#toryism

[blackswaneuroparedux]

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a  conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing  circumstances of the present.

Sir Roger Scruton  

[ratuszarsenal]

honestly who among us hasn't pushed the boundaries of medical hazard for the sake of wearing a binder just a bit longer. like when you're running from redcoats through scottish deserts after escaping a slaver ship and you have this tory acquaintance with you and you're not sure how he would react to you having naturals all of a sudden. like you might as well keep it on right

[letterful]

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, life, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie de siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley's dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great `I Am', harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable.

Also it is the familiar, the sense of one's unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk — the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-checked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable.

Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages.

But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, `la terre et les morts', as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand's aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet's loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle's worship of authority, and Hugo's hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, youth, life, étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky.

No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair, which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero — the rebel, l'homme fatale, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron's heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake's vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and `the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul'.

It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

— from Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.

[whatevergreen]

Do you know why I still have such a rage over the UK's 2019 election?

It's because so much of the supposedly left-wing poor "working class" North (among others) just threw aside decades of anti-Toryism to vote for the Tories or the Brexit Party (very openly just more Tories) because of Brexit.

These god damned mindless f*cking people just threw away the only chance in years for responsible, beneficial left-wing government because of Brexit and the racist xenophobic scapegoating that goes along with it. People who should have known better just swallowed a mountain of lies because it's easier to blame people who don't look like you, than the (mostly) white wealthy parasites that are bleeding people dry.

I'm tired of it all.

I'm tired of trying to excuse people for their mindless hate.

Racism and anti-lgbtq actions are greatly rising, and it sickens me that there are poor people both white and not, both straight or LGBTQ who've helped enable this because of comfortable ignorance and despicable greed.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"It did not take John Beverly Robinson long to conclude that, in the aftermath of the Rebellion, oligarchic authority now rested on a fragile and increasingly unstable foundation. He bemoaned the fact that the scruples and first principles of his beloved gentrified order seemed to have vanished in the conduct of public affairs. The old values and loyalties, indeed the British connection to Empire and its stabilities of governance, seemed to count for less and less among what remained of the Compact layer of patriarchal rulers. If Robinson would indeed oppose the drift of the times, he often privately despaired about the seeming inevitability of the displacement of a way of life, a style of paternal rule that demanded what could no longer be secured, acquiescence and unquestioning loyalty. In the face of Lord Durham’s report, which he judged “highly injurious” to “the state of public feeling in Upper Canada,” he worried about the fate of “men of judgment and right feeling.” The theatrical politicization of life in Upper Canada, culminating in the drama of reform and reaction in the 1830s, helped write finis to the undisputed right to rule of Robinson and those for whom he harboured a regard that, in its convictions and honour, could not be reproduced cavalierly. A way of political being, constituted in a particular kind of economy and lived in the vise-grip of patriarchal expanse and limitation, ended forever with the 1830s. The John Beverley Robinsons of Upper Canada knew it.

Allan Napier MacNab, staunch Tory defender of King & Country in 1837, provides an ironic comment on this passing of the ancien régime, one in which loyalty and honour figured forcefully, at the very moment that its time had both been successfully defended and historically defeated. Awarded with a Knighthood in recognition of his gallant defence of Her Majesty’s colonial interests, MacNab appeared, in the aftermath of 1837–38, to have reached the paternal pinnacle of influence and reverence. When his militia men paid him homage, presenting MacNab with a sword valued at 100 guineas, the old commander responded politely with patriarchal gratitude: “While living I shall cherish this Gift, among the richest prizes of my life – and dying, shall bequeath it, as the most venerated heir loom which a father could transmit to his Children.” But behind the public façade of familial grace lay the private recognition of the new realities, put to popular doggerel by Charley Corncobb, “poet laureate of reform”:

Toryism’s sun is set Tis down, tis gone forever Some say that it will start up yet, But will it? Nonsense, never.

As MacNab was feted by the Upper Canadian Assembly, he scrawled on the back of its printed testimonial the terse comment, “Not worth a fart.”

The ways in which that harsh judgment were lived by those who saw patriarchal authority undermined to the point of inevitable defeat have not really registered with historians, but the wounds were deep, and they cut across lines of class in ways that complicated the politics of alternative in Upper Canada in the 1830s. There is perhaps no more dramatic an indication of this than Robert Baldwin. Moderate and judicious in his politics, he recoiled from much of the popular theatre of antagonism to authority, just as he rebelled against the aribitrariness of oligarchy and compact rule. His was, ironically, one of the voices that would be heard loudest in the emergence of modern political institutions and the procedures of civil society, Baldwin’s name linked unmistakably with Responsible Government and the respectable reform of political life that flowed out of the defeat of the Rebellion, channeled in reasoned constitutionalist direction. Yet Baldwin, too, lived within the bounds of a disintegrating patriarchy, albeit of an extreme, personalized sort. By 1851 he had come to question where all the agitation of the 1830s had led. He complained bitterly of the “reckless disregard of first principles” that he judged to be running rampant in the seismic political shifts of his time. He was apprehensive about “widespread social disorganization with all of its fearful consequences.” “If the sober mind of the country is not prepared to protect our institutions,” he reflected, there was little hope for the future. As he made his exit from the political stage, a Reformer from the district of Sharon, represented in the legislature by Baldwin, wrote to the chastened Radical, William Lyon Mackenzie, offering a prescription for success in the changed political times of the 1850s: “The watchword is to be no lawyers, more farmers and machinists.” It would not quite work out that way – barristers would remain commonplace in politics – but that the matter could be articulated in such a counterposed language of class spoke tellingly about the accelerating pace of socioeconomic change.

