Circling the Drain

It's difficult to appreciate how, just three years ago, the Conservative Party was the pivot around which British politics turned. These days, it's an uninteresting side show followed by a diminishing band of aficionados and weird people. Kemi Badenoch has proved herself incapable of kicking the football, let alone powering one into the back of Labour's open goals, and everywhere the party is floundering, completely disoriented by getting dumped out of office and watching Reform become the primary opposition to Keir Starmer's government.

As we head into the summer recess, a couple of things remind us of their decrepitude. The Graun's man in Wales, Will Hayward writes about the party's looming extinction. 10% of their vote passed away between 2019 and 2024 with a further 40% due to grow angel wings before 2029, as per everywhere else in Britain young people are not replacing the base like-for-like. Going in for the Nigel Farage cosplay is not helping them, nor are efforts at trying to create new points of resentment over Welsh Labour's basic income pilots. No one is interested, and that means next year they could be wiped completely from the Senedd.

But all is not lost. There was a spasm of excitement on Thursday about a speech Danny Kruger delivered to a deserted House of Commons. He argued for a restoration of Christianity in politics. In an intervention the polyester populist Robert Jenrick described as "magnificent", Kruger expressed concern that Christianity had been ejected from our shared cultural space by two other religions. One was Islam, and the other ... was "woke". He said,

It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities, and nations ... [it] must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine ... It must be banished from public life — from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services."

Yes, Kruger wants to mobilise Christian values against a sensibility that finds exploitation, prejudice, and poverty abhorrent, and in its weakest version asks that we treat each other with respect. A Tory effort in this direction is likely to have as much effect turning around their party's fortunes as Badenoch's performances at Prime Minister's Questions.

What it does underline is the predicament the Tories are in. Everyone knows about their crisis of political reproduction and how their ageing voter base condemns them to dwindling relevance. This point is no longer a fringe belief confined to this corner of the internet, but is the political common sense in Westminster and mainstream political comment. Except, evidence suggests, the Tories and their press. Without any understanding of their predicament, and hemmed in by a strategy that cannot concede anything that could raise political expectations, their reflex is to double down on their core premises to try and consolidate themselves following a shattering defeat. It's what they did between 1997 and 2005, which gave them a foundation for the faux liberal Toryism that came next. And arguably, Boris Johnson followed a similar strategy when he became leader. Hard on Brexit, tough on immigration, showed his opponents the door and the British public lapped it up.

Except this time, it is not working. Doing Farage impersonations is pointless while the real deal is cruising the country, gliding from one soft ball interview to another. It's also a waste of time when the things the Tories are concentrating on, immigration, war on woke, are issues that, from the standpoint of the people they're addressing, they've demonstrably failed on. As Starmer nver misses a chance to remind the hapless Badenoch, the Tories put rocket boosters under net immigration. They're just not credible, which is something neither she nor the heir presumptive can do a thing about. Except publicly, desperately endorsing more and more extreme politics, which Farage is savvy enough to keep his distance from. And without the levers of power, the Tories cannot demonstrate how much they mean it this time.

Here we are then. The activities of the Tories are no longer the doings of an organisation in charge of its destiny. They are reflexes, a scramble of unthought reactions as this once mighty party circles the drain.

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What I've Been Reading Recently

Still can't write about politics for the time being, so here are the books I read during June. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of science fiction.

Bloody Panico! by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Shelter by Dave Hutchinson
Nova by Samuel R Delany
Run, Come See Jerusalem! by Richard C Meredith
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
White August by John Boland
Stars and Bones by Gareth L Powell
The Kings of Eternity by Eric Brown
The Aesthetic Dimension by Herbert Marcuse
Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

What stands out the most? Why, it's our old friend Marcuse! Still a bit of a dead dog where social theory is concerned (despite the valiant efforts of friend-of-the-blog Paul Ewert and his case for Marcuse's continued relevance), nevertheless his book on aesthetics has been on the to-read list for a very long time. And, though it's been even longer since I last read any of Herbs's screeds, this came across as accessible and super interesting. A far cry from the footnote it usually receives in Marcuse primers. As it's "safe", I might write something on it should the mood take.

