The Tories' Terrible Truth

Apologies for trying the patience of everyone reading, but this is another post about Kemi Badenoch. Some might have called her Thursday speech a relaunch, but for the Tory leader this was a further opportunity to set out her stall. And how does she wish to be known? As a "truth teller".

This self-designated title has a long history in politics, and it's always the right who lay claim to its mantle. Nigel Farage has built a career from "telling the truth" about the European Union, immigration, and the liberal elite. To his mind and those of his followers, he's cut through the obfuscation and crap and says it how it is, regardless of who gets offended and whinges about "you can't say that!". Boris Johnson was also a skilled practitioner of this form of politics. And all extreme right parties and demagogic figures use the same ploy - Trump, the AfD, the Le Pen family, Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban. A consistent pattern of behaviour.

Badenoch's truth-telling, however, alighted upon the failings of her party. She said politicians needed to accept and acknowledge mistakes, of which the Conservatives have made a fair few. She criticised the rush to leave the EU without having a plan for afterwards in place (you might recall the Japanese state did more contingency planning for Brexit than the UK did). She said setting the net zero targets without any idea of how to achieve them was another. And her party promised to cut immigration, but the numbers kept going up was probably the most serious of all. For Badenoch, this was symptomatic of a politics of wanting to be popular, of saying things the electorate wanted to hear.

The Tory leader didn't get the memo that admitting mistakes usually requires an apology, but that was too much to ask for. Instead, Badenoch promised there won't be any empty promises from her. With her Tories, the voters are going to have to face the facts. And we know what these are going to be: she's spent 2025's first fortnight exploiting sexual abuse and making explicitly racist political points about them.

Is there a grain of truth to her explanation about why the Tories have failed? Yes. The problem her party has is its strategic addiction to the politics of negativity, of undermining the efficacy of the state if not dismantling it and offering nothing but the demonisation of minorities for its support to rail against. With Brexit exhausted as an issue, the last five years of Tory party strategy can fruitfully be interpreted as the search for new glue to stick a coalition of voters together with. Hence, for example, why Rishi Sunak was set on burning down the house to get his Rwanda deal done. The problem with this is a party cannot wind its base up indefinitely. During their 14 years in government, the Tories were able to atomise British society further, create new points of distrust and division and pull the trick of presenting themselves as the only force capable of mending the insecurities they deepened. Yet if a party promises to do something about it and then doesn't, a slab of its support will sheer away.

This is what has happened to the Tory base. Its most racist and backward sections, those most excited by the rhetoric of division, have found a new home in Reform. Unlike the Tories, Farage has not been tested by office. He's established credibility on these issues through his long campaign against the European Union and, latterly, immigration. Married to his garrulous manner, he's become the beneficiary of the Tories' beggar-thy-neighbour policy pitches since 2019 - especially so after Johnson was forced from the scene and Farage re-entered the fray last summer.

And here's where Badenoch's problems are. Chasing after the right, on paper, makes sense for the Tories. They need to put their base back together again before they can contest Labour in a general election. But in practice, because the party's stock is so low with right wing voters, it doesn't matter how far to the right they go it looks like they're trying to catch up with Reform. They're seen to be doing it because they think they have to, not because they believe. What we saw with Robert Jenrick's conversion to the extreme right during the leadership election now applies to te Conservatives as a whole. Their posturing is tarred with the brush of inauthenticity, which makes Badenoch's gamble to try and unite the right under her leadership one unlikely to pay off. Indeed, if the polls are any indication the hole the Tories are in is getting deeper.

Yet there is nowhere else for Badenoch to go. She was elected on a right wing platform, nearly all of her party are committed to the rightist strategy of renewal, but that is inadvertently feeding the Reform beast. Every pulse of the Tory id is screaming that this is definitely going to work, that this path not only makes them feel good, it will make them come good too. But it won't. This is the hard truth about Badenoch's positioning and the party's orientation, and it's one you can guarantee she'll never mention at her next relaunch.

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Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity

Can you imagine a world where a three inch tumble is fatal? Welcome to Mesklin, the planetary setting of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. This book, which was nominated for a retro Hugo and is now immortalised as a Gollancz Masterwork, slots in the (largely superseded) 'howdoit' tradition of science fiction. I.e. the presentation of a challenging engineering problem, and how our characters are able to solve it. And if we're lucky, there's an interesting and entertaining story along the way. If Arthur C Clarke was the early British contribution to this strand of SF, Clement was his American counterpart.

