The Four Types of Electorate

 

When it comes to the electorate, there are four types of people.

First, there are those who submit themselves to authority with an almost childlike trust. They imagine - often quite sincerely - that those who govern them must also have their best interests at heart, and that wisdom and benevolence naturally accompany power.

Second, there are those who obey not from trust or confidence but from fear or apprehension. They are riddled with internal doubt, yet they consent in order to avoid the repercussions.

These two kinds of people - though they seldom intend it - have, at best, furnished every government with top-down inefficiencies, and, at worst, furnished every tyranny in history with its power and control. That is, no political party has ever ruled by its own competence or strength alone; it is encouraged and carried along by the sub-critical persuasions of group one and the compliance of group two.

But third and fourth consist of two very different groups. Those who will look authority in the face, reject it, and challenge it. Those who say “I see what you're doing, but I'm not having it,” are either a force for good or for bad, depending on the individuals in question. Some reactionary groups - who we’ll call category three - are rather toxic and unwholesome, and in many cases comprise individuals as bad as, or worse than, groups one and two.

But some - who we’ll call group four - have the hearts, minds and wisdom to resist, hold politicians to account, and be a force for good and positive change. 

Try to be in group four, dear reader, because it’s only group four types who give this nation genuine hope - the ones who, when they reach critical mass, see to it that authoritarian systems lose the compliance necessary to sustain themselves, and become disempowered.

The Art of the Political Con

 

The sad thing about watching contemporary politics is that it is full of so many con artists in front of a willing public who falls for what’s on sale hook, line and sinker. But con artistry is not all equal, and here I’ll explain the distinctions I observe. First, let me establish a long-standing truth in psychology about the typical con artist: a good con artist doesn’t pressure you into doing something; they compel you to be a willing agent in your own downfall. But this is predicated on their success in knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subject(s).

Now, socio-politics is full of all kinds of con artist - differing widely in age, character, belief and presentation. But unlike the classic psychological description of the con artist I outlined, these are of a different breed. They qualify by successfully getting large swathes of the public to fall for their con, hook, line and sinker – examples of which are Jeremy Corbyn, Greta Thunberg, Owen Jones, Sadiq Khan, Nicola Sturgeon, Dianne Abbott, Ed Miliband, Ash Sakar, Paul Mason, Zack Polanski, to name but a few. But their distinction is that their con is not based on knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subjects (although there is, of course, a lot of concealing going on) – it is a kind of con of incompetence, where most of what they believe is so absurdly incorrect or miscalculated, yet tribalistically persuasive enough to compel people to be a willing agents in their own downfall.

You may be on the left reading this, thinking “Hang on, what about those on the right - the likes of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, et al – playing a similar game?” Something different is going on there – it’s equally to do with psychological leverage, but it operates on almost the opposite mechanism. Because if you’re paying attention, the left tends to obtain its cognitive leverage by creating illusions, and the populist right by breaking illusions (see my blog on Hyperbolstering). They prick the balloon of the left’s illusions, and that’s why the vitriol coming from the left is more like the hate and rage that comes from being found out and exposed, alongside the inner malice many of them feel towards people who are more successful than them or have more status. The left deceives by pretending to be more competent than they are; the right attempts to expose what the establishment wants to remain concealed.

That’s also why the left’s cognitive leverage will always rest on a suite of well‑documented cognitive mechanisms that operate beneath the surface of rational enquiry. And as highly prominent figures like Greta Thunberg, Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski are showing – you can be an utter simpleton and still cast in your net the willing acolytes of identity‑protective cognition, because the tendency for people to defend beliefs that signal loyalty to their tribe, and provide emotional reassurance and moral self-congratulation, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false, miscalculated or self‑defeating, is as old as the hills.

And for those like me who’ve always been interested in human behaviour, you might also see that the most striking feature of this phenomenon is that many of these political influencers are not deliberate manipulators in the classic sense. They are not con artists who know the truth and hide it; they are participants in the very illusions they propagate.

Most con artists manipulate by knowing they are above the manipulation. Yet most political con artistry is of a more peculiar dynamic: manipulation while not knowing they are part of the manipulation.

Prediction: Burnham Will Be The Worst Prime Minister We've Ever Had

Oh dear. As much as I disliked Keir Starmer’s Labour - and I reeeaaally did dislike them - from what I’ve heard from Burnham’s Labour Party so far, I predict things will be even worse under Burnham. In fact, I’m going to make a bolder prediction: by the time of the next General Election, there is going to be widespread consensus from the right, centre and left (well, as much as there ever can be) that Burnham’s term in office has been the worst this country has ever seen.

