Today Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, is going to blame the Tories for screwing up the country.
Meanwhile Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, has just vowed to bend the law so that bad people don’t have human rights.
And in the US, a president who refused to step down has warned that oligarchs are about to seize control of democracy.
This is politics on its head. We are entering an era in which Left and Right no longer matter, where class and wealth dictate what you will die for and indeed how you will die, and where the social media meritocracy means the only power you have is who to follow. In short: we are all peasants now.
Some are happier about that than others
Except those who aren’t. The ones with massive online followings, the ones who control the algorithms, the ones who own the source of knowledge. Just like the newspaper barons of yore, the Hearsts or the Beaverbrooks, the tech tycoons of Silicon Valley already control your news, your entertainment, your advertising, and as such they control your wallet and your vote.
The nerds have inherited the Earth, but few noticed. Throw a brick and asks whoever it hits whether they will trust their elected government to implement biometric ID cards: they will say ‘HELL NO’. Then ask that same person to take out their phone, open it with a AI-powered face scan or thumbprint, and search ‘who has my biometric data’. When they wonder how to vote for, scrutinise or eject a 24-year-old Californian despot from their lives, inform them the only way is to dump the phone. The point you have made will then be instantly lost from their cerebral cortex, because truth isn’t valued by the tech we find too convenient to ditch.
The world’s most cynical opportunists spotted this coming years ago, which is why politics is now dominated by the kind of businessman who would not seem out of place operating out the back of a three-wheeled van. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are like two Peckham cockroaches, capable of surviving any scandal, justice system, milkshake, sniper, riot, or kiss-and-tell in a way no traditional politician could.
It is not ideological epiphanies driving people to enter politics today. It is the awareness that politics as we know it is dead, and everything is about to boil down to cold, hard, cash.
Meta to axe 5% of lowest-performing staff as Zuckerberg talks of need for more ‘masculine energy’
Elon Musk pictured at home
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Image:
Disney)
If you have enough money, you will vote for the status quo. If you do not, you will opt for whatever alternative presents itself. Entrepreneurs, business-owners, and senior managers will face off against the wage-earners, the service industries, those who feel hard done by. That was Brexit. That is the line sold by populists. It is a spectrum on which everyone reading this will find themselves in an uncomfortable place, compared to what they always believed their politics to be. This is game theory IRL.
Keir Starmer hopes to overcome it by abandoning dogma and being more reliable. Elon Musk sees no reason to pussyfoot around it. Joe Biden, in his outgoing speech, can just vaguely see it on the horizon, but unfortunately his brain has taken ten years to compute what Trump knew in his gut a decade ago.
The problem, right now, is that the managerial class want stability, stable economies, less Brexit, while the workers want to upend it like a game of Monopoly they’ve no hope of winning. Politicians of all parties have found the votes lie in the chaos, with elections depending on lies, glitz, and cash in a way they haven’t since rotten boroughs were last in vogue.
When politics becomes the property of the rich, we’re back to serfdom, dependent on whatever Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg is content for us proles to know. Citizens with a social media account tell themselves they’re the only truth-tellers, and forget everything they see and hear is the product of the last thing they were told. We may as well bed down with the swine as our ancestors did, for despite our shiny things the overlords treat us no better.
Badenoch blames rape gangs on peasants, but forgets that in every other respect her party, once the natural home of land-owning country squires, must become working-class to survive. Labour chopped off those roots in distaste, but relies now on a coalition of the graduate middle class and those who aspire to be part of it, which kills the radicalism it would need to thrive. Reform likes to think it’s the Wat Tyler of modern Britain, but like him relies on the economic crunch of a pandemic to make the point.
What drives the new world order is inflation, which is high because of war and disease, and their combined effects on a global financial system that is more interdependent than ever before. Inflation booted Biden, Trudeau, Scholz and a host of others; it will do, soon, for Putin. All around the world, where prices are rising out of control the governments are teetering. In the UK, with inflation at 2.5%, Rachel Reeves has put us in the global safe zone, whatever your socials want you to believe.
‘Them’ and ‘us’ has never been so stark, nor so confusing. Our politicians have never been so ill-equipped to face the wave about to break upon us. When the same currents tug at you, remember this: you can either drown, or ride the wave. But never forget why the wave came.