In Mission, humans several centuries hence are investigating Mesklin. It's a poisonous, frigid world that gets up to a balmy -50C in the summer. If that wasn't bad enough, the planet's gravity is punishingly uncomfortable to outright fatal for flimsy earthlings. Because the world spins so rapidly, it's tolerable near to and on the equator where gravity is only three times that of Earth. But towards the poles it ramps up to over 600Gs, which would turn us into bloody puddles. What happens if the exploration of this world lands an advanced expensive probe near one of the poles, but its gravity-nullifying engines fail and it remains there marooned? How to get it back? This is the task our on-site boffins have to accomplish.

Luckily, Mesklin is inhabited by intelligent life forms. The imaginatively-named Mesklinites are roughly at a pre-gunpowder level of technology, and are scattered across the southern hemisphere in small states. They also think their world, which is an oblate spheroid thanks due to its rapid spin (a day is approximately 18 minutes long), is bowl-shaped. The equator represents the edge of what is known and, presumably, no one has crossed it nor has anyone sallied down from the north. It also happens that Charles Lackland, the member of the planetary investigation team that volunteered to reside on the surface, has struck up a friendship with Barlennan, a ship's captain, explorer, and trader. He handily brings a crew to the party. The Mesklinites are well adapted to their world too. They're foot long centipede analogues with their equivalent of opposable thumbs. A bargain is struck between the two: retrieve or fix the probe and riches will be his. Barlennan receives four radios and regular weather reports in this fetch quest. They have to overcome environmental hazards, hostile wildlife, spear chucking tribes, supercilious bureaucrats, as well as teaching pre-industrial sailors how to fix a rocket.

Like Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, Clement's book doesn't have a fantastic reputation these days - especially among booktubers for whom whizz bang is largely king. Clement's characterisation isn't fantastic, it's low on action, and there are info dumps - albeit of the physical sciences sort and not the vibrant lore that accompanies most genre fiction. But again, like the Clarke, Mission exceeded my expectations. There are only really three, maybe four (if you count the planet), characters and they do the job. Barlennan is shown to be a wily operator with the gift of the gab and an ability to make the most of whatever situation Clement puts him in, The rapport he has with Lakeland is believable, even if it the captain has ulterior motives. Their relationship works to move the plot along which, again, is about solving a seemingly intractable problem. There is no superfluity, and we skip around Gravity's equator in very little time.

Perhaps the "boring" verdict lies in its being emblematic of a zeitgeist that has long passed, and profitably lampooned by the Fall Out series of video games and TV series: the 1950s flavoured hopes in science. When the Mesklinites finally reach the probe Barlennan demands, as the price for his further cooperation, the technological know how for guns, rockets, radio, and so on. Instead Lakeland and co. teach him the scientific method, which presumably would make Barlennan very rich upon his return home and (hopefully) improve the overall lot of his people. This speaks of the American character of US SF of the period. For the Clarke, proceedings were dutiful, unshowy. It was just professionals doing their job. Here the challenges are met by mustering Barlennan's faceless crew. His first mate, Dondragmer, has a knack for conjuring up schemes for getting them out of their scrapes but whatever the challenge, the spotlight is on them. They're the individuals who stand out and front the labour of others. In Moondust, the collective effort saved the Selene and that was that. In Gravity, it's these two who are the heroes, they're the ones that get centred, and are going to be the reapers of the rewards. This makes it as American as Clarke's adventures on the Moon locate it as British.

But there's perhaps a gentle warning in Clement's novel. Science can do wonderful things - it can transport humans 11 light years to another world, for one. But even here there are limits. No matter the expertise and the systems we design to support them, things can always go wrong. And with the Mesklinites, despite their pre-industrial level of development they know their world better than our star-bestriding descendents do. Rather than an uncritical celebration of postwar technocracy, there's a note here telling us not to become arrogant, not to presume to know everything, a hesitation injuncting us to take care. Only fools, or people set on losing an expensive space probe, would ignore common sense and local knowledge.

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Hyping Farage

Has the New Statesman got a Nigel Farage fixation? It appears to find Reform's leader/owner beguiling. But there's more to it than that. Their coverage has gone from simply covering what he's saying and doing to (arguably) boosting his project. Before Christmas, the august Andrew Marr was asking, in all seriousness, if Farage could become the next Prime Minister. The latest podcast speculates about the ability of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to destroy him, as if Farage is a figure of equal social weight. And in the magazine since last June, we've had articles like 'Reform isn't going anywhere', 'Reform could haunt a Labour government', 'Reform is Labour's problem now', 'How dangerous is Reform to Labour?', and 'Will Reform win in your local council?'. It's one thing for the right wing press to big up Reform, and quite another for the centre left's magazine of choice to indulge it.