Starting with today’s cavalcade of economic illiteracy, that most bus fares in England will be capped at £2 from the start of next year, and the clearly economically sub-literate new Chancellor John Healey’s claim that this policy will cause "no burden to British taxpayers". I’m not writing this post because I think this £2 price ceiling is going to be one of the worst things about the Burnham premiership – I’m writing it mainly for illustrative purposes to show that, in Burnham, we have a leader who has never shown even a passing intention to appear like he knows what he’s doing on anything to do with the politics and economics of our country – and that this one policy is illustrative of what a disaster his whole reign will be.

Ok, let’s be candid on this particular showboating policy: a £2 fare cap is not clever, not helpful, and certainly not free. This is not even complex – it’s GCSE-level economics: price fixes always have to be paid for by someone. So, who really pays? Well, contra Healey, if a bus journey costs, say, £3.50 to provide, and the government forces operators to charge £2, the remaining £1.50 doesn’t vanish into the ether. The Treasury must reimburse operators for the shortfall. That’s going to cost hundreds of millions in ongoing subsidy. That is a burden on taxpayers, no matter how many times Healey insists otherwise. Moreover, if there is any underfunding of the scheme, councils will be forced to top up subsidies or cut other services. A national fare cap simply shifts the pressure downward.

Also, bus operators ultimately pay too, and they might even cut services in doing so. If subsidies don’t fully cover the gap, operators absorb losses. And when operators absorb losses, they respond in the only way they can: by cutting routes or reducing frequency, and maybe even shedding staff. If subsidies don’t keep pace with rising costs, operators will be forced to cut routes and staff – it’s basic arithmetic.

A sensible politician would never force a business to sell below cost. It distorts prices and hides true costs. Artificially cheap prices encourage overuse and discourage efficiency. Furthermore, an economy in which operators become reliant on government reimbursement rather than private revenue makes everything less secure, not more.

Policies like this badly misallocate resources too. A universal fare cap subsidises everyone - including people who can easily afford full fares, and penalises the many who never use buses but are already taxed to the hilt.

No, this is everything we can come to expect from a Burnham government – it’s a political slogan; a bribe; a faux-compassionate headline‑grabber, not a serious policy or strategy. Expect Burnham’s government to be a shambles – and we can revisit this prediction in a few years’ time.

Christians Need To Rise Up

I think it’s high time that Christians spoke more confidently about politics from a Christian perspective, because currently too many Christians are being co-opted by the cultural manipulations and tribal impulses of political parties on both the left and right, who are anti-Christian in their ethos, and corrosive in their influences. 

Some of them are even able to seduce by offering the sort of policies and calls to action that simulate the kind of things one might expect Christians to say, which is why it’s good to remember that darkness often masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). One of the most salutary lessons you can learn about what comes from most of our political parties is that anti-Christian beliefs often try to imitate goodness by counterfeiting it.

Therefore, Christians really shouldn’t keep maintaining a circumspect faith as they nervously dance around a political landscape that seeks to dominate the narrative on subjects over which Christ has given us authority. Too many believers approach political discourse with hesitation, as though their deepest commitments are liabilities rather than sources of truth, justice, clarity and courage. Christian belief is not something that must be cautiously justified before it can be proclaimed. The convictions Christians hold (or should hold) about truth, justice, human dignity, goodness, compassion, etc, should be confidently leading the way in politics, not taking a back seat to party-political ideology and virtue-signalling that’s anti-Christian at source, and hollow in substance.

I don’t, of course, mean that Christian political conviction should always be voiced like a minister delivering a sermon. But there’s no bigger political truth than this: At its best, Christian belief provides the most coherent moral framework for the social considerations of the dignity of every person, the reality of sin, the call to justice, the priority of the vulnerable, the hope of redemption, and the limits of earthly power.

It is time for Christians to recover their voice in a nation that so badly needs to hear it.

The Symmetry of the Extremes

 

The extreme left and extreme right who continue to dominate the headlines may be extremely opposed in viewpoints, but they are highly alike in terms of instincts, temperament, and having the same blind spots. They may hate each other, but they are similar in their underlying psychological style and the way they process social reality.

To think of one or two examples off the top of my head, the extreme right displays a hugely disproportionate hostility towards immigration, whereas the extreme left is too soft, and in denial, refusing to acknowledge any challenges or trade‑offs at all. Another one, the extreme left tends to trivialise or overlook the complex structural and personal factors that leave people struggling financially, while the extreme right frequently lacks the empathy and attentiveness needed to understand the genuine pressures those same people face. And another, the extreme right tends to idealise tradition by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in ethnicity, culture and identity, whereas the extreme left tends to idealise equality by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in skill, talent, effort, competence, and risk. It would be easy to think of many more examples.

The upshot is that neither side is a healthy one to be on, because both approaches misunderstand more things than they illuminate. Both overlook the complex structural and personal factors that shape people’s circumstances and constrain their choices; both misunderstand the complexity of how people reveal their preferences, and form meaning and belonging; and both extremes build their politics on half‑truths, oversimplifications and extremities that don’t map onto the highly complex, multifaceted lived reality of society

Beneath the bluster, each extreme is animated by the same moral certainty and ideological intransigence, leaving little room for humility, revision, or the possibility that the world is more complicated than their beliefs, policies and slogans allow. And any politics that forgets that will always get the world more wrong than it does right.

