at his transgressions made the latter go slightly mad. I don’t think Presley could understand why people kept giving him a pass and probably started to wonder if that invalidated the success he had achieved when he was younger and actually trying. This is a hunch, but I don’t get the sense this bothers Boris all that much. He doesn’t seem tortured in any way by his ability to get away with pretty much anything. I get the sense he rather likes it.

There is a theory, postulated by those on the centre-left who have never thought much of Boris Johnson, that this will all eventually turn on the PM and the root of his downfall will be the exact same thing that propped him up in the first place. This now looks like wishful thinking to me. We’ve all written Johnson off so many times, at some point you just have to understand the guy as a phenomenon. Boris will probably be prime minister as long as he chooses. What happens to his legacy it’s too early to say, but I don’t think there will ever come a ‘gotcha’ moment while he is in office where everyone suddenly realises the emperor has no clothes. For whatever reason, Boris Johnson is just one of those politicians that come along every so often who has hold of the zeitgeist. Blair was like that while he was in Number 10 – nothing could bring him down and he left at the time of his choosing. Like it or not, Johnson is like 70s Elvis – only nature can defeat him.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

The post How Boris Johnson reminds me of 70s Elvis Presley appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

How Brexit got caught up in the culture war – and helped destroy Labour along the way

On last week’s Question Time on the BBC, there was an exchange between Michelle Dewberry, former Apprentice winner and Brexit party political candidate, and shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy. It is probably the most clear cut example I’ve ever witnessed of where continuity Remain went wrong somewhere around early 2018.

Dewberry starts in on Nandy, chastising Labour for having fielded an openly Remain-flavoured candidate in the Hartlepool by-election. She then moved seamlessly into critiquing Labour as being “more concerned with identity politics than they do about representing what used to be their base, the traditional working class”. A little later in the programme, she asks Nandy again why Labour won’t drop the identity politics bit before saying immediately after: “This is the point – you see Brexiteers as racist, xenophobic idiots”.

Now, I agree with Dewberry that Labour should drop the identity politics routine as it is alienating a lot of voters. I also agree that at times, Labour have insinuated that they rather look down on those who voted to Leave in a way that hasn’t helped them much. Where I disagree is about whether identity politics and leaving the European Union have anything to do with one another whatsoever. In fact, disagree is the wrong way to put it – Britain being in or out of the EU has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the convoluted politics of the current left. Which begs the question: why are these two unrelated things talked about as if they are one and the same and no one but me bats an eyelid?

The fact that it has become a lazy assumption that the new politics of the left – identity politics, defund the police, critical theory – and Brexit are perfect bedfellows is one of the great triumphs of continuity Leave campaigners, post-2017 general election. The natural flip side being, it is perhaps the greatest failure committed by continuity Remain campaigners.

While I think Dewberry is simply being reactive as opposed to consciously trying to carry on this myth, I’m certain someone looking to make sure we left the EU on fairly harsh terms spotted this prize at some point in the wake of the 2017 general election, when the Conservatives lost their majority and suddenly Brexit looked imperilled. It is ingenious, not only because it puts Brexit on the culture war landscape in a very, very helpful way to continuity Leave but because it was so obvious Remainers were going to fall into the obvious trap and play along.

Continuity Remain saw their chance to foil Brexit in the millions of people who were vocally against leaving the EU – a majority of which were on the left and centre-left. They didn’t see the danger in trying to sound like the young, leftist audience they wanted to galvanise, not realising they were handing a potent weapon to their foes. Because once leaving the EU wasn’t what it actually is in reality any longer – the terms upon which we both trade with the EU and also interact as people, i.e. travelling, living and working throughout the EU – which let’s face it, is both kind of boring and not a conversation Leave can win on straight up terms, it became instead something much more alluring. I can lay it out in an equation:

Brexit = rejection of the identity politics, anti-Semitism, sense of middle-class entitlement, hell anything you don’t like about the current left which, let’s face it, for most people is a lot of things

This handed the prerogative to continuity Leave, despite Theresa May spannering about as much as humanly possible, as it turned out to be an incredibly powerful equation for a lot of people. When you listen to uber-Leavers on any form of media these days, you can still hear this idea taken as a basic, underlying assumption. Brexit became symbolic of the fight against all of the most alienating and bizarre elements of modern day leftism, which is way more emotive than the details of trade negotiations. “You don’t want Brexit? Really? So that means you want three years old to be pumped full of hormones because their parents think they might be trans, huh? Why do you hate the Jews so much? Why do you want to live in a socialist country?”