Starting with novels that didn't quite make the mark for me, Dave Hutchinson's Shelter is a great post-apocalyptic number ... until it isn't. Skipping along at a decent pace with great characterisation and vivid world building, in the middle of the book there are a series of indiscriminate and cruel murders which, when all is revealed, does not fit the character responsible. I won't say more than that, except I found it jarring and not believable. Delany's Nova didn't do it for me either. Perhaps because of illness I couldn't focus on it, but for such a comparatively short and well-regarded book I found it something of a chore. Whiteley's The Loosening Skin had an intriguing alt-history premise. People shed their skins reptile-like about every 8-12 years, leading to different psychologies - shedding skin often occasions the break up of relationships and individual reinvention. This is also a world where the discarded skins of celebrities and prominent people are sought after. Loosening starts well with the disappearance of a film star-turned-director's skins from his vault but after the half-way point it peters out and gets lost in its own meander. You might say the book sheds its own plot and decides to do something different. Our last deflation comes from Gwyneth Jones. Probably a comment on how Tony Blair fancied himself a rock star PM, in her near future Jones imagines a Britain where rock stars take over and have to deal with Islamist uprisings, celebrity sex crimes, and bringing together a shattered England. It's well written but, for me, doesn't go anywhere or say anything particularly pertinent.

On the better pile, Herbert's third Dune book was alright, but hardly a masterpiece. It certainly hasn't dissuaded me that if you show me someone who says Dune is their favourite sf novel, you're actually showing me someone who hasn't read much sf. I enjoyed Run, Come See Jerusalem! - a time travel story that's short but as interesting as it is entertaining. The wild card here was Boland's White August, a 1950s proto techno thriller that involves evildoers plunging Blighty into a permanent snow storm in the middle of August. It's a race against time to find the culprit before everyone dies. Because the snow is (inexplicably) radioactive. Silly fun told from the standpoint of scientists and prime ministers, but nowhere near the heights of a Wyndham or John Christopher. Gareth L Powell's Stars and Bones was a well put together modern (2022) space opera. If you like the doings of Peter F Hamilton, you'll get on well with this further episode in the left's take over of sf's dominant sub-genre. But my book of the month is Eric Brown's The Kings of Eternity. Like his Kethani, there's a lot of food, drink, and immortality. There's also a laid back, life-is-good quality to Kings as well, even as the stakes build and there's a growing realisation that not all is well with the world. Brown here is gentle, but not cosy, and so manages an ambience that is uniquely his among contemporary sf writers. A real shame he's no longer with us.

What have you been reading recently?

Five Most Popular Posts in June

It was a touch quieter this month on the blog. More anon. But tradition is tradition and as a stickler for stability of expectations, here are the five posts that did the best in June.

1. Taken for a Mug
2. Geoffrey Wheatcroft at the End of the Tories
3. From U-Turn to U-Bend
4. What I've Been Reading Recently
5. Local Council By-Elections May 2025

With thin pickings to choose from, the great internet travelling public gravitated toward the substantive pieces. As they always do! In at one, ee have a meditation on Zia Yusuf's resignation from Reform chair, something he rescinded in short order. Demonstrating that the man is still a mug. Number two was my look at another entry in the death-of-the-Tories literature, this time being from someone who partly influenced my book (plug, plug). This was followed by Rachel Reeves's partial retreat on winter fuel allowance. A concession much overshadowed in recent days re: the government's disorderly retreat on cutting disability support. And then we have two of the regular fillers. A look at recent books read, and a round up of May's council by-elections.

What's going on? Normally happy to mouth off on anything and everything political, this month I've missed a short war, two instances of the government's authoritarian overreach, the latest round of Trumpist degeneracy, and the greatest threat to Keir Starmer's authority he's yet faced. Usual grist to the blogging mill you wmight think, but unfortunately I've had to take a rest. It started with the worst cold I've ever had, and immediately dumped upon it was something that has required nearly all of my energy. And because of this, I've given over evenings to winding down and low effort posting. I cannot say when normalcy will resume.

July could bring an upturn in posting, and it might not. Whatever, I'll keep this place ticking over for the forseeable.