Job Vacancy: Low Skill, High Pay

 

The value of labour is conditioned primarily by two things; the knowledge, skills and experience required to do a job - and related to that, how easy it would be for the next person in line to come in and fill a vacancy. That is why lawyers don't earn £19,000 a year and waiters don't earn £70,000 a year. That is also why you are unlikely to obtain a job with a £70,000 a year salary without the skills and experienced required.

There are, however, one or two exceptions to this near-ineluctable law - the most obvious one is being a Member of Parliament, where you can be ludicrously uninformed, with no real skills or experience in anything that equips you to do your job competently, and yet still find yourself earning an annual salary of £93,904.

Apart from perhaps the paid social commentators who earn their living writing similar guff to what most politicians come out with (and most of them aren't on such a high salary), being an MP really is one of those ultra-rare cases where you can earn a reasonably large salary without having much of a clue about what you're talking about.

And if you happen to find yourself fortunate enough to be in a safe seat, whereby enough of the electorate in your particular constituency are pliable enough to keep voting you in, it's a well-paid job in which you can get away with riding on your public-funded gravy train of confusion for decades.

Only in jobs whereby the salary of such incompetent people is forcibly funded by people with no choice in the matter could such highly paid low skill workers earn over three times the average UK wage and get away with being so confused about so many basic principles related to their roles in society.

Beware of Honest, Well-Intentioned Politicians

 

I don’t know if politicians are generally more honest, well-meaning and good-intentioned than in the past. I’d guess, in some ways, yes, in same ways, no. But as per the wisdom from C.S. Lewis that “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”, I suspect that it’s the so-called honest, well-meaning politicians who want to do good on our behalf who frequently do the most harm (especially indirectly).

It is with this in mind that I refer you to something I discovered called Celine's Third Law (based on a character in The Illuminatus Trilogy), which contends that an honest politician is more dangerous than a corrupt one, because a corrupt politician cares only about lining his own pockets, but an honest, idealistic one seeks to reshape the world - and that’s precisely why he might end up causing the most damage.

Celine contends that the proliferation of laws only breeds more criminals. Every new law chips away at personal liberty, and with the sheer volume of legislation being passed, no ordinary citizen can realistically navigate daily life without inadvertently breaking some rule. It is, paradoxically, the well-intentioned reformers - those earnest politicians seeking to improve society through legislation - who pave the way for true tyranny by overregulating every aspect of existence.

I believe that is true, but I think there is an even more compelling aspect of the same phenomenon - the honest politicians are even more dangerous because they are the ones who see the ever-increasing size of the state as the solution to most problems, and therefore they are the reason the size of government becomes so bloated that it can no longer afford to sustain itself. At this stage, which is what we’ve seen in recent times, performances suffer, politician live in denial, and we end up with crumbling public services.

I suppose all this is to say that the road to political hell is paved by visionaries with some good intentions, but who believe too deeply in their own righteousness and lack the humility to know their limits. Ignoble political con artists are dreadful, but you might like to consider that perhaps it is well-meaning dogma that allows the machinery of control to grow beyond all restraint.

Private Vs. Political Markets

 

If every individual (or firm) makes decisions based on the total net benefit to everyone - not just themselves - then outcomes would be socially optimal. Obviously the market contains negative externalities and public goods issues that can be mitigated or solved by top down central intelligence (a role usually performed by the state), but if you can align private incentives with social net benefits, you get the most efficient outcomes, and the market does that best in most areas of society. Or to put it another way, market failure is the exception in the free market, but is it the rule in the political market?

You may wonder why I’m using ‘market’ for the political landscapes too, so let me explain. Think of society like a whole interconnected market, where that market is a mix of private goods and public goods. We said that outcomes would be socially optimal when decisions are based on the total net benefit to everyone. In a free market, it’s easy to see why failure is the exception not the rule.

Imagine I set up a stall on Norwich Market called The Halloumi Hut, serving the obviously gorgeous freshly cooked halloumi dishes that a character like me would serve up. To run this business, I need to bring together various resources - workers, ingredients, cooking equipment, and my own time and effort. To hire someone, I must offer at least as much as their next best alternative - whether another job or their own leisure - so their cost is passed on to me through wages. When I buy halloumi or other inputs, I either outbid others who want them or pay suppliers enough to cover their production costs. The price system ensures these costs to others are reflected in what I pay. I collect the value of my cooking when customers buy it - their willingness to pay reflects how much they benefit. Any personal effort or time I put in is a cost I bear directly. So, all costs and benefits - to me and to others - are transmitted back to me through prices and wages. If the total benefit outweighs the cost, I open up the shop. If not, I don’t. That’s how markets push us toward choices that are efficient for everyone involved.