Baldwin stood astride the class divisions of the epoch, and their uncertain outcome troubled him greatly. One critical institution – patriarchy – was obviously centrally placed in Baldwin’s appreciation. It cut deeply into the political and social relations of Upper Canada, and while it affected women, the young, and those incarcerated in the dependencies of class most adversely, it registered elsewhere as well. Baldwin was predeceased by his wife, who was also his cousin, and throughout the last years of his life he carried a written memorandum in his waistcoat pocket. It stated that should he be carried away suddenly, he was not to be buried before an incision was made into the cavity of his abdomen. It was Robert “Responsible Government” Baldwin’s last wish that he should go to his grave, his God, and eternity bearing the same surgical wound as his wife, the scar of a Caesarian section.

The power of patriarchy left its mark, then, on the bodies of those who lived within its defining authority, in the terror of loyalist repression as well as in the theatrics of dissent. It scarred the politics of popular radicalism, which never quite shed its indebtedness to the politics of a civil authority rooted in understandings of familial duty. In the hybrid, transplanted world of Upper Canadian politics in the 1830s this meant that the aspirations of those who so often staged a counter-theatre of insurrection and rebellion were destined in the short run to be thwarted. But in the longer unfolding of Canadian political culture, the blows against patriarchy and paternalism, first struck on the ambiguous anvil of class, did indeed sound the death knell of the ancien régime. Popular radicalism made history in the 1830s, if not in ways that it either entirely understood or proved able to articulate with political precision."

- Bryan Palmer, "Popular Radicalism and the Theatrics of Rebellion: The Hybrid Discourse of Dissent in Upper Canada in the 1830s," in Nancy Christie, Transatlantic subjects: ideas, institutions, and social experience in post-revolutionary British North America. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. p. 427-429

[ametal0xide]

Excellent video about how decades of toryism and neoliberalism has absolutely destroyed the UK. Particularly post-2008 crash, the inability for the government to fund anything do to the belt-tightening "no magic money tree", eternal austerity brainrot that's infested British politics has fucking wrecked this country. We need to be investing in to communities, building up our industrial capabilities, building up a carbon neutral energy grid, building new homes and key infrastructure like railways.

[themaninthegreenshirt]

"I represent a brand of Toryism, at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the establishment."

T.E. Utley

[mariacallous]

Sometimes the most obvious questions are the best. In the case of the Conservatives, the most obvious question is so glaring that one wonders why Tory politicians don’t ask it ten-times a day before breakfast: why don’t they move to the centre?

The opinion polls are predicting a Tory rout on the scale of 1906, 1945 or 1997.

Surely in the interests of preserving the Conservatives as a fighting force the party must compromise to limit its losses to Labour. Here are a couple of compromises that occur to me. They make perfect political sense until you realise that conservatism has been so radicalised that compromise now feels like treason.

First, health. When we remember the suffering of the early 2020s, we will remember covid, of course.

But we will also remember the millions on NHS waiting lists, the elderly left for hours until ambulances arrive, the cancelled operations, the sick who would work if they could be treated but cannot find a doctor, the explosion in mental illness, the needlessly prolonged pain, the needlessly early deaths.

The Conservatives ought to be doing everything they can to improve the health service before polling day – out of a reptile-brain survival instinct if nothing else.

They will not do it because in British conservatism’s ever-diminishing circles health is not a concern.

The dominant Conservative factions want a right-wing policy offer of tax cuts and immigration controls. Not one of the party’s leaders has discussed how the increase in life expectancy means the demands on the NHS of an ever-larger pensioner population make tax cuts unaffordable. Nor have I heard honest discussion of how the need for foreign health and care workers to fill the gaps in provision makes immigration essential.

Rather than face up to the impossibility of Thatcherite economics in the 21st century they prefer to change the conversation and look the other way.

Let me offer a second example, which I think Brits will soon be obsessing about.

After years of delays Brexit Britain is finally imposing border checks on food imports from the European Union.  Wholesalers and retailers predict that bureaucratic costs and the need for veterinary and phytosanitary checks will lead to continental producers deciding to sell their goods elsewhere. Price rises and food shortages will follow.

What kind of government in an election year, of all years, wants empty shelves?

A Conservative kind of government appears to be the answer. The sensible move would be for the Conservatives to follow Labour’s policy of striking a deal to stick to EU standards and ease bureaucracy at the border.  That would mean the UK following European food regulations, as EU ambassadors have made clear.

But compared to dear food and empty shops, who the hell cares about that?

Tories care. Brexit is their King Charles head, their reason for being, their obsession.

David Frost, who negotiated the UK’s disastrous exit agreement with the EU, wrote an unintentionally revealing paragraph last week which encapsulated the ideological capture of British Conservatism.