This latest entry in the sub-genre comes courtesy of George Eaton, who has set out to explain "why Farage is turning left". This follows comments Farage made to Politics Joe last week in which he said there was common ground between him and Jeremy Corbyn. They are both "anti-establishment" and critical of the European Union. He said Corbyn's critique of the EU was couched in oppositional terms to big business, a position he happened to share. Brussels is "good for big banks and big businesses and bad for everybody else. Well, he was pretty much right." What Eaton then supplies is evidence for Reform's "left turn" - water nationalisation (cos Labour won't do it), and protecting British steel.

Should Labour be worried? Judging by the panicky anonymous "red wall" MP quotes that accompany such pieces, some are bricking it. And of course they are. Finding a Labour parliamentarian who understands the people Reform attracts is as rare as a tin of Quality Street with a decent amount of triangles. As previously explained, there are hard limits to the extent Reform can become "pro-working class" and adopt left-sounding positions. And when such "policy" is taken on board, they're adjuncts and nice-sounding afterthoughts. Does anyone seriously believe that a Farage-led government would renationalise anything, especially when his City pals benefit handsomely from the private monopolies that own essential infrastructure?

The extreme right have form for tacking left when occasion demands. Reform is not a fascist party, but its antecedents were. The British Union of Fascists, the National Front, the BNP, all had "left wing" positions on economics. So did the interwar continental fascist parties, and when these outfits became governments they turned the state into a straightforward criminal enterprise. The "socialism" in National Socialism was for optics to compete with the socialism of labour movements and mass working class parties. The Nazis, for instance, nationalised nothing. In fact, they were pioneers of privatisation. But the fascists then and the extreme right now can appear "credible" on these issues, despite their record, for two reasons. Putting public distance between themselves and consensus economic opinion underscores their anti-establishment creds, as Farage noted. And second, it's because their core support faces left and right simultaneously. The petit bourgeois roots of the extreme right are riven with status anxiety, and fear being forced down into into the employee class, of having to work for someone else. Downward social mobility can be "caused" by workers demanding too high wages, or expecting entitlements like breaks, sensible working hours, and time off. They are never as reliable as the proprietor. Or workers as an organised collective might be expecting too much from the state, and demand higher taxes on businesses to pay for better public services. Or the petit bourgeois could be out-competed by big businesses who share their market, or screwed over on contracts or suffer late payments. Small business is, from their point of view, where the pathologies of labour and capital collide. They're pushed from pillar to post, and it's why the authoritarian programme of extreme right parties resonate with them. They offer a middle road that puts the two great forces of capitalism in their place and allows for stability. The cypher for that can be the great leader/charismatic personality, the nation, or a menu of tough-sounding promises that would restore order to the world (have you read the 2024 Reform manifesto?).

Therefore, talk of a "left turn" is meaningless. Extreme right parties swing this way and that with the weather. It's in the DNA of their core support, but the moves left are always rhetorical and subordinate to a specific set of political priorities.

The more interesting question is why the New Statesman and Labour Party politicians are hyping Farage when Reform will always pose more of a threat to the Tories. And, I'm sorry to say, the explanation does not lie in "genuinely mistakes" or cluelessness. It's a politics of handling expectations, of Labour not offering too much so politics (or, to be more accurate, class relations) are easier to manage. And one way of doing this is talking up the threat Reform poses the to sort of Britain Labour supporters would like to see. Invoking the threat of a demon opposition is tough when the Tories are bumping along the bottom, but with a comparably more dynamic and more extreme threat, a la Reform, some will stick to Keir Starmer and Labour for fear that something even worse than the Tories is in the offing. What the New Statesman and friends are doing is reminding us of this fact.

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Baudrillard Vs Trump and Musk

It's a while since Acid Horizon product was last featured as a gap filler on this blog, a tradition I'm happy to resurrect on nights where the writing isn't happening. In this episode the comrades use and think against our old friend Jean Baudrillard on the nature of evil. As good Deleuzians, the hypemeister of hyperreality is found wanting. But in addition there are interesting insights into the authoritarian character of the Trumpist/tech bro crossover project - particularly their fondness for the obsolete forms of disciplinary power, which is especially noteworthy as social media platforms are the basic technologies of the control society.