Again, it feels weird to have to say it over again, but the idea has become so ingrained in our culture that it needs refuting in as many different ways as possible. Whether or not the UK is a member of the European Union or not has nothing whatsoever, even in the most tangential way imaginable to do with transgenderism, identity politics or statues being brought down. As for socialism, that does have something to do with EU membership in that it would be impossible to be a member of the European Union and be a fully socialist country at the same time – as long time Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn realised many years ago.

Part of this is that a lot prominent Remain campaigners also were leftie as hell, which didn’t help matters. The proof is in how many of them have turned from fighting Brexit to campaigning for a “progressive alliance” and electoral reform. It’s as if the terms of our relationship with the EU were never really what it was all about for them either – it was just another way to “bash the Tories”.

I often now see very Remainy social media accounts saying in one moment that we need a zero growth economy for a variety of ill-formed reasons – and then complaining about how Brexit has hit growth, without ever realising the irony. Or very left-wing, pro-EU people going on about how they are worried about how bankers and the financial sector will be affected and how the trans-Atlantic partnership must be maintained. It seems like all you need to do to transform a socialist into an FT reading centre-right person of old is to inject a little culture war into the mix – at least for the part of their life when they are still railing against Brexit.

I don’t see a way out of this now but I implore you all to watch for this tendency whenever anyone pro-Brexit starts talking about leaving the EU, particularly when it gets into tricky territory for them, like the customs border down the Irish Sea. They will run for identity politics and defund the police as fast as they possibly can. And while we can’t do anything about Brexit, the least we can do is call this weird and illogical tendency out.

How did this destroy Labour along the way? It’s what someone like Lisa Nandy can’t see, even as Michelle Dewberry spells it out for her on Question Time. It isn’t about Brexit in and of itself; it’s that the culture war and Brexit have become melded into this super-weapon that not only destroys any sentiment for Remain (or even for a better Brexit deal, for that matter), but takes the inverse of the equation I laid out above and adds another layer to it:

Anti-Brexit = Embrace of the identity politics, anti-Semitism, sense of middle-class entitlement, hell everything about the current left = the Labour party for the rest of eternity

That’s what Labour MPs don’t get – it doesn’t matter if you voted for the Brexit deal or how much you shout about how much you “embrace” leaving the EU. As long as you, Lisa Nandy, sit on a breakfast show and defend transwomen competing in women’s sports, the equation goes, anti-Brexit = trans rights extremism = Labour. Saying that, I don’t even know if Labour started to vocally dismiss identity politics and other stuff like it as much as possible – which they would never do as it would lose them their final active voter base – this could now be undone. It doesn’t matter how much they bleat about accepting or even loving Brexit, the equation goes: anti-Brexit = Labour. And they watched it happen to them, done by people who wanted Brexit to take place under their terms and make the Conservative party triumph out of it all to boot. They lost because they didn’t understand the game they were playing – and judging by Lisa Nandy’s very recent Question Time appearance, they still don’t.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

The post How Brexit got caught up in the culture war – and helped destroy Labour along the way appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Why I still find it impossible to embrace Brexit as the “new reality”

There are many things about Andy Burnham I dislike but I have to credit him with one thing: the guy always finds new ways to make me like him even less than I already do. During one of his recent copious interviews in which he is in no way seeking to put himself in the shop window to be next Labour leader, Burnham said that the reason Labour had been deserted by so many of its former voters was because of its pro-EU tendencies and that “people are embracing the fact that this is a new reality now in the UK, and I think that’s the way everybody needs to embrace it.”

I genuinely often wonder to myself why I can’t just accept Brexit and move on. It isn’t anything tribal – I have found and continue to find a lot of the pro-EU campaigning to be something I can’t relate to at all. I don’t have anything politically in common with the vast majority of pro-EU campaigns or campaigners so why can’t I just accept Brexit as the “new reality” and move on with my life?

Politics often comes down to strong emotions born out of experience. I grew up in Canada, a few hundred miles from the US border. That border really influenced my politics in way nothing now ever could. When Brexiteers started talking about how if we wanted a soft border between Ireland and Northern Ireland we should look to the Canada-US situation, I knew they had even less idea of what they were talking about than usual. For those who don’t know, the border between Canada and the US is incredibly hard – it is almost certainly one of the hardest borders in the world, when measured in terms of security build up and ease of crossing. The trees along it are chopped down so that surveillance towers have a clear view of anyone trying to sneak across either way, as just one pertinent example.