I frequently point out the ways in which market failure is rare in the free market and commonplace in political markets - and I do it with such rigour and charisma that I’m always amazed that everyone doesn’t just drop what they are doing and agree with me. Given that this is econ 101, and repeatedly demonstrated empirically throughout history, why do people habitually place too much confidence in governments and not enough in markets? (Read this IEA paper of mine if you can’t see the dangers of that).

I’ve laid this out a lot more comprehensively in my economics book, but my answers in brief would be:

1) Markets work subtly, and governments act more visibly and bombastically. Market coordination happens decentrally and quietly: prices shift, resources reallocate, and innovation happens gradually. Government action, by contrast, is immediate, dramatic and usually at the front of the news - so it feels more responsive, even if it's less efficient.

2) Market failures - rare as they are - often hit the headlines in a dramatic way, reinforcing the left’s incentive to distrust the system.

3) Self-organising systems make people feel intuitively uncomfortable - they prefer to think of top down agents in control.

4) Many people are not exposed to basic economic thinking - price theory, seen and unseen, opportunity cost, incentives, trade-offs, etc - so they are more likely to hold ideological views that override empirical evidence.

5) People are genetically predisposed to favour socialism over markets (see my side bar on Socialism)

6) Politicians lie and distort the truth so readily that they are trusted far more than they deserve to be.

But there is a seventh reason that needs more fleshing out, because I think it might be the primary mistake that leads to overconfidence in governments. When people think of a government, I suspect that (consciously or subconsciously) they think of it as a little like a benevolent uncle who stands firm in the family and has the wisdom and sagacity to organise society according to its superior knowledge. But just as one can see the folly of corporation tax by seeing that corporations are really just a collection of individuals, similarly one can see the folly of overconfidence in government by seeing that governments are really just a bunch of people, acting with their own interests first and with a woefully incomplete and inadequate understanding of the interconnected market. Try this; when you think of the concept of government in the future, don’t think of an abstract wise uncle, think of concrete individuals like Boris Johnson, Ed Miliband, Dianne Abbott, Liz Truss, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Ed Davey, Keir Starmer, Caroline Lucas, David Lammy, Angela Raynor, Kwasi Kwarteng, Rachel Reeves, Michael Gove, and so on – they are the typical politician who have put themselves forward and asked you to trust them to manage our complex society. The paradox of government is that most people wouldn’t trust the competence or motives of most individual politicians to act in their interests to engender socially optimal outcomes, yet when they come together as a cluster called a ‘political party’ the confidence increases.

I know that people work collectively better in ways they cannot as individuals, but they don’t work collectively better in the same way that the free market enables us to work collectively better because, as we saw above with my Halloumi Hut sketch, the market most consistently aligns private incentives with social net benefits to produce most efficient outcomes, where failures are the exception, and the political market shows the opposite. This is because they operate under fundamentally different systems and with different incentives at the heart. Free markets increase total aggregate value, where each individual agent bears the net costs of his action, making his interest the same as our interest. The free market does that imperfectly, the political market much more imperfectly. Politicians bear virtually none of the costs of their bad policies, and the electorate is not privy to the full extent of politicians’ short-term, selfish incentives.

The most efficient systems are systems that align local knowledge with personal responsibility, that reward value creation, and penalise waste. The free market, for all its imperfections, is the only mechanism we’ve discovered that does this consistently and organically. It harnesses dispersed information and decentralised decision-making to produce outcomes that, more often than not, benefit everyone involved. Government, by contrast, operates in a fog of incomplete information, distorted incentives, and absent accountability. That people place too much faith in the one system that persistently divorces power from consequence is regrettable. Because the most fundamental difference between markets and politics lies in who bears the costs of failure. In a free market, bad decisions are punished - swiftly and impersonally. If I overpay for ingredients for my Halloumi Hut, if I hire the wrong staff, if no one wants my halloumi, I lose money. I feel the cost. But politicians operate in a system where the feedback loops are weak or broken entirely. They spend other people’s money on behalf of other people and are rarely held accountable for the unintended consequences. When policies fail, the costs are dispersed across millions of people, and the connection between action and outcome is easily obscured.

Look, none of this is to suggest that government has no role to play. There are domains - especially the provision of certain public goods - where collective action through central intelligence is essential, and where market mechanisms alone fall short. But central authority can rarely outperform decentralised incentives, personal responsibility and local knowledge. No, I’m afraid the reality is, through government, incentives are frequently misaligned with the public interest - because they are aligned with appearing virtuous, furthering the career and reputation of politicians, and helping the party stay in power by saying whatever it takes to secure votes. The market is not perfect - but it is the best we have for most societal transactions, and as a result of an aggregation of revealed preferences, it is profoundly more honest and reliable than the fiction of a wise and benevolent state.

