A new politics: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the culture

“One of the primary lessons to be taken from politics over the past decade is that for lots of voters, cultural insecurity matters as much as economic insecurity.” That aperçu, culled from a column by Matthew Goodwin in last weekend’s Sunday Times, is a précis of all that it is essential to know about current politics. Practising politicians who wish to remain in practice for any length of time should set their grannies to unpicking “Thou God seest me” from family samplers and embroidering those words instead, to hang prominently on the wall.

It’s not the economy, stupid – it’s the culture. It seems no time since establishment commentators were intoning complacently – some of them are still doing so today – “Thank heavens the culture wars that are crippling America will never gain any traction in Britain.” That dinosaur delusion ignored the evolving reality that culture wars are global: only Antarctica has escaped belligerent status.

Thirty years ago, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it was rashly and wrongly assumed that the scourge of Marxism had been expunged, creating a new historical era; even more rashly, Francis Fukuyama absurdly proclaimed the End of History. In reality, the crude, lumbering Soviet model of Marxism, which had become a liability to its supporters, had reached the end of its life. It was discreetly replaced by the sleeker model that the Frankfurt School had been refining since the 1920s, based not on state control of economies but on the infinitely deadlier subversion and subjugation of culture.

Now, after the long march through the institutions, cultural Marxism has occupied most of the commanding heights of British society. Parts of our universities are seminaries of totalitarian intolerance: they have followed in the path of American academe where, in the words of one commentator, every North American campus is a small, ivy-covered North Korea. The undergraduate revolutionaries of a generation ago are the senior common room commissars of today.

The useful idiots who have collaborated in the cultural subversion of Britain – its town halls, its civil service, its police and judiciary – are the virtue-signalling clones at Westminster who are enslaved to the need for approval by political correct lobby groups representing infinitesimally small minorities, while blindly indifferent to the anger and resentment of millions of voters.

This insouciance on the part of MPs dates precisely to 1965. In that year, when Parliament abolished capital punishment against the vociferously expressed wishes of the overwhelming majority of the electorate, MPs made the intoxicating discovery that by forming a cross-party “consensus” on issues where their bien-pensant liberal views were morally superior to the prejudices of the mob, they could impose any oppression they liked upon the supine masses.

The consensus gathered pace in 1968 when Enoch Powell exposed the country’s deep unhappiness with mass immigration; the consensus broke his career and enacted laws to gag free speech in order to silence the public on all controversial issues. Increasingly draconian legislation followed, culminating in Labour’s Equality Act of 2010 which spawned innumerable totalitarian subsidiary impositions, all zestfully enforced by a Conservative government that has forgotten the meaning of the term, as absolutely as the Liberal Democrats have reneged on their dual designation.

At the Brexit referendum sovereignty was the overriding issue, closely followed by immigration. The result was seen by a shocked establishment as a revolt by the left-behind populations in the North, though the rebellion was more widespread than that, and it promised to respond. In fairness, it did: it spent three and a half years using every device at its disposal to block the democratically expressed decision of the majority on Brexit.

Now these same politicians are saying to the people of Sunderland, Bishop Auckland and Vale of Clwyd: “Please may we have your votes?” The unspoken corollary is “and then we can continue making your lives a misery from the comfort of Westminster”. All that the people of the North, of Rotherham and hundreds of similar communities that are communities no longer, asked for was to be allowed to live as their ancestors had done, among their own people, with no ill will to others and with, they hoped, a reasonable level of employment.

Instead, the social engineers and cultural Marxists, keen “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity” (how many northerners are normally classified as of the “Right”?), destroyed their communities; not even the local pubs survived. And now Labour – and, just as impudently, the Tories – expect to be rewarded with sackfuls of votes from grateful northerners dutifully celebrating diversity.

Britain, or at least the southern quarter of it, has been living in a dream world for half a century. There is a new politics: the British electoral scene is more similar to the continent than at any time in past history. In Poland the Law and Justice Party has cemented a popular hegemony by creating a new coalition, formed by a Faustian pact whereby voters who would previously have been neo-liberal upholders of markets will endorse an increase in public spending, particularly on welfare, in return for socially conservative policies. Significantly, as the recent Polish election showed, that is a political programme for which the left has no effective countermeasure.

The most interesting aspect of the exiguous Conservative party manifesto in the British general election is its open courting of the blue-collar vote, which is socially conservative, in what could become a first tentative step towards the Polish model. Leftist criticism of the manifesto for containing no pledges on “trans” rights reflects the fear of the left that the Tories could break the consensus, which is exactly what they need to do to survive. Instead of engaging in a bidding war with the left over pandering to ever-smaller minorities, it is time to court the majority.

The left has been concerned since the 2016 referendum result exposed its numerical weakness. Tiny militant minorities have been punching far above their weight by exaggerating their strength through Twitter mobs and endless media referencing. In reality, no Twitter storm or Antifa demo can remotely match the demographic that repairs to the polling station. What really concerns the cultural Marxists is the emerging awareness of the electorate that it commands real power, if it is disposed to wield it effectively.

If the Conservatives do not seize the opportunity, Nigel Farage will. He deliberately designed the Brexit Party, unlike UKIP, to be more than a one-trick pony. If he can keep a reasonable proportion of his party together after the election, besides riding shotgun on Boris Johnson’s trade negotiations with the EU he can also address his “Change politics for good” agenda.

We need a clean sweep. Abolish the Blair-contrived Supreme Court which is already transforming itself into a constitutional court, Venezuela-style; put radical restrictions on immigration and deport illegals; reform sentencing policy for terrorists and other violent criminals; impose eye-watering, escalating fines on universities that do not ensure free speech; repeal so-called “hate laws” and all culturally Marxist impositions on society; de-politicize the police; restore parental authority over children and the right to protect them from state-sponsored social-engineering propaganda in schools; above all, banish the weasel terms “diversity” and “equality” from public life and discourse.

If you winced at that agenda and you are a politician, you should prepare to join Ken Clarke for a pint in convivial retirement at the Dog and Duck. Things may not change dramatically at this election, but the trend is irreversible: for the liberal establishment that has managed Britain’s decline since 1945, the jig is up.