Why is no one interested in politics?

 

The year 2024 could turn out to be one of the most monumental years in British politics, but no one is interested.

Labour could win 450 seats and more. The Conservatives could be reduced to 100 or even less. It is possible that the Lib Dems might be the opposition.

In Scotland it is reasonable to expect that the SNP will be reduced to less than 20 seats. After the past week things may be even worse for the SNP. There may come a point when enough Scots decide to punish the SNP by voting for the party most likely to defeat the SNP in each constituency. In that case the SNP could be reduced to single figures. Yet still no one is interested.

Because I write a lot about politics, I have a sort of crude barometer of how much people are interested. Last year when Nicola Sturgeon resigned and when the SNP had a leadership election and there were frequent new revelations, the number of my readers soared. This year the number has slowed, and I expect during the long summer until the Autumn election it will slow again. By the time of election day no one will be reading, and no one will discover the result of the election because no one will care.

Scottish nationalists have given up on the SNP because they rightly have concluded that it is not really interested in obtaining Scottish independence. This was the real damage of the Sturgeon scandal. It made her look like a fraud. She kept promising a referendum next year, but that was just to keep support for the SNP high, but there was never a legal route to a second referendum, and she knew it. She was promising what she could not deliver. But without the goal of independence why pay money into a fighting fund, why deliver SNP leaflets, why indeed support a rather second-rate Holyrood if it is not a stepping stone to freedom? Why indeed?

If the SNP is reduced to a handful of MPs it will turn into the Parti Québécois and everyone will conclude that neither Scotland nor Quebec will become independent. This puts the SNP back to the 1970s and 1980s. A second referendum won’t be a next year, nor will it be a generation away it will be over the rainbow in never never land.

This leaves us with right/left politics. Nationalism in Great Britain will be dead and there is no prospect of Northern Ireland joining Ireland partly because most voters in Northern Ireland don’t support it, but more importantly because Ireland can’t afford it and would require the UK to pay to lose its territory as some sort of reparation for 1000 years of being beastly to the Irish. This no doubt will happen after we have paid trillions to everyone who was descended from the slaves that the Royal Navy alone freed in the 19th century.

But there is no right/left politics, which is why we cease to be interested. There is just left/left/centre politics and no real distinction between the major parties.

There is rivalry between Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems, but like football teams they are all playing the same game and the rivalry is mainly tribal and the players care most about their wages and don’t give a damn about the fans.

There are two sensible political positions in a modern society, Blairism and Thatcherism. Socialism hasn’t worked anywhere, but there are a few societies such as the Scandinavian countries where a sort of social democracy works well. We know that Thatcherism works because it did work. Britain was more prosperous when she ceased to the Prime Minister than when she started, much more. Other countries which have pursued low taxes, free markets, free trade, and undercutting competitors have also been successful.

The Conservative Party is like a football team that gives up a winning formula called scoring goals in favour of one of kicking the ball into their own goal.

The British electorate should be offered a genuine choice. Give Labour a chance. If it makes a mess of the economy kick it out. At that point we need an alternative economic policy.

But perversely the Conservative Party having succeeded in the 1980s with Thatcherism and sometimes while pretending to be still Thatcherite have rejected everything that Thatcher stood for. People with Conservative views are rejected as candidates in favour of those with views that are indistinguishable from the Lib Dems and Labour.

It’s not only stupid. It’s undemocratic, because it makes elections pointless. We end up with rule by a sort of oligarchy of Lib, Lab, Con all in the centre while pretending to have democracy offering a choice. No wonder no one is interested.

There are this year different priorities. From the Scottish point of view, we need to defeat the SNP, so vote sensibly depending on where you live. There is no point voting Reform in Scotland as it won’t win any seats. There is lots of information available telling you who has the best chance of defeating the SNP so use it.

In the longer term we need to campaign for UK democracy to reflect the view of ordinary people rather than elites. The vast majority of Brits would vote to limit migration to 100,000 per year, send illegal migrants back to where they came from, and ditch woke ideas like critical race theory and transgenderism. But we have no chance of getting what we want, because the same elite rules no matter who we vote for.

We need to first lessen the power of Holyrood and then abolish it. If nationalism has been defeated it no longer has a purpose. If the UK is one country indivisible it does not need parliaments in pretend countries.

But more important of all we need voters to have a genuine alternative and for political parties to deliver what they promise. This can only happen when there is a choice.

I believe that bringing back choice to UK politics requires the Conservative Party either to cease to exist and be replaced by a Thatcherite party or far better for it to be taken over by true Conservatives with the One Nation Conservatives invited to join the Lib Dems where they belong.

A big enough defeat of the Conservative Party will bring about a realignment of UK politics. Perhaps then we will become interested again.

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