It's no surprise that Boris is on his way out. It will take some time as he hollers through his sub-Oxbridge speeches. His Party is riven with poisonous factions. No one has been able yet to pick up Johnston's (fading) charisma. But the reality is that Johnston is getting weaker and weaker, shackled with party-gate and massive public debt, Northern Ireland and Scotland. His giant domination of Parliament has become the apologies offered by the new Tory MPs as they spend their time listening to unhappy criticisms in their constituencies. Boris is over. The timescale may stretch, but the new Tory party will convulse and the current Tory government is unavoidably in trouble. Yet this was supposed to be the novel 'new' type of politics and politicians in the UK since WW2. And now it's going to hit the wall. The Tories' only hope for a future is their awful, incoherent alternative.
The Tory Party, now running over 12 years in government, has evolved rapidly but in a new way. The Boris Tory Party shows little continuity with Cameron and May, who ran the governments from 2010 to 2019. Boris's crashing 'success' over the traditional Labour strongholds elevated the 'man who got Brexit done' and a new future that would improve the lowest conditions outside London. It was a genuine Tory political novelty. And, as Boris continues, the Tory Party is still, reluctantly unhappy in many places, as it is shifting its new character.
One of the many mistakes of Labour leaders is their constant squawking about the so-called 'same old Tories.' True Boris and company continue to adore the wealthy. But so did the Blairite Labour Party leadership, quite openly. Both main parties, excepting the partial moment when Corbyn turned in a different direction, have always supported the wealthy. That's not new. What's new is that Boris has shifted away from what used to be the historical and 'normal' British democracy.
Boris has not done this himself. Certainly he has been swallowing what has been emerging in the US and the EU. But his approach is not scientific. He is grabbing what has happened to the West's new model as it dropped the death of the social democracies - with their pretences of the taming of capitalism by the state. Boris doesn't have a clue of the social and economic manoeuvres that have been erupting in society, in either the UK or anywhere else. He is not interested in the deep moves of late, western capitalism. He is interested primarily in his own rich, much loved and praised existence. But he is the first leading British politician that sussed what Blair, the EU and Trump has become in the new politics.
Picking up one version of the new political development in the West, an essay of Wolfgang Streek in the London Review of Books (27 January 2022) suggested a way of looking at the new politics and its relationship to the West's social and economic classes. The critical points in his argument were one; the breaking down of the traditional working class (added with the reorganisation of work and housing), two; the removal of ideology in politics and the use of the state to 'fix' problems, locally and distinctly one by one, three; the new democracy should have no theory of class conflict but instead manufactured consent is the incentive, four; the absence of the past, its avoidance of real history (instead of slogans) and no futures for the aim of society in general, is the focus. There is no sense of the moment in which we are to live.
WS calls this as 'technopopulism'; the deliberate type of a version of involvement in politics organised by the government. It is an anathema to the existence of alternatives created by the public. The historic core that traditionally created a genuine society, particularly under capitalism, was the organisation first of trade unions. The new politics reveals that a worker can be offered single advantages where necessary. A trade union or collective bargaining or workers on the boards of companies must be destroyed.
WS catches a real concept and program for this new politics. Going forward he is reflecting that the tiniest collective demand that emerges outside of the state is unacceptable. Moving on from WS, the West's new politics is based on the destruction of the remnants of social democracy in relation to three new modern essentials. First, independent organisations with the demand of their own stakes in society are out, replaced by either destruction, as with the UK miners strikes, or re-construction, as with unions re-composed into 'professionalism' ie., seeking to accept harmony with the government. Second, the movements against racism and the fight for women have to be both insistently separate, swallowed by state via their offers and decisions, and reduced of independent activity through state law and order. Third, the silent and unseen motor of capitalism, when mentioned at all in any alternative individual presence, is beyond the argument by the state and silent in respect of society's problems.
Boris's political bubble is already shrinking after party-gate and popping while the UK opens up the opposition to Boris's new politics. His shaky new politics is interestingly represented in the hands of 2 billionaires - one from the US and the other from the UK. The latter, John Armitage, gave the Tories more than half a million since Boris became the PM. Now Armitage wants to get rid of Boris, and the current political situation he has found is 'tremendously upsetting.' Bad show. Boris lies and pretends and turns solid straight forward Tory standards into mob slogans.
In the US the West's picture is sharper. Peter Thiel, who has a wealth of about $2.6 billion, is focusing on 2022 Trump type candidates in the State elections, says he 'no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible'. He deplores 'the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women' (after 1920.)
Our traditional Tory is shamed at one side of Boris's politics. The direction of the new Western politics is suggested from a new Trumpet on the other.
What is this politics? The politics emerging from the West is not creating the next millennium, or even a decade. From the EU banks dominating countries that are causing public eruption and destruction, nationalist racism, to the worst labour laws in the UK whose leaders claim the greatest freedom across Europe, to a US on the edge of State wars, the present politics is a serious disaster. We are inevitably at the start of a new revolutionary period in the West. And it will require an organised revolution to prepare, to be ready to throw down the current, swelling dangers and create public governments and states with the full energy of a collective society
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