“The Conservative Party owns Brexit. Whether ministers like it or not, or maybe even wish it hadn’t happened, it’s the central policy of the Party and the government. They must be prepared to defend and explain it – to show why it’s so important that Britain is a proper democracy once again. For if voters come to believe Brexit is failing, then the Conservative Party will inevitably fail too.”

There you have it. Brexit is the Conservative party and vice versa.

What a distance we have come! In 2016, a mere eight years ago, the Conservative party’s leader and most of its MPs supported the UK’s membership of the European Union. Eurosceptics posed as mild-mannered people. They promised that leaving the EU would not mean leaving the single market .

But then leave won the 2016 Brexit referendum and set us off on a spiral of radicalisation, which was instantly familiar to those of us who grew up on the left. 

Here is how it worked on the left in the 20th century.  You would be in a meeting where everyone agreed to a leftist policy: say that the government should encourage banks to give micro loans to poor people to keep them out of the hands of loan sharks.

Everything seems fine until an accusatory voice accuses all present of being sellouts because they do not believe in nationalising the banks,

Or today, after the great awokening, an academic department will propose reasonable measures to check that they are not unconsciously discriminating in their application process, only to be told that, if they were truly concerned with justice, they would decolonise the curriculum and purge it of “white” concepts such as truth and objectivity.

The near identical radicalisation of the right has been more serious because the right has real power.

Here is how its spiral into Tory Jacobinism went.

After winning the Brexit referendum in 2016, retaining the UK’s membership of the single market and the customs union suddenly became wholly unacceptable. They had to go.

As the ideological temperature rose, Theresa May’s attempts at compromise became sellouts, judges became enemies of the people, and the only acceptable way to leave became Frost and Johnson’s impoverishing hard Brexit.

We now have a new Tory ideology: “Brexitism.” It is a style of swaggering bravado and a bawling loud-mouthed way of doing business that goes far beyond the UK’s relations with the EU.

The catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss was “Brexitist”. She crashed the economy because she believed she was right to ignore the warnings of the Treasury, Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility.

What true Brexit supporter trusts experts, after all?

Brexit showed that you did not need them.  All you needed was the will to impose a radical agenda and then the world would accommodate itself to your desires.

In retrospect, 2016 plays the same role for the radical right of 21th century Britain that 1917 played for the British radical left in the 20th. The fluke communist takeover of Russia in 1917 convinced hundreds of thousands over the decades that revolution could succeed in the UK, even though communism never stood a chance in this country.

The fluke leave win of 2016 has had an equally mystifying effect. Because radical right politics succeeded in one set of circumstances, its supporters assumed they would succeed in all circumstances.

Nowhere in right-wing discourse do you hear suggestions that the Conservative defeat might be softened if the government appealed to the majority of voters. Instead, the right says that the only way to save the right is for the right to move rightwards and become more rightly right wing.

Once again, the parallels with the communist movement to people of my age scream so loudly they are deafening.

To quote the weirdest example. A few weeks ago, an anonymous group of wealthy men calling themselves the Conservative Britain Alliance spent about £40,000 on opinion polling, and gave the results to the Daily Telegraph. They showed the Conservatives were heading for a landslide defeat, as so many polls do.

But the spin put on it by the Conservative Britain Alliance’s frontman Lord Frost (again!) was that the Tories must move to the right to attract Faragist voters, not to try to stem the growth of Labour support.  

A further release from the anonymous group of wealthy men added to the impression of a right wing living in the land of make believe.

They produced findings that showed the Conservatives could win if Sunak were replaced by a hypothetical Tory leader. This imaginary figure was a political superhero who would be strong “on crime and migration” (naturally) but also had the superpower to “cut taxes and get NHS waiting lists down” at the same time.

Lower taxes and better public services all at once in a wonderful never never land.

My guess is that it will take three maybe four election defeats to batter the delusions of 2016 out of the Conservative party.

Perhaps no number of defeats will suffice, and Brexitism will be Toryism’s final delirium.

[hjohn3]

End of An Era

Toryism’s Existential Election

Source: Reddit

By Honest John

AND SO this is it. The end of an era: fourteen years of Conservative rule are, on 4th July 2024, likely to not just to fizzle out, but to result in an unprecedented wipe out of Conservative seats that will leave the Tory Party possibly with as few as 100 seats and without leadership, ideology, direction or purpose. The more extravagant polling models project, in terms of numbers of seats, that the Conservatives could even come behind the Liberal Democrats and be replaced as the main party of opposition to a Labour government presiding over a Parliamentary majority of 200 seats or more. Whereas it is hard to believe the Tory performance will in reality be that catastrophic, the fact that commentators now talk of the Conservative 1997 seat haul of 165 seats, when the Tories were demolished by Tony Blair’s New Labour, as being a good result on 4th July, indicates just how dire Conservative prospects are now considered to be.

