A farewell to freeloaders
An iron curtain is descending across the Potemkin Village Idiot.
A spectre is haunting this substack… the spectre of capitalism.
From today, I am turning on paid subscriptions for the Potemkin Village Idiot.
From now on, there will be a new post at the PVI at least once a week. Free subscribers will still have access to some posts, as well as a sample of each paid article. But paypigs Valued and Respected Readers will have access to all my writing - including postscripts to pieces I’ve had published elsewhere, adding further thoughts that were cruelly cut by evil editors.
The first paid piece is out in the New Year; until then, subs are 20% off.
I’ve always appreciated Richard Hamming’s double-edged question: “What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on one of them?”
The fundamental question of the PVI is this; what does a right-wing Britain fit for the 21st Century look like, and how do we win it?
For what feels like my entire lifetime, mismanaged decline has been the unspoken, acceptable norm in British politics. The worm bores at the very centre of our command; but it doesn’t have to be like this. This is a choice.
Britain should be strong; but that means the strength to do bold things, not simply to suffer. Decades of failure have created a country full of reasonable people at their wits’ end. They, like me, cannot bear to see Britain expecting its fate with patient resignation instead of grasping an outstretched hand towards the stars. We must break the cycle, before we are forced to accept a humiliating slide it is no longer in our power to arrest.
The work lies at hand.
Valued and Respected Reader, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for Soviet Britain, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Dear reader, subscribe to this substack! Dear reader, tear down this paywall (with your money)!
Books of the year
I genuinely love contributing to CapX’s Books of the Year. It makes a change from writing blackpiling pieces on immigration, energy, housing, the Blob, Starmer... But let’s open our kimonos, it also flatters my ego. Anyway, my recommendations were a repetition from last year, a foundational text for explaining the Blob & a paean to the countryside;
Last year, ‘with the rise of medically assisted suicide’, I chose Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Love Among the Ruins’, a dystopian short story written at the outset of the welfare state where euthanasia is the most in-demand government service. If you didn’t read it then, you should read it now.
Suddenly, everyone in politics seems to be talking about the Blob; I’ve therefore been recommending Peter Mair’s ‘Ruling the Void’ liberally. Mair argues the decline in party politics has severed the link between ruled and rulers, meaning elites increasingly distance themselves from the public and redefine democracy to downplay the importance of popular sovereignty. In this void, ‘experts’ – allegedly impartial technocratic specialists – step in, operating within ostensibly accountable state or semi-state institutions. This deliberately creates a ‘protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy’. 14 years of Tories handing money and power to their political opponents suddenly made a little more sense after I’d read this.
Finally, Keir’s war on farmers through the detestable IHT increases made me re-read James Rebanks’ ‘English Pastoral’. The story of three generations of Rebanks maintaining their rugged upland sheep farm reminded me just how much the countryside I love up here in North Yorkshire relies on their careful, patient stewardship – and how quickly that might be lost.