I have loads of memories around the horror of crossing that border that were very formative. You can be turned away for absolutely no reason at all and heavy duty searches of your person and property are de rigueur. As for working and living in America if you’re Canadian or in Canada as an American if you don’t have a visa, forget it. And while loads of visas are given out each year, you need to have a job first. I would have loved as a young man to have gone to New York with a few dollars in my pocket and given things a go but that was out of the question.

Luckily, I have British citizenship through my parents and have lived in the UK the vast majority of my adult life. One of the things I loved when I first travelled in Europe as a young man was how easy it was as an EU citizen; I loved the fact that I had a right to go to France if I wanted and further, I could stay as long as I wanted and even try and get a job in Paris if I thought my French was up to it.

So now when I read about EU citizens coming to the UK for job interviews and face being detained, I find the core of my political being incensed. I knew that Brexit would bring this and to see it unfold angers me. I fundamentally believe in the free movement of capital, people, good and services wherever and whenever logically possible. I hate the idea of putting up barriers to any of these things once they have been lowered, unless very temporarily in times of extreme emergency (like during the Covid crisis, as an example).

I also find it hard to understand how people on the right who supposedly believe in free trade can celebrate trade becoming more constricted with our geographic neighbours. Perhaps if I was a socialist like Andy Burnham may or may not be, I’d find Brexit easier to accept. But I’m not and I don’t.

So, Im sorry but I will always hope that the barriers put up by Brexit to our freedoms are someday bashed down again. Whether that’s by rejoining the EU or the single market or some other way, in a sense I don’t care – I just want the freedoms back. To that end, this will animate my politics – and I feel politically homeless given no party seems to want to do this right now.

I think its inevitable that one day we will have a liberal party rise in Britain that will be pro-free trade, pro-four freedoms, pro-market, pro-open. There are too many people who think the way I do on this stuff – particularly on the right, come to think of it – for this to not assert itself at some point. In the meantime, instead of accepting Brexit as the “new reality”, I will be thinking about how to open Britain up to the world again in real terms.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. Here’s the blurb, followed by a link to pre-order on the WH Smith website (you can of course pre-order on Amazon, but the link isn’t working for me at present):

She went willingly to the hospital. She couldn’t have anticipated how difficult it would be to leave…

Mr and Mrs Sincope are anticipating the birth of their first child. On the way to the hospital for Mrs Sincope’s induction their squabbling over their daughter’s name betrays an unquestioning trust that everything will go to plan. And why wouldn’t it?

But as the hours pass and Mrs Sincope’s labour doesn’t begin, the couple start to worry. And as the hours bleed into days and there is still no sign of progress, it becomes clear that there is something far more sinister going on behind the white hospital doors…

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/the-patient/nick-tyrone/paperback/9781472287793.html

The post Why I still find it impossible to embrace Brexit as the “new reality” appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

What the next decade of Tory government might look like

I will apologise right off the bat – none of this is going to be positive. Even if you’re a Tory, none of this is going to be positive. The reason for this is that for all of the usual hysterics surrounding the aftermath of May 6th, if anything people haven’t gone far enough in talking about how much of a sea change we’ve experienced due to the Hartlepool by-election and the set of English local elections that occurred on the same day. I think it all but locks in another decade of Tory government, barring a miracle.

Most Tories are avoiding saying as much publicly. They realise that to do so would appear hubristic and might blow up in their face at some point. But you can feel that they feel it. Things are different after May 6th. While prior to the Thursday before last Conservatives felt like Starmer was going into a downward spiral that might gift them the next general election, there were still nagging doubts this was the case. Hartlepool was the perfect remedy for all of that. Here was a contest in a red wall seat that Labour hung onto in 2019 because of the Brexit party vote. How much of that Brexit vote would shift to the Tories? Answer: all of it.

How Starmer has handled things since then has been almost as catastrophic as the result. The way he has lionised Angela Rayner is remarkable. His half-arsed reshuffle managed to deteriorate his authority even further than losing more than 200 seats in a set of local elections he should have cleaned up in. The time has come to whisper it: Keir Starmer has been a disappointment as Labour leader.