Comfortable in the Gutter

Putting aside the small matter of election night, this has been the worst moment for the Conservative Party since the Liz Truss government visibly disintegrated in the Commons. By "this moment", we are talking about the wholesale adoption of rape gang panic by Kemi Badenoch and the motley crew on the opposition front bench. Yet this same leadership will be toasting the week. As far as they're concerned, the Tories are back on the map and hogging the limited media space available to opposition parties. For once, the conversation isn't all about the doings of Nigel Farage.

Let's look back at the disaster. As forecast in November, the Tories have tried making common cause with Trump, Elon Musk, and the oligarchical interest they front. With Musk's turn against Farage and calls for his replacement as Reform's leader, the Tories have served themselves up as the most deserving supplicants. Andrew Griffith, the shadow for business and trade, marked the initiative with the most excruciating flattery, in which he credits Musk with "saving humanity" for purchasing Twitter. This came just after Badenoch wholesale adopted the call for another public inquiry into grooming gangs, an issue that she had previously shown no interest in nor would likely have done if Musk had stayed off the ketamine and taken an early night.

The repugnance and opportunism of the Tories was on full display at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions. Because it was obvious she was going to press for an inquiry, Keir Starmer easily turned the tables on her. He condemned the Tories for appending their inquiry call to that afternoon's child protection bill, which they voted against when it fell. So much for caring about child abuse. He attacked the Tories for not doing anything to implement the recommendations of the Alexis Jay report on grooming and rape gangs in Rochdale, leaving it to gather dust on a Whitehall shelf for two years. And most damning of all, Starmer skewered Badenoch on the fact that as Minister for Women and Equalities and as a member of the Commons, she had not once spoken on the issue since entering the House.. If that wasn't bad enough, later that afternoon Badenoch's spox told the lobby hacks that she hadn't met abuse survivors nor thought she needed to. If it waddles like opportunism and quacks like opportunism.

The Tory adoption of the second inquiry cause is about the shoring up the party, nothing else. As we saw last weekend with Jenrick's rant about "alien cultures" and language that resonates with white nationalist 'great replacement' psychosexual paranoia, Badenoch's Tories have departed the norms of conventional conservatism for the politics of Viktor Orban, the National Rally, and AfD. The Tory hope is enough people will have noticed the row in Westminster and start asking questions about why Labour are keen to avoid an inquiry into the rape and abuse of young women by criminal gangs of Pakistani heritage men, nudge nudge, wink wink. But the Tory problem is they're can easily be outflanked by Reform. For instance, Musk's anointed one, Rupert Lowe, demanded an inquiry focusing just on this aspect of rape gangs. The Tories, so far, haven't been so crude with their racism. Reform has no need for such niceties. And, of course, Starmer is not the only one who can call Badenoch out for her opportunism - Farage is well placed too.

This doesn't leave the Tories in the most advantageous of positions. Starmer has no problem batting away Badenoch's underhanded bowls, and Farage is better placed to reap any electoral disaffection. The Tories might be glad they're making headlines again, but it's not doing anything to consolidate their shaky foundations and is doing nothing for winning back the former support they lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. All they've managed is confirming how comfortable they are in the gutter.

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Donald Trump's Expansionist Threats

Having seen Elon Musk cause transatlantic agonies in Britain, Donald Trump had to make a bigger international splash. At a news conference on Tuesday morning, the president-elect reiterated his intention to buy Greenland from Denmark, take back the Panama canal (and use economic and military means to get his way), and threaten Canada about a border he described as "an artificially drawn line". For good measure, he also said he wanted to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and he expected NATO members to increase their military spending to five per cent of GDP.

To justify these imperial ambitions he has said on several occasions, most recently on Christmas day, that expansion at Denmark's and Panama's expense is essential for "national security". China, apparently, has too much of a presence at the strategically vital waterway into the Pacific and, according to Trump, US shipping has to pay an unfair premium to travel through its gates. A demonstrably false assertion. On Greenland, Trump has shown an interest since someone, in 2019, showed him a world map and he couldn't work out why it wasn't part of the United States already. And there's the small matter of extensive mineral resources US mining interests wouldn't mind getting their hands on.

For such an overweening ego, Trump's rambling "interventions" owe something to an incontinent id. To suggest Trump has ulterior motives apart from whatever spark has lit the dim corners of his limited mind affords him too much credit, but that isn't to say those around him haven't. Offering territorial expansion would play well to the base, which has recently been riled up by a dispute between Musk and MAGA over work visas and immigration. A secondary consequence might be a repeat of what we've seen domestically from other billionaires, businesses, and institutions in pre-emptively bending the knee. For example, Jeff Bezos instructing The Washington Post not to endorse anyone at the election, and Mark Zuckerberg's scrapping of "biased" fact checkers in favour of "free speech" on Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps Panama, Denmark, and Canada will pre-emptively offer concessions to sate Trump's greedy eyes.