It remains one of the strangest and most unfortunate things, that I doubt I've ever met anyone who would endorse the outcomes I know political market failure produces when it occurs, yet the world is replete with people who habitually endorse its mechanisms and repeatedly trust its architects in prospect. The typical voter who trusts these politicians time and time again is a bit like someone who cheers for a magician when he saws the wrong person in half, and then asks for an encore.

A Reflection

By and large, I don’t get heavily involved in much politics (and certainly not party politics) or mainstream media narratives. For years, I’ve got a strong sense of how things really work, with the narrative cartel’s hands behind the curtain, and that has only enhanced as I’ve got older, and the world has become even more under their thrall (see my blog The Maze and the Watchtower: Seeing Beyond the Illusion for an initial eye-opener). The world, for all its top-down pretences, is steered not by democracy, the perceived good for the electorate, or the supposed will of the people, but by a quiet, calculating network of manipulators who understand that the easiest way to control a population is not through overt tyranny, but through the careful engineering of ideas, beliefs and perception. I think the more we delve into it together, the clearer you’d see how things really are.

I understand how, for some, this can sound like conspiracy theory, but I can assure you it’s not. This narrative cartel really do understand that fear, anxiety and division are the most potent political currencies, and they mint them in national, and sometimes global quantities, with the primary aim of keeping the masses unapprised, disoriented, alienated, and perpetually in need of interventions that just happen to consolidate more power in the hands of the very people who either caused the problems or pretend they have the solutions to them.

And without being too much of a Cassandra figure (I prefer Jeremiah), I’ve long since come to conclude, often reluctantly, that with the continual acquiescence of the people, there is no realistic way to significantly change things or thwart the aims of this cabal of puppet masters. As well as seizing control of the narrative, they’ve convinced most people that they should be begging for more of it. They are doing the devil’s work for him. And like quicksand, I believe the more people struggle to get out of it through some opposing ideology, tribal loyalty, or even some well-meaning solutions, the more they are dragged under, and the faster they’re pulled into the suffocating depths - because division is a key part of the deception.

Consequently, I’ve resolved to live in a way that tries as best as I can to detach myself from it, knowing that the best life I can live is one that centres itself on God, scripture, on my loved ones, friends, family, private learning, and being servant-hearted in church.

Increasingly, detachment from the above has enabled even more devoted Christian living, and has enhanced my well-being even more, because the above merely distracts and draws us into situations that take the attention off the most valuable things. For me, detachment is not mere resignation - it is a conscious act of preserving my soul’s clarity - actively disassociating myself from the endless spectacle of the superficial maze-running narratives. I believe it’s the only way to find real exhilaration, freedom and peace.

Sure, I do partake in commentary on these matters, in the hope that it might help others detect the cheat and the sheer amount of emotional and intellectual resources it drains from the preoccupants, but I endeavour to not let it steal my gaze from the things of eternal value. 

The Inefficiency Trap

 

There's a classic Econ 101 brainteaser often posed in introductory economics courses (I think I saw it first in Steve Landsburg's work), which I won't quote verbatim, but it's along these lines:

Question: Suppose apples are produced by a competitive industry, while pears are provided by a monopolist. Coincidentally, they both sell for the same price, and you would be equally happy with either. If you care about conserving societal resources, which should you buy?

Answer: You should buy the apple if you care about economic efficiency and conserving societal resources. In a perfectly competitive market, firms produce up to the point where price equals marginal cost (P = MC). This means that the price of an apple reflects the true societal cost of the resources required to produce it.

I hope that makes sense because, by contrast, a monopolist typically restricts output and sets a price above marginal cost (P > MC). This results in underproduction - some consumers who would have been willing to buy at a price above MC are unable to do so, leading to deadweight loss. This artificial scarcity means society is not producing as much as it efficiently could, making the monopoly inefficient from a resource allocation perspective.

Since the price of an apple equals its marginal cost, choosing an apple means you are participating in a market that operates efficiently, ensuring that goods are produced at the optimal level. By contrast, choosing a pear supports a monopolistic market structure that produces inefficiently low quantities, reinforcing the misallocation of resources. Thus, if your goal is to align your purchasing decision with economic efficiency and the best use of societal resources, you should buy the apple.

At first glance, the idea that a seller in a competitive market sells at a price equal to marginal cost (P = MC) does seem counterintuitive - it almost sounds as if they are only breaking even on the last unit produced. However, there's more to the story, because we are considering average cost as well as marginal cost. Marginal cost is the cost of producing one additional unit, but average cost is the total cost (including fixed costs) divided by the number of units produced. In a perfectly competitive market, the price is typically equal to both marginal cost and the minimum average cost in the long run. This ensures that firms cover all costs, including fixed costs, and earn a normal profit, which is the minimum return necessary to keep a business operating in the industry.