That feels hard to say – and that’s for me, someone who has never voted Labour at a general election in my life. It was a bit of a miracle that he managed to get the leadership in the first place. What I mean by that is someone who had enough credentials with the left to win yet clearly wanted to try and steer Labour away from Corbynism was a truly incredible person to have won a Labour leadership contest in early 2020. It feels scary to write off Starmer because as I’ve written before, it is hard to see anyone who might be better winning the next leadership contest.

But the time has come to be realistic here, particularly with so many rancid ideas being passed around the centre-left at the moment. People who should really know better are putting all of their energy behind a ‘progressive alliance’ of parties. I’ve written a lot about the limitations of such of an alliance elsewhere, so I won’t rehash those arguments here. I just find it depressing that so many who had put their backs into stopping Brexit have decided now to back an obviously doomed project.

If you want a ‘progressive alliance’ and think it’s the only answer, stop pissing around and really go for it. Merge the Labour party, the Lib Dems and the Greens into a new entity. Merge the memberships. Come up with a collective manifesto and shadow cabinet. Create a British version of the Democrats. That’s the only way this idea will ever work.

Ah, but then we come to the ‘Labour isn’t finished’ argument, which is a fair enough thesis. I’m coming to the point where I disagree – I think Labour really could be past the point where winning an election ever again could be possible. When I say this to people, a common response is, ‘Well, what about the 1980s? People thought Labour were finished then but they rebounded to win 418 seats in 1997.’ There are few responses I have to that. One is that back in the 80s, the trade unions were a relatively moderating force. Since they represented the working person, they were a bit more grounded in reality. Nowadays, the leadership of most of the major unions seems to have gone as far to the left as it is humanly possible to go. This is pretty major – one thing about the history of the Labour party to note is that they have a real problem escaping the pull of wherever the trade union movement happens to be.

The other is that the PLP had a lot more power back then. At the beginning of the decade, they alone chose the leader of the party, but even when the rule of thirds came in, MPs still had a lot of power over the direction of the party. That’s gone now – the membership alone decides these things. And because of Ed Miliband’s £3 entry disaster, the membership has tilted very much to the left. Thus the membership, which now has ultimate power, is completely out of touch with the rest of the country.

I don’t see how you get round these two points. The next leader of the Labour party, probably after the 2023 or 2024 general election, will be one of Angela Rayner, Rebecca Long-Bailey or Andy Burnham. I think the latter will probably get it in the end simply because he’s a bloke (the membership may have gone to the left but it still doesn’t seem to like women very much). His very recent pleas for Labour people to accept Brexit as the “new reality” will probably hurt him, but given all of the potential leaders will be pretty Lexity, I still think Burham will sneak through.

That will be a total disaster for several reasons. One is that Burnham is worse than Starmer on almost every available metric. Second is that it will be like the left rewinding itself back to 2015 and instead of picking a catastrophic option, merely a terrible one.

So, what will the next ten years of Tory government look like? Everyone thinks they’ll revert back to austerity but I’m not really convinced they will; I think a lot of the people insisting on this are indulging in wish fulfilment, hoping for a version of the Conservative party an economically left-wing party can attack. I think they will rule until an opposition party can effectively do three things:

Attack Brexit and get a hearing from a public that has grown sick of the hassle of it – I think that’s five years away at the most optimistic.Attack the Tories economically from the right and be heard – again, at least five years away from getting the public to listen on this.Attack the Tories on sleaze, which after ten years of a one party state, should be the easiest on this list to achieve.

The problem is, it is impossible to see the Labour party being a party that can do those three things, even if I gift them a decade. Which brings me back to the party we do need at the moment – and again, that party would take five years to gain power, even if it was perfect – which is essentially something that looks a bit like the Canadian Liberal Party in terms of ideology, the American Democrats in construction. In other words, a party we do not have at present. If you want a ‘progressive alliance’, that’s what you need to start building.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. Here’s the blurb, followed by a link to pre-order on the WH Smith website (you can of course pre-order on Amazon, but the link isn’t working for me at present):

She went willingly to the hospital. She couldn’t have anticipated how difficult it would be to leave…

Mr and Mrs Sincope are anticipating the birth of their first child. On the way to the hospital for Mrs Sincope’s induction their squabbling over their daughter’s name betrays an unquestioning trust that everything will go to plan. And why wouldn’t it?