This fatalism about the General Election’s result has palpably infected the Tory campaign itself. Rishi Sunak has cut an increasingly folorn figure, and his missteps and misfortune, from his drenched announcement of the date of the election outside Downing Street over a month ago, through his catastrophic decision to leave the D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration early, and culminating in the bizarre story of an insider betting ring within the Conservative campaign itself, seem to symbolise not just Sunak’s personal ineptness, but, ultimately the incompetence, arrogance and corruption that has been present throughout the various iterations of the Tory regime the country has had to endure since 2010. Rarely has an outgoing government been so thoroughly unloved, not just by the electorate as a whole, but also by swathes of its own former support. In numerous vox pops testing the opinion of the public over the last four weeks, the most frequent response from people when asked for whom they are going to vote for in the election is “not Tory”, even in the safest Conservative seats.

The term “end of an era” slips easily off the tongue. Often, despite a change of government, it is often no such thing. Whereas Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s governments did much to improve the lot of ordinary people (notably the huge reduction in child poverty since reversed under the Tories), NHS improvements and inner city regeneration, New Labour nonetheless maintained much of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s revolution intact. There was no reverse to deindustrialisation; no end to deregulation; no renationalisation of privatised industries and utilities; a continued ideological belief in the primacy of the free market over state intervention in the economy, and a restless and relentless attempt to “reform” public services from the right, introducing internal markets to essential services still in state hands and opening areas such as the probation service and community health services to the private sector. New Labour may have introduced, to a degree, a different set of priorities to Thatcherism, but in its essentials, the neoliberal settlement remained intact. In a different era, Harold Wilson’s incoming government, for all its talk of “technological revolution” remained attached to fiscal orthodoxy and it was its fatal decision to devalue sterling in 1967, that probably ultimately did for its impressive 1966 majority.

Given Keir Starmer’s excruciating caution and his blatant gaslighting when he and Rachel Reeves claim the British economy can be turned around and public services repaired by a combination of spontaneous growth and “reform”, it is perhaps hard to justify the end of era statement. The political philosopher John Gray once described Keir Starmer as a ‘faithful servant of the ancient regime’, referring to what he considers a redundant neoliberal settlement. Despite Labour’s quite radical policies on constitutional reform, workers’ rights and green energy and social democratic positions on economic strategy, housing and public ownership, this is not the Labour Party that has been allowed out on public display this election thanks to dead hand of Morgan McSweeney. This, along with Starmer’s and Reeves’ slightly odd emphasis on “stability” as their headline, gives credence to the Gray critique and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, the ever-opaque Starmer would quite like to administer a neoliberal regime quietly and efficiently with a few leftish tweaks along the way; his problem will be he won’t be allowed to because, quite simply, that settlement no longer exists.

The probable electoral collapse of the Conservative Party next month will simply be the end game of the final implosion of Thatcherism, that probably began as long ago as 2008, when the financial crash pumped toxic debt into the advanced economies, and caused the “globalist” market economy to retract in its very first iteration of sovereign currency and national industries protectionism. However, the so-called “social democratic” moment did not arrive and Brown’s neoliberal government slid from power as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats combined to use the debt crisis as an excuse to inflict a hyper-Thatcherite assault on public services’ funding. This was the start of fourteen years of performative Thatcherism under the Tories - an exaggerated version of the Iron Lady’s creed that emphasised public spending cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy above all else, choking off growth to the British economy, stagnating living standards and fatally undermining the long term viability of public services. And of course it didn’t work. The whole austerity experiment, a bargain basement travesty of the original Thatcherite ethos, did nothing except provoke the revolt of its victims - principally the deindustrialised communities of the north and Midlands - that culminated in the Brexit vote. Despite Theresa May’s and Boris Johnson’s anti- austerity words, neither did anything to put right a decade of devastating cuts. Instead they contrived to ensure Britain’s exit from Europe was as hard as possible - under pressure from the peculiar nationalist-Thatcherites of the European Research Group, hoping to create a low-tax, deregulated hedge fund managers’ paradise on the Thames.

The economic illiterates of the ERG failed to appreciate that outside the neoliberal EU, Thatcherite ideology no longer made any sense. Outsourced services and foreign-owned British businesses could work within the risk-shared environment of the EU, but outside the Union, the need for an active state to manage and stimulate the British economy is essential - something that Johnson recognised with his “levelling up” agenda. And who put a stop to all Johnson’s half-hearted attempts to deliver on his promise to the first-time Tory voters of 2019? His Thatcherite Chancellor, one Rishi Sunak.

It is perhaps appropriate that the last hurrah of British neoliberalism had a clownish aspect. The crazed turbo-charged Chicago Economics of Liz Truss caused real damage and in many ways it was the culmination of an arrogant selfish ideology, posing as a means of growth, when its barely concealed real agenda was to make the very rich even richer. Trussonomics was Thatcherism as caricature and the electorate have never forgiven the Tories for Truss. Sunak’s attempt to pull the Conservatives back into the realm of serious politics was hobbled by his personal and his party’s continued adherence to this busted model. In the face of ever-growing NHS waiting lists, underinvestigated crimes, a social and long term care crisis and sewage in water, Sunak has no answer, because this societal breakdown is the logical extension of a small state, low tax model pushed to its extreme, and in which Sunak still believes.