That's also why, in the long run, in a market-friendly industry with no barrier to entry or excessive regulations, competitive firms earn this normal profit but not excessive profits, because competition drives prices down to the level of average cost, but not below it. Incidentally, it also shows the foolishness of the statement 'people before profits', to which I can refer you in past blogs (see here and here).

The fact that it's usually better to consume from a competitive industry than a monopoly (natural monopolies sometimes excepted) also shows why it's usually better for the market to provide goods and services than the state. Markets are competitive industries but governments are monopolies. In competitive markets, firms must minimise costs and innovate to survive. This tends to allocate resources efficiently, leading to lower prices and better quality for consumers. Competitive markets produce goods where the price reflects the true societal cost of resources, ensuring that production aligns closely with consumer preferences. And markets tend to adjust quickly to changes in demand or supply, as firms compete to attract customers and maximise profits.

Governments, which are de facto monopolies, usually lack incentives to innovate or reduce costs because they do not face direct competition. And government-provided goods and services usually do not reflect true marginal costs, due to subsidies, taxes, or inefficiencies - meaning an almost inevitable over- or under-consumption of resources.

In his famous dictum, The Four Ways to Spend Money, Milton Friedman outlined the perennial problems of governments spending someone else's money on someone else - the typically least efficient way that money is spent. It's obviously not the case that markets are always preferred over governments in every sector - but politicians are primed to put their own interests first, which means the probability of inefficiency and bad value for money increases. I'll elaborate on that in tomorrow's blog post. 

Two Models

Here are two models, which, for simplicity, we’ll call the private model and state model. The private model undergoes the following test: if people are willing to pay for what you’re providing, then you must be serving them in providing value. If anyone has made a lot of money from this model, then they are likely to be serving society prodigiously. Alternatively, the state model takes our money in the form of taxation and purports to serve us on our behalf. Within the private model, consumers are spending their money as they choose, so inefficiencies will be few. Within the state model, there’ll be some cases where the government spends our money in a way that benefits us, but also, given the model, there’ll be many cases where the state spends our money poorly and in ways that give us bad value for money. Even if you’re someone who really values a big state, it’s still the case that due to top down information failure, and self-serving interests from within the political establishment, a lot of money will be spent on things that rob us of greater value elsewhere through the private spending model. This inefficiency gets exacerbated by the fact that the state keeps growing its sector to serve these interests, so the inefficiencies increase alongside it.

But it doesn’t end there. Politicians become incentivised to fatten up their state model, and to do this they have to constantly adapt to reflect the views of the people on whom they rely for their power. The popular views held in society are often of the most absurd and ridiculous nature, which means as they become more ubiquitous, they are inevitably going to be absorbed into the state mindset, and eventually, as the Overton window shifts, they become part of mainstream policy. At this point, sheer nonsense has become part of lazy political gesturing, and the voters have become so inured that neither the governors nor the governed call any of it into question.

I think this relationship is a bit like the relationship between the greyhound and the hare on the racetrack. Greyhound racing uses an electrically controlled and propelled mechanical hare that must stay far enough in front of the dogs to keep them chasing, but not be so ahead that they stop bothering to chase. Politicians do that; they impose a small enough thrall to keep the majority tolerant of their aims, but they are careful not to go so far that folk reject the political system altogether and bring about anarchy (although watch this space - there is a lot of unrest out there). That is, they keep the hare close enough so people are willing to chase, and ensure it’s not sufficiently out of reach that people go off and do their own thing. You’ll notice that people in abusive/coercive relationships often do this too; they provide enough allure to keep their partner emotionally conjoined, yet are not so awful that they run a mile. The awareness of this is often what causes the victim to eventually extricate themselves. There is an analogue here too in countries with dictators and oppressed citizens who flee the tyranny in order to begin a better life.

All that is to say, there is a sub-standard co-dependency going on between the general population and the people that they elect into power – which means that if absurd views begin to proliferate in society, they are likely to find representation in the establishment too – and that makes everyone worse off. The government takes shape by moulding itself around their own perception of their electoral popularity – and as a weighted average, it is generally about as good or bad, and as prudent and imprudent, as its perception of the people it claims to govern.

On The Problem of Political Authority

 

Mike Huemer, in The Problem of Authority, argues that political authority - the state’s supposed moral right to command and coerce - is an illusion. Mike challenges two primary propositions, that of political legitimacy and political obligation: 

1.         The government is entitled to rule over the society, including doing things that would normally (if someone else did them) be considered rights-violations. This is called political legitimacy.

2.         The rest of us are obligated to obey the government’s commands simply because they come from the government. This is called political obligation.

(Mike's words)

One of his central beliefs here is that if ordinary individuals cannot justly coerce others, neither can the state. He concludes that government authority is an unjustified form of coercion, making anarchism - where voluntary cooperation replaces state control - the morally superior alternative. Mike's very impressive; he has been an influential and highly competent philosopher at seriously questioning long-standing assumptions about the legitimacy of state power, and advocates for a more voluntary libertarian society. He's also a jolly nice chap, and has been on my show for a very enjoyable discussion about God's existence (which you can access here).