But as the hours pass and Mrs Sincope’s labour doesn’t begin, the couple start to worry. And as the hours bleed into days and there is still no sign of progress, it becomes clear that there is something far more sinister going on behind the white hospital doors…

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/the-patient/nick-tyrone/paperback/9781472287793.html

Here are the three main reasons a progressive alliance won’t work

Since Brexit happened, a lot of energy that was focused on halting our exit from the European Union has gone into a new project which can be defined as the “progressive alliance”. The idea is that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens (and in some iterations, the SNP) make a pact for each party to stand down in an array of seats at the next general election, paving the way for whomever got the best result there in 2019. This would then eliminate the problem of “progressive” votes cancelling each other out and the Tories being able to come through the middle in seats where the non-Tory vote is split between two or even three parties. Once this progressive alliance gets into government, it would then legislate for a PR voting system, ending two-party politics forever.

The idea is a terrible one that will never work. Here are the three main reasons why.

It’s been attempted before and failed miserably

To be fair, it has only ever been tried on a limited basis as opposed to any large scale venture, such as something set across the whole of the country involving hundreds of seats. But the returns from this have been historically abysmal. The reason why is easy to understand if you try and look at it objectively.

Say you have a seat in which the Labour party stands aside for the Lib Dems because the latter came second and have a much better chance of beating the Tories. Just for a start, why would Labour people campaign for the Lib Dems? Fine, perhaps a relatively minor issue but this one isn’t: assuming that voters think like Westminster activists, i.e. politics is split between progressives and the evil right-wing, is a huge mistake in the thinking around this. I can imagine lots of people who might have voted Labour if a Labour candidate had run not voting for the Lib Dems but for the Tories instead. Or staying at home. The notion that you can just smush all of the Labour, Lib Dem and Green votes together in any given constituency and if they come to more than the Tory total then that seat would automatically fall to a progressive alliance is wrongheaded. It isn’t how people actually vote in real life.

2. Labour have no interest in this idea. At all. None.

It’s worth pointing out that at the 2019 general election, less than a year and a half ago, Labour sent activists into Finchley and Golders Green knowing they had no chance whatsoever of taking the seat – but realising that they could stop Luciana Berger from winning it. I say this not as some bitter Lib Dem – Labour were smart to have done this. You’re facing electoral oblivion anyhow, so why not stop the Lib Dems as much as you can from being a possible hope for non-Tory politics ahead of you?

I point this out to demonstrate how far from being seriously considered by anyone in the Labour party the idea of a progressive alliance is. It’s one of the very few things that unites all factions within the Labour party, in fact. No way do the right of Labour want to help prop up the Lib Dems anywhere. No way do the left of Labour want to seriously help the Greens build themselves up.

It is deep within the DNA of the Labour party that they are the only force that can save the nation from the Tories. This cannot be unwound. And if Labour don’t want to be involved in a progressive alliance, it has a zero percent chance of working.

3. Even if you could get everyone to the table and did everything as well as could be, it still wouldn’t work out the way the progressive alliance cheerleaders think it would. In fact, it would probably strengthen the Tories

Let’s imagine by some miracle the Labour party decide that their days of being a party capable of winning a majority at Westminster are over and embrace the progressive alliance idea fully. Then let’s say that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens manage to put aside all differences and then agree on which seats each one of them will stand in. You’d still have a massive problem – you’ve handed the Tories a huge campaigning tool.

The Conservatives can tell the country: “Labour clearly cannot win a general election anymore on their own steam – even they know that now. That’s why they have decided to try and circumvent democracy by attempting to stitch up the election between themselves, the Lib Dems and the Green party. Know this – a vote for Labour is a vote for an unstable coalition that has an express purpose – to change the voting system forever to their advantage.”

There’s a difference between someone voting Lib Dem in a Lib-Tory marginal because they don’t mind the Lib Dems and want to vote against the Conservatives and someone doing so with the knowledge that they are in effect voting for a Labour-Lib Dem-Green coalition. It would change the way people vote dramatically. And I think a lot of people would rally around the Tories at that election.

I understand the psychology around the progressive alliance idea. It is a way of avoiding seriously confronting the mistakes that left of centre politics has made over the past decade and a bit and instead pining it all on a structural issue. ‘You see! The problem isn’t that people don’t like us or our ideas! It’s just that the system is rigged against us!’ As hard as it may be, it would be so much better for non-Tory politics to move away from these silly ideas and begin to try and engage with the actual politics of the 21st century.

