The Sunday Poast

Human quantitative easing, woke environmental subjugation and why Reform are rubbish.

GM.

Welcome to the now-occasional Sunday Poast, where I collect my work for other outlets in case your eager eyes missed it. Let’s get after it.

---

First up I wrote for CapX on the renaming of the Overground Routes. I argued the renamed was undoubtedly a process of woke environmental subjugation, but not in the sense that the lines are named after specific woke talking points - instead, it was the process by which the Overground names were arrived at; these names are a physical expression of the power of the Blob:

This interfacing function, relying on reciprocal engagement between government and ‘civil society’, is key to ‘the Blob’s’ influence on public policy – and now, too, on the public realm. It’s commonly packaged as ‘stakeholder engagement’ and is an essential part of ‘Blob’ apparatus.

Another key feature of Blob governance is that culturally progressive groupthink – which is the natural result of widespread institutional capture – means decisions, as Mary Harrington points out, are often ‘made pre-politically and largely unaccountably, via the interaction of rules, institutions, and seemingly leaderless pressure groups.’ 

---

Following the news that the UK was in technical recession at the end of 2023, I argued in Con Home that GDP is a measure increasingly irrelevant to political discourse, and that it’s GDP per capita that matters - which, thanks to our addiction to low-wage mass immigration - has flatlined. That’s a policy I labelled Human Quantitative Easing:

Successive Conservative governments have sought to juice GDP figures with increasing amounts of immigration. But this process has not made our economy more dynamic or our citizens more wealthy – rather, it has simply increased GDP through increasing the population. It is, more or less, a process of human quantitative easing. But as Andrew Neil notes, increasing GDP by increasing the population means GDP figures no longer tell a relevant story about the everyday economics that drive the electorate’s voting patterns

It should be noted with grim irony that this year, the biggest fall in living standards on record has coincided with yet another all-time high immigration record. Despite being told that immigration is economic rocket fuel – and that we need much more, always much more – we are yet to see runaway growth, rocketing GDP per capita, huge leaps in productivity, a prospering welfare system, or the lowering of the retirement age. Perhaps we are only one more set of record-high immigration figures away from paradise.

---

I also made my debut in City A.M. contending that the UK shouldn’t introduce citizen’s assemblies in The Debate:

We already have means of engaging the body politic on specific issues. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of referenda, which solve all the problems that citizens’ assemblies seek to handle. Worse still, citizens’ assemblies allow politicians to depoliticise their decisions by outsourcing decisionmaking to a supposedly apolitical forum that can in fact be subtly but easily rigged.

We shouldn’t pretend that citizens assemblies are anything other than a forum to give a veneer of legitimacy to decisions already taken. And we certainly shouldn’t pretend they’re democratic.

---

I also wrote ‘Why Reform is rubbish’ for The Critic, arguing that the Reform PartyI also wrote ‘Why Reform is rubbish’ for The Critic, arguing that the Reform Party are unlikely to ever replicate the success of European populists or provide a successful alternative to the Conservatives, and that their authoritarian party structure means we’re more likely to see a further descent into self-defeating absurdity than a Canada-style right-replacement:

The truth is that Reform itself is the problem. It is an entirely autocratic organisation that is structured more like a company than a political party. The party is entirely under the direction of its leadership. As a result, the party has no feedback loop to voters; despite Reform’s protests at the disconnect of politics from ordinary people it is — perhaps even more than mainstream parties — ensconced entirely within the Westminster bubble.

Tice isn’t blessed with the natural understanding of his electorate that his predecessor, Nigel Farage was; nor with the charisma required to lead a breakthrough movement. Primarily an economic liberal, Tice is offering an ideologically confusing and unappealing platform of reheated Thatcherite economics with mindlessly rehashed, unconnected talking points that have little public salience —the WEF, “common sense coal”, taxing working from home, the “woke brigade in California” — to an electorate that as, Matt Goodwin identified, is more motivated by distrust, fears about the actual or perceived destruction of their national community, identity, and ways of life, relative deprivation and political dealignment. 

Tice’s problem is that he doesn’t share or understand the values and concerns of his potential voters and, thanks to the party’s structure, has no feedback loop to correct him. As I have written before, that leaves Reform bereft of any actual understanding of their voters and cast adrift in a sea of irrelevance, basing their campaigns negative caricatures drawn by establishment and left-wing commentators in the immediate aftermath of 2016, which painted Brexiteers — and especially white, working-class, formerly Labour-voting Brexiteers — as fuelled merely by ressentiment, a deeply jejune and superficial understanding of the complex drivers behind the long-term shift in voting patterns.

---

On the back of that I was asked on to the Northern Agenda podcast with host Rob Parsons and former Reform MEP Alex Phillips to discuss what the party can offer the north, and if the Conservatives or Reform are more ideologically confused.

Obviously she couldn’t resist a Tom Jones joke. They never can.

---