And so the 2024 General Election is momentous for two reasons. One will be the redrawing of the political map across the United Kingdom and the vanishing of blue seats the length and breadth of the country. The other however is that, unusually in British elections, this changing of the political guard coincides with the collapse of the accepted economic ideology that has dominated the U.K. for at least 37 years. The task of an incoming Labour government, probably with a majority sufficiently large it will be in office for two, possibly three terms, will be to define a new modern version of a social democratic settlement that rebuilds public trust in the ability of politics to change people’s lives for the better; that restores a devastated public realm, and which guides Britain economically in a way that simultaneously repairs our trading relationship with Europe while at the same time seeing off far right populism.

Keir Starmer may appear to be an unlikely looking tribune to pull off the greatest political feat since his Labour predecessor Clement Attlee surveyed the wreckage of Britain in 1945. If he succeeds, he will go down in history as one of the great Prime Ministers in British history; if he fails, he may be midwife to a new and dark authoritarian populism that will shake British democracy to its foundations. As modern Toryism finally reaches its existential moment and the end of its guiding philosophy, can Starmer’s Labour create a reinvented era for British social democracy to replace Thatcherism? The stakes for the future of this country really are that high.

29th June 2024

[blackswaneuroparedux]

For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.

Sir Roger Scruton

[shebeafancyflapjack]

Ghost OC headcanon

Silver is autistic. But of course having grown up in the 90s, she was never diagnosed. She, like many, was just labelled as a "weird kid". Bit shy. Hyperfocused on some topics, vague on others. Extreme meltdowns over what seemed to others as slight inconveniences or harmless jokes, written off as being "too sensitive". Her need to dance or bounce or constantly hum is how she stims. The velvet coverings she wears on her hands bring her comfort.

It's not until the mid 2020s, after Alison had become a parent, she's connecting these signs she spots in Silver to what she's learned with other mums who have autistic and neurodivergent children around Mia's age.

When Alison kindly suggests to Silver after her most recent meltdown (where she threw her boot at Julian's head after one of his Toryisms and had to sit rocking in Mary's old room for an hour to settle), at first she's shocked, even a little insulted - because, again, 90s child and that's the kind of prejudice and misunderstanding about mental health and neurodivergency that we grew up with. This was back when slurs like the R word and SP word were still commonly thrown about. Even Silver, for all her hippie peace and love tolerance, is not immune to that. But Alison explains it to her, how views have changed and science has learned so much more. She shows her YouTube videos that give a more professional understanding.

Of course, there's no way for Silver to get an official diagnosis, being dead, but the idea begins to give her a little more peace and acceptance in herself. She and Alison also acknowledge that Mary seemed to have a lot of autistic traits as well, so that makes her feel closer to her.

Not to mention most if not all of the other ghosts - especially Kitty and Pat and Cap, possibly Robin and Fanny too - could also land somewhere on the spectrum. Given how Silver often feels like an outsider and forgotten about, it makes her feel a little bit closer to the others that this is something that seems to bind a lot of them together.

[popsicle-stick]

death gas this mass murder that the most damning thing about sydney atherton so far is the toryism

[talesofpassingtime]

And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of Birkin’s talk, and of Gudrun’s penetrating being, he had lost entirely that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set. He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism.

— D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love 

[cathkaesque]

do you thing the UK should be divided in a hypothetical scenario of a communist revolution? should just northern Ireland be given back? what if Ireland is still capitalist? what about all the overseas territories?

I guess the answer to this is contextual. A seizure of power by forces with any kind of socialist bent (either by election or by a coup) would have to deal with an immediate collapse of the British economy in the form of a collapse in the value of government bonds (which underpin the resolution to the 2008 crisis, discussed here). This will be accompanied by the inability of the state to continue borrowing money, a collapse in the stock and property market bubbles, a 'credit crunch' as banks and pension funds no longer have the ability to continue lending, closure of most British businesses, accompanying collapses in the value of the currency and gross domestic products, and with it Britain's ability to continue importing essential items like food, medicines, textiles, inputs into domestic industries, computers and other consumer essentials (never mind luxuries). This will either be the context in which a socialist movement comes to power or the response of investors to a socialist government that actually has the guts to break with international financial institutions.

We had a sneak preview of this with the Truss government and I do think it's the UK's long term trajectory. Currently the UK is resolving this through extreme austerity measures, keeping the value of bonds high by feeding more and more of the country's social and industrial infrastructure to the financial system, but government borrowing costs are currently as high as they were at the height of the Truss government. I think Britain's slow motion financial collapse is inevitable - the question is how much of society is fed to that financial system before it dies. We are essentially faced with a choice between ending consumerism and financialisation and transitioning to an economy that can meet immediate needs for healthcare, education, housing, food, and little else, or the slow motion collapse of society and the environment while the joys of a consumerist standard of living become restricted to an ever shrinking slice of the world's population.

The socialist movement's task will be to ensure a society which is used to being able to live balanced on the top of the financial and global value chain system can still reproduce itself in the context of the disintegration of that system. To survive this period, the state will have to seize control of banking and investment and direct economic activity towards the immediate needs of the population. It will also have to manage a massive global population transfer from the South to the North due to the effects of climate change.