Here are the two reasons why Labour lost Hartlepool and a chunk of local England

There are those who will try and spin Labour’s results from last week’s ‘Super Thursday’ elections as not all that bad. ‘Look at all those mayors!’ and ‘It’s early in Keir’s leadership still!’ will abound. But make no mistake – Labour are in the shit. The Hartlepool by-election result on its own was terrible enough, but it gets worse for Labour – so many of the places they lost seats in England are precisely the type of areas they need to be winning over and are clearly not. If these voters won’t plump for Labour during a local election, it is very likely they will not do so at a general election. Which means that getting anywhere close to depriving the Tories of a majority, never mind winning one themselves, looks absurdly remote.

But I am here to try and be positive about the Labour party. I think their problems aren’t as bad as they look – at least in theory. In fact, I think the reasons Thursday was so bad for them comes down to two essential things.

One is that Labour have to realise that they are no longer the default ‘good guys’ of British politics. The leadership seem to get this on some sort of intellectual level, but not a gut one that would change their behaviour. Labour need to flush out the sanctimony that has become a part of their campaigning and communications DNA as soon as possible.

I like Keir Starmer. If we had a presidential system, I would definitely vote for him over Boris Johnson. But we don’t have a presidential system and so it’s worth asking whether my like of Starmer translated into whether I voted for Labour when I had an opportunity to do so on Thursday. No, I did not – and I didn’t really ever come close to thinking I would. Why? If I think Starmer is the last hope of a non-Tory government, why not support his party?

It’s the sanctimony for me. It’s the way Labour portray themselves as missionaries telling us all of our souls will be damned if we don’t vote for them. Take this quote from Friday as a great example, when Sadiq Khan had done more poorly than expected in early counting for London mayor:

“We always said it would be a close election. There is no question we are seeing significant impact from turnout and voters believing they could put a smaller party first preference without influencing the election result. There is no question we are seeing significant impact from turnout and voter complacency.”

On a day when they lost a formerly safe seat in a former heartland, Labour comms thought it was a good idea to put that statement out. How dare voters go for smaller parties over us! How could they be so ‘complacent’? Don’t they realise that we are the only answer to their prayers?

Labour need to stop preaching to people about how they are the church that can save everyone through sheer brand power and instead work on telling people why they would govern better than the Tories.

But now I come to the second reason I think Labour did so badly last week, and this one is even more key. Labour cannot expect to win seats in England when they give out such an anti-English vibe.

Everyone goes on and on about how Labour is still being done over by Brexit and their positioning on that subject. Yet they did well in Wales on Thursday, which voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a very similar margin to how England voted in the referendum. Labour’s success in Wales is being treated as a fait accompli when it was by no means a sure thing. The break up of the UKIP vote in Wales could have easily accrued to the Tories enough to make them the big winners in Wales on Thursday, and yet while the Conservatives picked up seats, it was nowhere near enough to deprive Labour of victory.

So why did this happen in Wales and not England? It’s because there is a Welsh Labour party that is clearly proud and happy to be Welsh, while there is no English Labour party per se and the Labour party as it exists in England often comes across as if they don’t like England very much at all.

It has become something of a cliche even, for left-wingers in England to portray their homeland as a Brexity hellhole, drowning in racism. England is seen as having pushed us all out of the EU at the expense of the blessed ‘Celtic nations’ that make up the rest of the UK (again, despite the fact that Wales voted to leave as well). England is the oppressor and the English the oppressors in this paradigm, even those English people living on benefits in a council block in Rotherham.

This is far and away the biggest reason why Labour are losing voters in England. When combined with the sanctimony bit, an electorally lethal combo is formed. The narrative to a lot of people sounds like this: ‘We are the only party that can save your souls you racist, entitled group of English oppressors! We hate you and all you stand for but if you vote for us, we’ll work on improving you all as much as is practically possible.’ Not very appealing is it?

Perhaps the Labour party needs to take the radical step and make themselves a fully federal party, with an English Labour party much like the existing Welsh and Scottish one. All I know is that for years people like Jon Cruddas and John Denham have been going on about how if Labour doesn’t find some way to make English identity compatible with centre-left values and politics, one day they will lose the English working classes. And that day came on Thursday, May 6th, 2021.

Early signs here are not good, however. After promising big changes, Starmer’s reshuffle really only amounts to demoting Dodds and making Rachel Reeves shadow chancellor, something everyone who knows anything at all about politics understands he should have done in the first place. Cooper still isn’t in the shadow cabinet, which is insane. Does Starmer fear her as a leadership contender? If so, he should give up on being prime minister.