What about his central beliefs in The Problem of Authority, though - is he onto something? I think he's onto a lot more than many people would countenance - and Mike and I are certainly similar in our advocacy of free market economics and the espousal of general human liberties. And, of course, on the inefficiencies and overreaching of the state, we also concur. But… I don't think I can go as far as Mike in his rejection of any moral authority of the state - I think it's too strong, and that there are conditions under which a central authority and/or top-down central intelligence are/is necessary to maintain social order.

In my book Benevolent Libertarianism, I lay out several ways in which some services and institutions require the kind of large-scale coordination that wouldn't be optimally performed by the market. It's not just the case that the practical challenges of implementing and sustaining a Huemer-esque stateless society are prohibitively complex and costly, I think the end result would be both unrealistic and sub-optimal too. Just because the state is inefficient at most things it does, that doesn’t mean we should abolish it.

Standard economics teaches that services should be provided by the most efficient agent. While the market often outperforms the state in delivering goods and services, that doesn’t mean the state has no role in the cases it provides unique value. Some functions are better handled by the state than the market. The key is not to eliminate the state, but to ensure it focuses on what it does best and leaves the rest to more efficient providers.

Moreover, I won't lay the whole thing out here, but I also argue in my book that abolition of state is a problematic idea on several other accounts, to do with hardwired human incentives, human will, and human nature in general when it comes to power struggles. To take the latter as a case in point, an attempted stateless society would soon see people forming new power structures in hierarchies that would not differ significantly from the state.

Consequently, I do think Mike Huemer makes a compelling partial (perhaps majority) case against the illusion of political authority. But I'd only go so far as to say that the fundamental problem isn’t the existence of a state but its inefficiencies and overreach. I think the purported problem of political authority is not an absolute, totalising problem, it can be ameliorated with a state that is restrained, accountable, and limited to those areas where it is the most efficient provider, allowing human liberty and voluntary cooperation to flourish wherever possible.

The Maze and the Watchtower: Seeing Beyond the Illusion

 

Irrespective of whether I like someone or how I feel about people as individuals, when it comes to most of their highly partisan left or right-wing political views, beliefs or rhetoric I encounter, I simply do not trust the conclusions they draw or the reasoning they attempt to employ to get them there. I believe that some highly partisan political commentators have good intentions, but I have little confidence in their ability to discover that they are part of a large, complex game of power, manipulation, deceit, and self-serving narratives designed to obscure the truth.

First, here’s an important preliminary quote from a recent Blog post about why politicians lie way more than you think:

"There are generally two ways to lie. One type of lie is called suggestio falsi, which is the suggestion of something which is untrue or deliberately telling an untruth – such as about where you were last night, about breaking something and blaming someone else, about not being at an event you claimed you attended, and so forth. The other type of lie is called a suppressio veri type of lie, which is concealment of truth – such as failing to disclose conflicts of interest, ignoring information about negative consequences, not revealing the true costs of policies, and so forth. Because suppressio veri lies are less blatant and slipperier due to the ambiguity of what they omit, they are harder to directly confront, more widespread, and therefore the most insidious and destructive kind of lies told in society. And they are mostly the kind of lies that underpin the political system – they are habitual tools of manipulation that erode trust and exploit people's assumptions, allowing politicians to shape narratives and control perceptions without outright fabricating facts. In the way that politicians craft the squalid art of omission and indirect duplicity, it could be argued that they, and the media that amplifies and legitimises their distortions, are society's biggest liars."

Now, I don’t like to be overly-bivalent in my analyses of societal phenomena, as I prefer a more sophisticated, nuanced analysis that considers a wider range of perspectives and complexities. But to the greatest degree, I really do think society is made up of two groups of people; those who have figured out what the system is like, and those who remain in its thrall. I acknowledge that this comes in degrees, but only up to a point – the reality is, once you’ve sussed out the trick and seen through the illusion, you can never unsee it. I think of it as being like a maze and a watchtower. Most politicians, most of the media, and the public who’ve bought into it all, from whatever side of the political spectrum they happen to place themselves, are controlled by strings inside a complicated maze, being guided through its dead ends and wrong turns, relying on signs of manipulation placed within the maze to have them believe they’ve been directed through their own volition and competence.

Those enlightened few who can see the maze from the watchtower can see the bigger picture; they can see the extent to which those inside the maze are bought cheaply to protect the interests of those who pull their strings, where their outcomes are frequently aligned with the agendas of their funding sources and political thrall. I’d actually go so far as to say that virtually everyone who is pushing for some kind of left or right wing political agenda, party political partisans, tribal in-group mentalities, so-called social justice warrior narratives, wokeism, identity politics, or culture war distractions, has been bought or compromised in some way, and they unknowingly serve the very power structures they would vehemently oppose if they could see beyond the snare.

