If you like your political commentary served up with a heavy dose of non-partisanship, an intolerance for sloppy policy making along with a generous pinch of well justified pessimism then Peter North’s your man. I hope he will accept the descriptors above well as I mean them as compliments. He’s the antidote to the sort of sloppy thinking and the away with the fairies ideas that too often characterises the British Right challenger parties and the Tories.
In a brilliant piece entitled ‘We are out of time for a peaceful solution’ Mr North starts off by talking about and excoriating the policy failures of both Reform and Restore. He bemoans these parties use of poorly thought out headline grabbing policies that might be popular with their bases but might be challenged outside of the base. He uses as an example the issue of remigration policies. He criticises the challenger Right parties for having policies with no thought of second order consequences or any policy, procedural and administrative underpinnings to these policies.
I agree with Mr North that the challenger parties of the Right need proper well thought out, accurately costed policies that will appeal to the bulk of voters not just these parties bases and which take into account second order consequences such as disorder, resistance and the already thinly stretched policing staff.
However what caught my eye in this article were a few passages that I’m going to quote and predict what may happen if the challenger Right cannot produce credible policies that might meet the approval of the bulk of the public. Remember to be a success a party needs to go where the majority of the public are intellectually and politically. Many people may be worried about migration but it’s important not to come over as a complete fraggle with added jackboots when talking to voters. Most people want to see migration reduced and might even want some form of remigration but you won’t get voters to stick their cross next to your party name if you come over all ‘mid century German history’ enthusiast.
Mr North said that if there’s not a sensible political solution then other less peaceful solutions might be brought into being.
Mr North said:
“With Restore Britain being much the same kind of slop factory, I now have no faith in a political solution. While Restore has made a stab at policy, its spokesmen clearly haven't bothered to learn it, and they’ll continue to improvise, missing much of the necessary finesse. Put simply, we are not getting a government that can meaningfully address mass immigration any time soon.
As such, there are two possible futures ahead of us. There is one in which Reform wins, probably needing to lean on the support of the rump Tory party, which bites off more than it can chew, running into consequences it never anticipated. If they are also in the process of scrambling the constitution by leaving the ECHR, they’re going to find themselves far out of their depth, to find themselves rudderless - and firefighting for the rest of their term in the same way Labour is now.
The result of this is more or less exactly where we are now, only Reform is as hated as the Tories, and the riots and protests are more violent - while everything else spirals out of control. The other possibility is that Reform doesn’t manage to close the deal in 2029, resulting in a rainbow blocking coalition, calling itself a government of national unity. That results in more of the same chaos, perhaps giving rise to an actual far right. In my view, the era of stable government is over for the foreseeable future.”
On the subject of how a future internal conflict in Britain might look Mr North added:
“What seems more likely is a state of low grade civil war which loosely follows recent patterns in Belfast, where migrants will be encouraged to leave by the natives, using shall we say, unsanctioned methods. There won’t be much that an overstretched and demoralised police force can do about it. While the state will clamp down on social media, they’re completely behind the curve in tracking private communications networks. You can’t keep a lid on this sort of thing when there’s a camera phone in everyone’s pocket.
Essentially, I think we’re past the point where elections could prevent a wider unravelling. Fixing the fundamentals would, at the very least, require a reset of energy and welfare policies, neither of which will happen soon, and will take at least a decade to sort out. The sand timer has run out.”
Mr North is in my view completely correct his assessment of what might happen on the streets. He’s also correct in saying that the government’s online censorship plans might not work because there exists too many private communications networks to effectively censor. I know about the comms issue because I’ve seen how effectively the Greenham Common women and other CND types used primitive techniques like telephone trees to get protestors out. The situation regarding communications is today far more sophisticated than it was back then and I predict that stories of migrant crime and actions against criminal migrants by indigenous groups will circulate widely and in full living colour.
Where I depart in agreement with Mr North is in his assessment that the hour glass has run completely out. There are still a few grains in the upper chamber of the glass. There’s still time for sensible pro British groupings to emerge some centred on the challenger Right, some from sensible centrists such as the Social Democratic Party and maybe even some from the Tories. There might even emerge or rather there be a re-emergence of the sensible Left such as those who think along the same lines as Paul Embery. There is an off ramp from disaster but it will take those in the Right Challenger parties, the Tories, the sensible left and the more grounded centrists to build that off ramp and for the public to be confident enough in these politicians competence to take that ramp.
Please read the entirety of Mr North’s excellent piece via the link below:
https://www.northernvariant.co.uk/p/we-are-out-of-time-for-a-peaceful
Link
The telephone tree concept modernised and commercialised. Manual methods still work though.