To summarise, Labour’s problems are big, but can be overcome. They question is, will they even try?

Five British political scandals that ultimately went nowhere

In a week that saw Boris Johnson caught up in multiple political scandals, any one of which would have brought down a political career back in the old days when this stuff still mattered, I am taking the time to remind us all of incidents in British politics that have fizzled out into what is relatively nothing in the recent past. In other words, political scandals where the ramifications were short term and small scale for the politician at the centre of it, particularly compared to what used to end careers not all that long ago. I think this tells us a lot about what is wrong with politics at the moment.

Once upon a time, even a scandal that would seem insignificant by today’s standards could bring a permanent end to someone’s political career. Back in 2009, when the expenses scandal brought the whole of the political class under fire, one would have thought that perhaps the bar for career ending scandals would get lower – instead, the bar seems to have got so high as to have almost entirely disappeared.

If you’re wondering how we got here, what follows is five British political scandals that ultimately fizzled out to nothing, in chronological order:

The Liam Fox “Adam Werritty” scandal (2011)

A strange one that has never been fully decoded, it’s best to start this out by saying that Liam Fox and Adam Werritty had a very close friendship. Werritty was Fox’s best man at his wedding in 2005. This was the partial explanation for the scandal that followed, but it only really acts as a bit of background. In the year leading up to the scandal, while Fox was Secretary of State for Defence, Werritty accompanied Fox on 18 foreign business trips and was at Fox’s side during the majority of his official engagements. Yet Werritty was never officially employed as a civil servant or by the Conservative party and was never even security cleared. Even odder, when the civil service started an investigation into the matter, Fox claimed that Werritty had never worked for him in either an official or unofficial capacity.

The pressure around this got too great and Fox had to resign his post. At any time pre-2010, this would have been the end of Fox’s frontline political career. Yet in 2016, Fox stood in the Conservative party leadership contest and no one batted an eyelid. After May became PM, Fox was back in the cabinet as her International Trade Secretary, meaning the whole Werritty scandal – which was never satisfactorily resolved – had no real lasting effect on Fox’s career whatsoever.

2. Emily Thornberry and the English flag house (2014)

On November 21, 2014, Emily Thornberry thought it would be a good idea to tweet a picture of a house covered in English flags with the accompanying sentence: “Image from #Rochester”. Soon enough, the internet was ablaze with people complaining about Thornberry’s snobbishness and lack of patriotism. Given it was emblematic of the biggest problem Labour faced at the time – lack of empathy with actual working class English people, which come to think of it, is still their big problem today – Thornberry was forced to resign from her post as Shadow Attorney General.

Yet she was back as a Shadow Minister within the year, was back in the shadow cabinet just over a year after the incident, and was Shadow Foreign Secretary less than two years after the Rochester tweet. The end result of the scandal was Thornberry was promoted, which became something of a thing generally from here on out.

3. Cameron and “Piggate” (2015)

I remember the build up to revelations regarding David Cameron allegedly having stuck his willy in a pig’s mouth as part of a university initiation ceremony. Everyone in the press knew about it and right before it came out, it was assumed that the story would finish Cameron’s career. And yet when it broke, it was met with a brief chuckle and then a shrug by the British public. No one really cared. As it turned out, Cameron’s political career was finished less than a year after this “scandal”, but it had nothing to do with pigs but rather his own political stupidity regarding the EU referendum.

4. Boris Johnson and Obama’s “ancestral dislike” comment (2016)

In the heat of the EU referendum campaign, Boris Johnson wrote a an article for The Sun that said that Obama’s “back of the queue” comment on behalf of the Remain campaign was shaped by the then US president’s “ancestral dislike” of Britain due to his “part-Kenyan” background. This comment was special in that it contained something for everyone, being both racist and anti-American at the same time. In another time period, this would have cut dead Johnson’s chances of ever being prime minister – but this clearly isn’t the time period we’re living thought presently.

5. Priti Patel and the Israel scandal (2017)

While Secretary of State for International Development, Patel met with Israeli officials without it being official, ie, without telling anyone in government or having any British officials present. This behaviour is off-limits for very obvious reasons and Patel was forced to resign. But in keeping with the post-2010 mood of anything goes in British politics, Patel was back in the cabinet within less than two years, getting a large promotion to Home Secretary along the way. Her flouting of the rules paused her career but then ultimately led to a big promotion. Bad behaviour is not only not really punished in politics these days, it is often times actively rewarded.