There's further method to Trump's madness. The reason why the likes of Musk are on board the Trump train is because their politics are determined by an experiment in naked class rule. This means scrapping as many checks and balances on capital they can get away with, winding down the federal government, which includes residual social security and health entitlements, and squeezing central funding to states' budgets. Needless to say, those who mistakenly thought Trump was protecting their meagre welfare cheques are about to find out what they voted for. What's left is going to be shaken down so more federal money pours into billionaire coffers, and they'll doubly benefit from tax cuts too (though these are now another MAGA bone of contention). What Javier Milei is doing to Argentina, and what Liz Truss tried doing here is the prize, and that is a further shift in the balance between capital and labour. Though given the state of US politics, this is a move on from the dominance of capital to its unquestionable authoritarian rule. The United States economy is to become even more a billionaire's playground, with the world's largest and most advanced military there to intimidate the rest of the globe into falling in line.

This is the project, at least where Trump's elite backers are concerned. But winding the Donald up and letting him waddle into controversy is a good way of generating interference, of continually creating spectacles while the real business of looting the state and securing an even more subservient class settlement proceeds relatively unnoticed.

It's impossible to say whether this project will be successful. Everyone has a breaking point, and not even Trump can rub the faces of his mass support in it indefinitely. The MAGA row over immigration might preface far more serious disputes to come if the incoming government and, especially, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency throws millions of federal employees out of work and ratchets up the difficulties for poorer Americans and those just getting by. That's the problem with projects aiming to implement naked class rule. Existing forms of political consent break down and the truth of a society becomes apparent to everyone. And history shows those situations tend not to end well for those who've brought them into being.

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New Left Media January 2025

It's 2025, and there's enough new media projects to justify a post plugging them! Send them some new year love by checking them out.

1. Red Barrels (Podcast) (Bluesky)

2. Think and Resist (Podcast)

3. Workers' Inquiry (Podcast)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs from existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Bluesky, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months, give or take. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

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The Tory Party's Gruesome Twosome

Timing in politics is everything. Nigel Farage has seriously disappointed Elon Musk because he doesn't share his enthusiasm for Tommy Robinson. It's a good job that there are others who are willing to step into the breach between the two, such as Robert Jenrick.

On Saturday evening, the shadow justice minister penned a tweet that is the most extreme statement issued by a Tory politician in recent years. In it, he begins with the ritualistic attack on multiculturalism but quickly departs from political politesse with this:

The scandal started with the onset of mass migration. Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this. This scandal shows why we must end it.

20 years ago this was the sort of stuff Nick Griffin and the BNP would have been attacked for by the Conservative front bench. Farage has never gone as far as this, nor did Suella Braverman in her most extreme moments. You might say this is a direct challenge to the authority of Kemi Badenoch, but a day later he's still in post and there's nary a ripple of concern among Tory social media and chatterers on Conservative Home. The Tory leader herself is somewhat compromised seeing as she's jumped on the grooming gang inquiry calls, and has already used the "not all cultures are valid" line. Sacking Jenrick - and he should be sacked and stripped of the whip for this - would leave her in an awkward position.

This tawdry episode says everything about the position the Tories are in. With Reform soaking up the media attention and eating into Tory support, they've got nothing left. The MPs determined they wanted right wing leader to see Reform off and consolidate the shaky foundations of the party, and a right wing turn they indeed got. The problem for the Tories is Jenrick's an obvious opportunist who believes nothing apart from his self-advancement, and there's no sewer he won't wallow in if reeking of effluent gets him the top job. Doubly unconvincing is Badenoch whose leadership is proving spectacularly unspectacular. There are the gaffes that aren't gaffes, because she thinks about everything very seriously. And because she and the people around her are clueless, she's hitched the Tory wagon to the Trump train with all the negative consequences that means for her and the Tory party. Keir Starmer must be thanking his lucky stars to face an opposition marked by a rivalry between such a gruesome twosome.

