The Sunday Poast

All the Views What's Fit to Print

Welcome to The Sunday Poast, a weekly round up of things I’ve been reading I’d like to share and highlight to help build up a picture of what the collective mission and purpose of conservatives should look like. That means explaining what road we’re on, how we got there and where we’re going - ideally, a conservative Britain fit for the 21st Century.

On Wednesday I asked ‘What if I’m wrong?’, looking at data that suggests people are becoming more liberal and asking if that’s really true - or if people are just parroting high-status opinions.

Despite being on holiday I also made my debut in The New Statesman, asking why our national discourse can’t stop comparing things to the Nazis.

Besieging the BBC

The argument around Gary Lineker has been as unavoidable as it has been inconsequential, uninformed and unintelligent (apart from my contribution, obviously). But it raises an interesting question that, as the debate has inevitably sunk to the very lowest depths of Very Online Argument, few have recognised.

In the Telegraph, Nick Timothy raises the question of whether impartial, national institutions can be sustained in a world of increasingly bitter and frivolous bipartisanship, and lays out why it’s important for culturally conservative aims:

Some say the answer to these dilemmas is to give up on the idea of public service broadcasting: that we should let freedom reign and consumers decide. If people want to watch highly partisan television, they say, we should let them – but we should let more enter the market without impediment.

But at moments of triumph and tragedy, we still generally turn to the national broadcaster to come together. As misinformation and disinformation remind us – with the pandemic and war in Ukraine obvious examples – reliable news and an informed citizenry are part of our national defence. As we are awash with imported, mainly American culture – much of it alien to life here and divisive in the extreme – we should promote original British content and high culture, and remember that our own cultural exports bring us great influence in the world. However hard it is to maintain the BBC ideal, it is still worth striving to do so.

Minding migration

Rishi’s move to reduce crack down on Channel crossings has prompted opposition as entirely predictable as the Lineker debate. Immoral. Illegal. Impractical. We’ve sat through this performance often enough before.

In Unherd, Eric Kaufmann points out the migration surges have a history of swinging elections, and the issue has very high salience for the Conservative’s 2019 electorate.

The increase in channel crossings stems from these global pressures as well as the fact that while Brexit releases Britain from sharing EU refugee burdens, it also means that France, an EU country, no longer has to accept asylum seekers back from Britain. The growing awareness of this loophole, and of the ineffectiveness of British law enforcement, is thereby producing a rise in channel crossings.

This problem is not going to go away, as it is a structural issue affecting the entire West. Migration scholar Michael S. Teitelbaum writes that the internet and established global people-smuggling networks now mean that such networks are highly responsive to information about soft entry points. Policies or statements ‘signalling openness…can be quickly disseminated globally’. Numbers can increase very rapidly to take advantage of loopholes.

Promoting the postliberal

I’ve been writing about the need for a specifically Tory vision of postliberalism for an upcoming piece. One of the biggest problems in developing a Tory postliberalism - or British National Conservativism - is that there’s no locus of thought.

In the French conservative monthly L’incorrect Gladden Pappin, one of the major figures in the development of American postliberalism, explains how the movement has been fostered, as well as offering those of you new to right-postliberalism a summary of its thought:

The purpose of American Affairs has been to reorient U.S. political debate around essential themes of political and economic sovereignty, and to encourage a political ideology that prioritizes the same themes. Hence we have argued that the American Right must define a role for the state and aspire to govern—since most “right-wing” institutions have promoted a libertarian approach that neglects rule…

For most postliberals, liberalism is the political system based on radically new assumptions about human nature and politics that make continual liberation from unchosen norms into a social and political imperative. Liberalism, in the postliberal view, has an inherent instability due to this radical core. Now that the system no longer inspires loyalty in ordinary citizens and is incapable of delivering on its core promises of security and prosperity, postliberals seek to return to earlier traditions that emphasize the common good, and using politics to affirmatively protect, defend and shape society toward the good.

Dealing with the distasteful

Liberal rhetoric around immigration is often rooted in vague conceptions of the global good. As a Tory postliberal (or National Conservative, it amounts to pretty much the same thing) I reject the notion that’s what our government is there to do. But it’s also not clear if our immigration system is, in fact, contributing to the global good.

In The Times, Matthew Syed faces up to the monstrous inhumanity of our liberal immigration system, and the obvious gaming people have to do to ‘win’ at the entirely rigged system:

For let us acknowledge the basic truth in this debate: namely, that more people wish to come here than any sane person thinks could be accommodated. Suella Braverman has put the number of people who could qualify for UK asylum at 100 million, but that is a severe underestimate. This is obvious to anyone with family living in other parts of the world — many of my relatives live in Pakistan, where thousands of Afghans fleeing the Taliban are desperate to get to the West. Unless liberals accept the necessity of limits, they lose any claim to realism, because the reality is that we would be overwhelmed…

What appals me about the liberal position on asylum, therefore, is not hypocrisy but the absence of understanding. Liberals pretend they are merciful to refugees by providing succour to those who get here, but by erecting such formidable obstacles they ensure that those most in need never get here at all. Instead, the majority who make it are young, fit men, rich enough to pay the criminal gangs. This is not compassion; it is moral subterfuge. The same can be said for the human rights lawyers who deploy conventions written in 1951 to sustain the pretence that they are acting on behalf of the dispossessed. Nonsense. They are often acting on behalf of those capable of gaming this hopelessly rigged system.

Forming the family

‘I really question this assumption that a mother’s primary value is in the workplace contributing to GDP’ said Miriam Cates on GB News this week. She is absolutely right in to question why the only policy around family in in the Budget was focussed on getting mothers back to work asap, rather than creating stable families or happy children.

In The Telegraph, Madeline Grant looks at the continued indifference of government policy towards family formation and points out where we could do better:

UK nurseries are also subject to unusually high staff-child ratios by international standards, and often absurd levels of bureaucracy and paperwork. One friend with a child in pre-school reports having to sign an “Accident Form” every time his toddler sustains a bump while playing – something four-year-olds are fairly liable to do. And this problem isn’t confined to formal childcare, either. It is now illegal to pay friends or relatives for child-minding unless they comply with arduous employment regulations and undergo background checks. In some cases they can’t even do it for free.

We could also consider offering greater recognition to families within the tax system. France, one of the few countries to buck the downward global birth trend, explicitly does this. If you have two children, you only hit the top tax bracket when your household income reaches €250,000, while the childless hit it at under €100,000. The UK tax regime, unlike the benefits system, views married or cohabiting couples as separate individuals, leaving two earners on £40,000 a year apiece considerably better off than a single earner on £80,000 – a discrepancy that propels many parents who might have preferred to stay at home, reluctantly back into the workplace.

The Sunday Papers

After Jonathan Haidt’s look at reverse CBT causing a mental illness epidemic in liberal teenage girls went viral, someone sent me ‘Religion and Depression in Adolescence’, which found strong links between the two:

…a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by 11 percent.  By comparison, increasing mother’s education from no high school degree to a high school degree or more only decreases the probability of being depressed by about 5 percent.

Not quite a paper, but this deep dive by Karl Williams at CapX shows that the OBR forecast expects immigration to rise by nearly 20%:

Lots of factors go into GDP growth. One is the size of the labour force. Hunt’s welcome push on economic inactivity was partly a reflection of this. But most of the workforce growth comes from additional net migration, with the long-run annual rate revised up by 40,000 to 245,000. This is the highest level ever in OBR forecasts, as per the table below, which is based on analysis of all 27 EFOs to date.  

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