It can’t surprise that Mr. Colevile is a man of High Privelidge, wedded to a toxic Thatcherite Political Nostalgia, that is employed in its various regitsters?
Headline: Starmer is stumbling but it’s too early for Tories to celebrate
Sub-headline: It’s one thing to promise to do better next time, another to persuade voters to believe that
In the first paragraphs Mr. Colvile primes the reader with his ‘just one of the fellas’ self-presentation:
In struggling to explain the spate of injuries affecting his new club, Swindon Town, Ian Holloway has happened upon an unusual explanation. The club’s training ground, the manager believes, is haunted — so he’s going to ask his wife to carry out a spiritual cleansing.
Perhaps, once she’s done, Mrs Holloway should pay a trip to Downing Street. Since entering office, Keir Starmer seems to have become a living embodiment of that Simpsons meme in which Bart laments that this is the worst day of his life, and Homer corrects him: worst day of your life so far.
Editor: To add some important political precursors to Mr. Colevile’s essay, this Reader can recall reading the first edition of Paul Johnson’s book of 1983.
Editor: Here is the Mises Institute Robert Nisbet in the New York Times of June 26, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7: the final paragraphs of Mr. Nisbet’s essay :
…
As this sample of chapters fairly shouts, ”Modern Times” presents a world that has been mostly grim and depressing during the last 60 years. Looking only at the United States we may, if we choose, take comfort in advances in medicine, high technology and mass production of consumer goods. But, welcome as they may be, these advances are hardly likely to be of much effect against the steady decline of economic productivity; the continuous advance of statism, irrespective of administration; the serious, perhaps calamitous degradation of our culture, starting with the educational system, and the constant threat of inflation, massive deficits and high interest rates. I am thinking only of this country. Anyone who can find more hope elsewhere in the world is welcome to try.
Mr. Johnson concludes his book with an overview and assessment under the heading, ”Palimpsests of Freedom.” As that title indicates, he finds some good signs among the bad events he has recounted. He is correct in taking comfort in the death of any serious belief in socialism and statism in the West at the present time. He is correct also in his perception that the social sciences, even economics, and the ideologies embedded in them, are in the doldrums, suggesting that a new start may be made one of these days on getting back to ”the proper study of mankind” -man. I have reservations, though, about his notion that sociobiology might be that new start. On the other hand, if Mr. Johnson means that, on the evidence of human history and especially that of the 20th century, we may well have to wait a few hundred thousand years for improvement of the human lot through the same evolutionary processes that brought homo sapiens into being, I can’t argue; he just may be right. In the meantime, we can take a great deal of intellectual pleasure in his book, which is a truly distinguished work of history.
The result is a state of play in which British politics looks — if you’re allowed to use this kind of ablist metaphor these days — like a bunch of one-legged men in an arse-kicking contest. Reform will surely make gains in the council elections, and may well become the main opposition in Wales. But neither it nor the Tory party is yet strong enough to knock the other out.
Badenoch has made a promising start as leader (and I’m not just saying that because I introduced her on stage). But the Conservatives still have a huge amount of brand damage to repair. Labour is floundering on both sides of the border — in Scotland it has again fallen behind the SNP, leading Scottish Labour to denounce Rachel Reeves’s totemic cuts to the winter fuel payment.
Ed Davey, for his part, seems more interested in reaching No 1 than No 10, his main contribution to the national debate in recent weeks being the release of a Christmas charity single, recorded with a group of carers, called Love Is Enough. Having listened to it, I am prepared to donate quite a large amount if it will guarantee that no one else has to.
Recently, the pollster James Kanagasooriam — who first came up with the idea of the red wall — proposed a new model of the political cycle. He argued that it’s not just about voters moving between left and right, but the level of “block dominance”. Essentially, parties win elections when they unite a block of voters on the left or right. But as they become more unpopular, they fracture their own coalition and unify disillusioned voters around the most likely challenger on the other side.
Labour’s support base appears to be breaking down with unparalleled speed. The big question — especially given the recent shattering of the Tories’ own coalition — is whether voters eventually coalesce around one opposition option, or whether we’re in for a messy, muddled, multiparty age.
How very puzzling that Colevile fails to mention Mrs. Thatcher famous/infamous decalartion, that ‘Tony Blair was my greatest accomplishment’ : in sum Mr. Colevile is attacking the grandchild of the Iron Lady, that is Kier Starmer, as titular leader of New Labour! With Tony Blair dehind the curtain, controling the levers of power?
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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