This lurch to the far right might catch Musk's eye, especially as Badenoch and Jenrick were somewhat equivocal over the summer riots. But with the Commons resuming on Monday, the more centre right elements of the parliamentary party are going to be chuntering in their dismay. For instance, on Laura Kuenssberg former Boris Johnson advisor Samuel Kasumu accused Jenrick of inciting racial hatred. He is unlikely to be alone. It's true that Badenoch is seemingly unaware about how precarious her position is, but with this direction of travel it's probably not going to be long before she gets a rude reminder.

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Keir Starmer: A Lucky Leader?

As the snow blankets the country, Keir Starmer has been buried under an avalanche of advice. This is normal for any leading politician at this time of the year as political journos and commentators struggle to churn something out over the idle period. This time they have not had to look far for something to alight upon, as the latest unhinged criticisms of the government from Elon Musk attesst. How should Starmer try and deal with them?

In case you've been under a rock, Musk has accused Starmer of the "rape of Britain" and said Jess Phillips should be in prison for refusing a further inquiry into grooming gangs, or what Musk calls "rape genocide". For context, this is the kind of bullshit peddled by assorted fascists and neo-Nazis as an adjunct to their great replacement "theory"; that white women are being raped and having mixed race children to hasten the take over of the Western nations by black and brown people. Hence why grooming and rape gangs were okay when his friend Jeffrey Epstein organised them. Musk has undoubtedly been radicalised as he's become conscious of his political interests as a billionaire, and is banging on about this because he wants to push UK politics further to the right and visit naked class politics upon the country. As if we haven't already had a bellyful of this destructive rubbish.

Labour are on a sticky wicket. The situation demands a straightforward riposte and, because Starmer is opposed to "sticking plaster politics", retaliation in the form of enforcing the provisions of the Online Safety Act against hate speech. But this is complicated by Musk's being a powerful figure in the incoming Trump administration, and so any response would be overdetermined by Labour's customary obsequiousness to the United States, regardless of who is in office. And if that wasn't bad enough, Labour - and especially this leadership - are loathe to take billionaires on anyway.

As someone not at all fond of Wes Streeting, his comments on Laura Kuenssberg this Sunday morning walked the tightrope the government has set itself. He said the attack on Phillips was a "disgraceful smear". She and Starmer had done more to lock up rapists and "scumbags" than most people, and social media platforms should work toward online safety. He also said that the voices the government should be listening to are those of the survivors of sexual assault themselves. A text book response from the Blairite book of rebuttal. Appear to take a hard line by dismissing the argument, defend the record of one's colleagues, and proferr a course of action that steers away from more confrontation with someone Streeting, Starmer, et al would much prefer to cultivate. An effective rebuttal? I'll leave that up to readers to judge.

Writing prior to this weekend's farrago in The Lead, Zoe Grunewald argues that Labour should stick to the priorities and not get blown off course by criticism, be it from the Tories, disgruntled landowners and the like. Wisely, she suggests taking on the right on grounds of Labour's choosing instead of attempting to outdo them on immigration. It appears Starmer is in part agreement. According to Alex Wickham, there will be no new year address as such on Monday. He's going to plough on while ignoring the "gossip" and, presumably, the "distractions" of the daily headline generators. This studied aloofness didn't serve the government well over freebies or the removal of winter fuel payments, but as all the "difficult" (i.e. poor) choices are supposedly out the way Starmer can focus on the managerialism and, perhaps, recapture something of the appearance of his first week in office.

Smashing the delivery button so government churns out tractor production figures runs the risk of leaving the field to Labour's opponents, but right now that is not too bad an option. With Musk now calling for Farage's removal from Reform's leadership, the divisions among Team Trump over there are finding an echo over here. Despite toadying to Musk across the Sunday politics shows, he dared disagree with his would-be sugardaddy over the release of Tommy Robinson. Farage wants "respectable" distance between Yaxley-Lennon and his thuggery because there's only room for one senior personality on the extreme right, and undisciplined street violence is impossible to wield if one's chosen route to office is electoralism. This exacerbates divisions in Reform itself, which saw Lee Anderson of all people heckled at Reform's East Midlands conference for refusing to back Yaxley-Lennon and his thugs. Meanwhile, the Tories are nowhere with Kemi Badenoch pathetically repeating Musk's calls for inquiries into child sexual abuse, and Robert Jenrick has disgraced himself further with another racist diatribe that, at an earlier period, would have been on the receiving end of a prosecution.

Just as Boris Johnson was lucky in 2019 because of the divisions between his opponents, it's possible Musk's influence could destabilise the opposition on the right and make things easier for Labour than they might otherwise be.

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The KLF - Justified and Ancient

No time for a blog tonight, so let's have a proper tune instead.