The debate over immigration represents the cleavage of an ideological moment. A new orthodoxy of open vs. closed is emerging, a central division “moving from the legal-cultural and into the political and governmental. Openness is an identifying marker, associated with urbanism, globalisation and fluidity”[1]. Immigration is a major aspect of this dichotomy, clarifying what openness and closedness actively entail – the dissolution of sovereignty and national culture for the emergence of a new global community, where the divisions of borders and race are liquified. Fundamentally, immigration is a belief system, tethered to ideological commitments.
Continue readingTwo-Tier Rioting
The response to the Southport riots and their overspill across the country demonstrate a key facet of Britain’s governing class – it’s hatred of the native people, particularly the white working class and the peri-urban middle class. A seemingly natural response to children being murdered by a psychopathic child of Rwandan immigrants would be to ask why did the police, mental health services and other aspects of this country’s bloated, sclerotic bureaucracies not intervene or flag this. Inevitably, this case will become another in the long line of “he was on our radar” statements, passing the buck to another faceless agency in the administrative state.
Continue readingZero Seats Is a Start
The Conservative Party will lose on July 4th. Polls are predicting a vote share[1] low enough to see them hold less than 100 seats. A Starmer coronation seems inevitable and is the least the Tories deserve. Zero seats should be the aim, nothing less than the destruction of a party that believes nothing, does nothing and will never achieve anything. A vast morass of glorified lobbyists, sex pests and dullards who seem happy to trundle along into oblivion. Let’s just hope the chasm is wide enough to accommodate such collective density.
Continue readingWe’re All Schmittian Now
The late 20th century was the ushering in of a new era of politics beyond politics. The post-political and post-historical consensus that great ideological conflicts were at an end and governments could settle into the administration of people and things. The shift to governmentality as described by Foucault, “an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws”[1] in which sovereignty, as the distinction of a state to mark an exception, is sublimated. A technocratic, global architecture of international law and institutionalisation sits atop this post-political landscape. As the state is decentred as the locus of power, international institutions step in to set the limits and decide the rules of the game.
Continue readingStability to Stagnation: On the British Gerontocracy
The Conservative election pledge of national service and a quadruple lock on pensions has only enhanced the centrality of gerontocracy in the UK. There is no expectation of a Conservative victory, instead shoring up the core voter base as an electoral strategy[1] in the face of a Labour landslide. But no one should be surprised by this. Britain has been a gerontocracy for decades.
Continue readingEscaping the Longhouse
In the paranoiac fantasies of modern progressivism, the most widespread and deeply-seated is that of the egalitarian conceit, the blank slate notion of equivalence between sexes, races and cultures. There being no basis to differentiate, there can be no basis to discriminate or compartmentalise. However, as natural differences diverge from each other, specialities and deviations emerge that don’t fit this paradigm. The conceit becomes an enforceable norm, and from it come discursive and coercive instruments of multiculturalism, anti-racism and feminism.
Continue readingIndividualism and Post-Liberalism
Individualism as the sine qua non of liberalism is one the great shibboleths of the modern era. The unmoored individual, a mythical creation in its own right, is both protagonist and antagonist in the various ills of society. From “society does not exist” and greed is good to deaths of despair and anomie, individualism serves a dual purpose in relation to liberalism as a governing ideology.
Continue readingThe Re-emergence of Lebensraum
Time-space compression is the apex of globalisation. Yet it sits over a paradox – the vast resources required to maintain and expand this compression require a greater expanse of space to conquer. The aim of a boundless globe requires the existence of a vast frontier from which water to cool server farms and nuclear reactors and rare earth minerals to feed electronic arrays is extracted. This paradox is tearing globalisation apart. The post-globalised world slowly growing through Chinese and Russian revanchism and US consolidation is becoming acutely aware of the need for space and the resources it provides.
Continue readingEmpty the Villages
“The Khmer Rouge command had ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns to the countryside (an estimated 20,000 people died of snap executions, hunger and disease in the emptying of Phnom Penh alone); the liquidation of anyone who had served the pre-revolutionary government; the abolition of money and markets; and rapid, forced collectivisation”[1].
Continue readingOne Way Criticism
The fallout from the Committee of Privileges’ report on Boris Johnson’s conduct has descended into farce. The image of Conservative politicians, many of whom having been in or currently are part of government, sniping at the sidelines calling the committee a kangaroo court while never having mentioned or actioned during their time in government any attempt at parliamentary reform or changes to the Ministerial Code is only trumped by the pathetic response of the committee to these politicians’ claims.
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