To achieve this, it's essential that the popular insurrections that are going to break out during this period (moments like the Estallido in Chile for instance, what's happening in France etc) are able turn themselves into political forces capable of carrying out this programme, and support each other in taking these steps as well. The class basis of these forces will probably be the 'marginalised' of the system - people in deindustrialised areas in the north, inner city populations, and the (frequently migrant) workforces in the domestic industrial system. These populations are often in conflict with one another (see how Brexit pitted the deindustrialised Northerners vs the migrant workers, culture wars around race etc) but I do think that's got to be the bedrock of any coalition.

I think people who want Scottish and Welsh independence and Irish Unification and anti-colonialists are going to be a part of a successful coalition strong enough to remove the current government from power. The direction politics is going in at the parliamentary level is also towards a consensus between the two main Westminster parties in favour of hard right toryism, and alternative policie only really get a hearing in places like the Scottish parliament at the moment. The current system is based on a very centralised economy and state, and breaking that power up and distributing it to local populations is very important. I think creating localised directly democratic structure to manage community welfare provision (I'm particularly inspired by the communal council system in Venezuela here) and devolving powers to local governments is an essential part of the whole process. Indepedence should be granted to all overseas territories.

When it comes to Northern Ireland I think it's always been a case of 32 county socialist republic. The Irish state as it stand is descended from the Irish Free State and the partition settlement of the Irish civil war. The Irish state has played a role in amelirioating republicanism in the North partly because it was in large part a revolutionary working class movement that would have implications for the social structure in the South. Sinn Fein have been pretty much integrated into Stormont now, and is also a pretty social democratic force in the South as well.

The other side of it is the role that Ulster unionism has played in connection to British fascism, Ulster unionists supplied fascists organisations with guns in the 1990s. Any socialist revolution will have to confront a whole host of reactionary forces. This will include fascist forces like the unionists, but also a ruined managerial and landlord class whose wealth is derived from their control over people and property, and the military establishment as well. It's not so much a question of the 99% vs the 1%, but the 60% vs the 40%, and in an imperialist country like Britain I'm not even sure we're the 60% in that.

Anyway that's a lot of Marxist gibberish that doesn't even really answer the original question - hope something useful is in there! Thanks so much!

[onion-hunter]

The SSP's cooking up a public meeting if anyone round about Scotlands interested!

Text: Scottish Socialist Party Party, For an independent Socialist Scotland.

Unite against attacks on communities, workers and out NHS

• Reverse closures of libraries, youth and community centres - tax the rich!

•Reject all shades of toryism

- For genuine socialist change!

Up: Food prices, Fares, Pollution Billionaires' Profits.

Wages, Benifits, Jobs, Public Services, Down.

Public meeting monday 1st July, 7PM. Blantyre, Miners' Welfare Club Calder Street, G72 0AU

Speakers include:

Mark McHugh - Organiser Bakers' Union,

Collette Bradly - Education worker and UNISON brach chair,

Bill Bonnar - SSP General election candinate,

Richie Venton - SSP Workplace organiser.

All Welcome!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Viewing the prosecution of Sterry as an early skirmish in Toronto’s free speech struggle reframes the entire issue. The first chapter of Betcherman’s The Little Band gestures in this direction by explaining the religious and cultural outlook of Toronto’s elite and their defenders: conservative Protestant (usually evangelical in outlook), British or anglophile, Tory, staunchly imperialist, royalist, and pro-capitalist. Business owners, Conservative politicians, army officers, clergymen, the Orange Order, and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire were core components of this swath of Canadian society. A.E. Smith, the clergyman-turned-communist, bluntly described Toronto as “the citadel of reaction and religious Toryism,” while J.S. Woodsworth called the city “smug,” “intolerant,” and “village-like.”

If, prompted in part by the Sterry trial, we view the Toronto free speech struggles not simply as another Red scare but more specifically as an attempt by the Anglo-Protestant elite to keep Toronto locked into late-nineteenth-century cultural patterns, we begin to see more clearly the reasons why rationalists and radical Christians were repressed alongside communists. One telltale connection is the presence of Emerson Coatsworth as the presiding judge in Sterry’s trial. He was also the dominant voice on the Toronto Police Commission, and a key supporter of the Toronto-based Canadian Christian Crusade (CCC), an anti-atheist organization formed in 1929.

….

On 5 May 1929, the police broke up a street meeting organized by the Rationalist Society of Canada. Founding members Lionel Cross [Toronto's first Black Canadian lawyer], Styles, and Leavens promptly lodged a complaint with Chief Draper and the police commissioners. They asserted that police had orchestrated the situation “by aiding and abetting persons to create a disturbance at their meetings and then [intervening] under the guise of a ‘breach of the peace being imminent’ to justify their action.” The RSC officials insisted that, “in matters of fundamental rights and liberties, they [would] permit no one to abrogate,” and they would continue holding open air meetings, just as they had for “the past four years.” They were aware, however, that Toronto’s elite, despite their frequent praise for “British freedoms,” did not believe that liberal principles protected radicals or blasphemers. On 4 August the Star published a letter from Cross spelling out this contradiction:

“I have been trying to reconcile our ideas of British liberty with the attitude of the police in breaking up the meetings on the street of those with unconventional ideas, while religious gatherings are undisturbed.”

Cross was told by an inspector that both the public and his men found rationalist speeches objectionable, and that was reason enough. Admitting that appeals to the authorities had been a waste of time, Cross asked the readers of the Star: was it possible to “arouse an enlightened public sentiment to correct this?”

On 13 August 1929, policemen forced a crowd out of Queen’s Park, in an effort to forestall a communist meeting that had not even started. The violence meted out to communists and bystanders alike shocked many of those present and sparked a furor in the press. While this incident has been discussed in the existing historiography of the “free speech struggle,” another case only a few days later has been overlooked. On the following Sunday night (18 August), police ordered an “atheist” meeting of almost five hundred people near Massey Hall to disperse. This was almost certainly a gathering of the RSC. “The crowd took exception” to the interference of the police, and “as they walked slowly towards Yonge Street they jeered [at] the officers and called upon them to stop a religious meeting” being held on a nearby street corner. Indeed, members of this “throng” themselves interrupted the religious gathering, which ended in disorder.

While this confrontation was not violent, the way it was reported in the next day’s Globe reveals the extent to which Toronto’s unbelievers were characterized as an existential threat to Canadian values, alongside communists and “foreigners.” First of all, the paper argued that police action had been entirely justified because the rationalists had blocked the street. More significantly, however, its coverage of this story was surrounded on all sides by bold headlines warning Torontonians of the dire threat they faced from depraved agitators. The rhetorical question, “‘Is It to Be Bolshevism or Constitutional Government?’” spanned the top of the page. Another headline trumpeted: “Communism Spells Murder, Pillage, Merciless Tyranny, Says Shields, and Would Eliminate Civilization.” That lengthy article praised the eloquence and logic of a sermon by the fundamentalist Baptist minister T.T. Shields, who denounced atheism, communism, modernism, anarchy, and the Toronto Star. The adjacent piece interviewed four prominent Conservatives: Anglican canon H.J. Cody, war veteran and businessman J.J. Shanahan, politician Alfred Morine, and publisher S.B. Gundy. Not unexpectedly, all four praised the police and condemned leftists. “Exaggerated Stories on Reds, Distortion of Report Alleged,” was the title of a nearby article about the police action in Queen’s Park the week before. It reprinted a letter from someone who claimed to have been present and asserted that the police had had no choice but to break up the “sullen,” “ugly” crowd, composed of threatening “foreigners” who would have become violent if given the opportunity; concerns over police brutality were simply the product of “scare headlines” and “gross misrepresentation” orchestrated by the Star. In the Globe’s coverage, the rationalists were merely one element of an ominous outside force that sought to overthrow “Toronto the Good.”

Rationalists, radicals, and their allies contested this view of events. On 2 October 1929 a heated meeting (which according to the mayor threatened to become “a regular donnybrook”) was held at city hall to address concerns over the public exercise of free speech. Chief Draper and Judge Coatsworth were present and subject to intense cross-examination by R.E. Knowles, Salem Bland, and others. Hard questions were aimed at Coatsworth in particular. After the judge explained that only seditious meetings were prohibited, an unnamed voice called out, “What about a man’s religion?” Coatsworth replied, “I don’t interfere with any man’s religion,” but he went on to caution that blasphemy would not be permitted either. One audience member pointedly asked him, “Aren’t you connected with a religious organization?” (The judge was a prominent member of the United Church of Canada.) Coatsworth responded, “I’ve been connected with a religious organization all my life, but it interferes with none in their religion.”

William Styles attended that 1929 meeting as the RSC representative. He argued that his group had “inalienable rights” to hold meetings in public places, and that “any trouble in the parks has been caused by the police themselves.” He complained about “a hysteria among certain people in the city that there is going to be a revolt.” Styles said he had seen many socialist meetings and had never witnessed a riot; but “now every meeting is construed as being unlawful.” He went on to declare that the rationalists would not “submit to a dictatorship,” defiantly concluding, “I submit that the chief of police is the servant of this city and not a dictator.” When a Free Speech Conference was called for 12 October, the “Canadian Atheist Society” was listed among its supporters, alongside Bland, Knowles, and a number of communist-affiliated organizations.

The conflict was played out well beyond the streets. Direct police pressure in 1929 led to theatre and hall owners reneging on their arrangements with communists and other leftist groups; it is possible the same thing happened to the rationalists. Early in the year, the RSC suddenly moved their meetings, going from the Victoria Theatre on 16 February to the Occident Hall a week later. After indoor lectures resumed in the fall, there were a number of other rapid venue changes: from the College Assembly Hall to the Brunswick Hall, and then, after a gap in the schedule, a move to Winchester Hall for the winter and spring of 1930. RSC officials never publicly addressed the changes but, given the timing, it is certainly conceivable that they were having trouble finding people who would rent them space.

…

That would change early in 1931, when the Globe declared, “The eyes of atheism and the eyes of bolshevism in North America are fixed for the moment on Toronto.” This renewed burst of outrage was provoked by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, luminary of the American freethought movement. His Kansas-based company, Haldeman-Julius Publications, was enormously prolific in its production of affordable books, pamphlets, and newspapers. His series of “Little Blue Books” would become particularly influential across North America. The publisher was himself a socialist and an atheist of Jewish descent who never shied away from controversy. Upon hearing reports of the Toronto free speech battle, he decided to support local unbelievers and test the authorities by printing an “Atheist Special Edition” of his American Freeman newspaper and distributing “copies numbering in thousands” in the city.

This provoked the ire of the Globe, which denounced not only Haldeman-Julius’s atheism but also his support for “companionate marriage.” An editorial entitled “Keep This Trash Out” declared:

the atheist and the ‘Red’ have so much in common that it behooves Christian people to be on guard against their insidious style of propaganda. Their methods are so similar that general direction from Moscow is more than a suspicion.

The aim of both was the same: “the overthrow of established conditions that have been developed through the centuries.” Something had to be done. Canadians could not reasonably be asked to tolerate “widespread circulation” of arguments in favour of companionate marriage and “blatant, scoffing atheism.” Fortunately, something could be done: censorship. Crown attorney Eric Armour believed that the Atheist Special Edition of the American Freeman contained blasphemous libel and that anyone who distributed or kept it “would be subject to a criminal charge.” Indeed, he believed many American publications should be barred from Canada. Chief Draper agreed that the Freeman should be kept from circulating by mail, and pronounced that if it were sold from the city’s newsstands “police action” would be taken.

Haldeman-Julius was not intimidated. He responded by sending a telegram to the Globe a few days later. It began:

Please announce in your columns that I am coming to your city for lecture in hall to be announced soon. Will explain to your people why I am an atheist and why atheism will make Toronto a more civilized city. Will defy your Chief Constable to stop my meeting. Will also print extra edition of Freeman for free circulation and will send friends of mine to every house in Toronto to deliver free copies of paper.

The publisher also said he would attempt to bring Clarence Darrow with him because he anticipated trouble from Chief Draper, “who I understand is a tinpot tyrant and a small edition of Mussolini.” Haldeman-Julius then sent a message to Draper himself, asking if the chief would guarantee his safety at a Sunday afternoon meeting “explaining the philosophy of atheism and the falsity of Christianity and the corruption of the Catholic Church.” He took pains to stress the fact that “this special campaign is not being financed by Moscow, but by myself personally as a great believer in free speech and free assembly.”

…

Haldeman-Julius seems to have changed his mind about visiting Toronto, but he did produce a special “Canadian Free Speech Edition” of the American Freeman for distribution in the city. In it he declared, “If there isn’t free speech for an atheist in Toronto, then there is no free speech in Toronto.” Since the man himself remained out of reach, the Globe decided to use Haldeman-Julius’s example as a stick with which it could beat local free speech advocates. Earlier in the year sixty-eight professors from the University of Toronto had signed an open letter arguing that the actions of Draper and Coatsworth violated the British principle of freedom of speech. The Globe’s editorial writers claimed repeatedly (and without evidence) that Haldeman-Julius was allied with these professors and that militant atheism was the natural outcome of their line of thinking.

One reason that the Globe took this approach was that it fit popular pre-existing narrative whereby orderly Christian Canada was threatened by irreverent and destructive outsiders. This narrative was extremely common when communists were being targeted, but it was invoked to explain and belittle the rationalists as well. The reader will recall Rev. F.C. Ward-Whate having employed the reliable rhetoric of outside agitators (“mongrel curs”) during the Sterry case and calling for the rationalists to be immediately jailed and deported. At that time the Evening Telegram stressed the links between Canadian and American rationalists. In a breathless article entitled “U.S. Is Controlling Centre of Toronto’s Rationalism,” it warned that “organized atheism in this city is receiving support via the same channels as does Communism.” As proof, the Telegram pointed to the RSC’s friendly relationship with Franklin Steiner and his American Rationalist Association of Chicago, “whose horrible doctrines are a derivative of the black atheism of Moscow and Berlin.” In Ontario this type of anti-American imagery dated right back to the time of the United Empire Loyalists.

Toronto’s rationalists resented this line of attack and took pains to refute it. Cross “denied with considerable warmth” the claim that he had come from the United States. “I was born in the British West Indies, saw war service overseas and am now pleased to call myself a Canadian,” he told a Star reporter. When the Sterry incident began, Styles made a point of stating that the Rationalist Society stood for “the integrity of the British empire.” He and Leavens also strongly rejected the allegation that they were outsiders, insisting that they were, respectively, third- and fourth-generation Canadians. Styles derisively pointed out that it was Ward-Whate who was the immigrant. The clergyman would probably have seen no shame in that: he was a Briton, and Toronto was a British city. It was Americans and “other” foreigners who were the problem. We may, however, detect a certain irony in the fact that Canadian authorities wanted to eject Sterry from the body politic, even though he was a British citizen who had lived in Canada for seventeen years. The quality of “Britishness” was claimed by both Toronto’s elite and by the rationalists. It was frequently invoked by Toronto’s elite as a marker of their authority, but they hastily distanced themselves from it when it became a limitation or a liability."

- Elliot Hanowski, Towards A Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. p. 142-149.