Within the maze, there is a ladder leading up the watchtower – it’s the ladder of authentic, uncompromised truthseeking – but few dare to grasp its rungs. Many don't even see it is there, or don't recognise it for what it is, because it looks like too much hard work to reach. And the watchtower at the top of the ladder is not one small, isolated viewpoint - it is a vast, elevated expanse of interconnected insights - a profound vantage of extraordinary clarity, where the exposed realities of the intricate web of power, manipulation, ideology, and human susceptibility converges into a comprehensive awakening. From this grand perspective, the maze below is revealed in its entirety, and the forces that shape and direct it become unmistakably clear.

And it's important to remember both the conditions under which one finds oneself stuck in the maze, and the plight of being trapped there. Residents are contending with the elephant and the rider problem (see Haidt) - where they are driven by the emotional elephant, and where emotions frequently take the lead and steer our rationality, not the other way around, with the rational mind struggling to justify decisions made impulsively by the emotional mind. Instead of rationality guiding emotions, it often serves as a tool to justify what the emotional elephant has already decided. Furthermore, they are also contending with the fact that there is a divide between left and right wing ideologies that is often deeper than mere social influence, and how much the left and right are genetically predisposed to their beliefs, as differences in moral priorities appear to have a heritable component, where genetics predisposes people to certain orientations and beliefs. Add to that the fact that online content algorithms amplify this effect by feeding them material that aligns with their preexisting views.

As they consume content that supports their biases, they are pushed further into ideological silos, deepening the divisions within the maze and making the ladder of truthseeking even harder to recognise. These predispose them further to actively seek out views and content that already align with what they believe, where they search for mirrors that reflect and reinforce their own biases, and gravitate toward views that validate their existing beliefs, leaving them trapped in a cycle of confirmation bias and self-reassurance. And to entrench them further, tribalism fosters loyalty to one’s "side" - whether political, social, or cultural – often at the cost of critical thinking. Running around the maze, they seek to defend their group’s beliefs and narratives, not because they’ve diligently critically evaluated them, but because dissent feels like a betrayal of their identity. 

Moreover, the maze amplifies their illusion of competence - the Dunning-Kruger effect - where they overestimate their understanding of complex issues, and mistakenly feel more informed than they actually are, emboldened to make confident assertions while ignoring the limits of their knowledge. And as those pulling their strings tug a bit harder, they remain subliminally motivated by fear and in the shadows of the maze, while all the time believing they are a force for good, acting with near moral certainty, convinced of their own righteousness even as they unknowingly perpetuate the very dynamics that keep them imprisoned. They remain fully sold on the labyrinth’s paths; blind to the watchtower, they embrace their imprisonment with the zeal of willing convicts.

I think most individuals are trapped in the maze, navigating its endless twists and turns without ever questioning its design. A smaller minority have begun their ascent, partway up the ladder of truthseeking, striving to rise above the confusion. And then there are the rare few who have reached the watchtower – where, through a determined effort to learn the truth, they are elevated to a level where they can see the maze for what it truly is and understand the forces that shape it.

See What's Happening

 

What I’m going to say is expressed in very simple prose, but I suspect only a minority of people who are like me - smart, good looking, socially urbane 😃 - will fully get this. Until, that is, a time when virtually everyone has no choice but to get this.

So, Trump won in America, and in the UK, it is predicted that Reform UK will be the largest political party by membership this summer. The woke left hasn’t woken up (no pun intended) to the fact they are largely to blame for this. Biden was beyond awful; years of the woke, left wing Tories were a disaster; and now the UK faces even gloomier years under Keir Starmer’s Labour - a party even more dreadful in its woke policies and censorious mentality. It is difficult to find many who welcome this prospect. Most people clearly don’t like woke nonsense, and those who think they do are either absurd people who think they are its main beneficiaries, or people who are oblivious to the societal harms it inflicts.

Of course, the headline-grabbing woke stuff is an easy target – but woke’s main harms are more widely and more thinly dispersed in the form of bureaucratic overreach, cultural self-censorship, divisive identity politics, institutional groupthink, and mass resentment in its true victims across the nation. I’ve talked about the last four before in blog posts, so here I want to address bureaucratic overreach, because that is the silent, most insidious force that quietly infiltrates every level of society and undermines real progress and freedoms. And while I’m not a fan of all the purported solutions being offered as a reaction to this plight, you’re not paying enough attention if you don’t realise that many of the most hated figures (Trump, Farage, Musk, etc) are a direct result of millions of people being utterly fed up with woke, with bureaucratic overreach, and with left wing politicians’ attempts to nannify, infantilise, control every aspect of individual and societal autonomy, and, of course, extract ever more money from the public through taxes and regulations to pay for things that most people don’t want and would never vote for if they had the chance.

Up until recently, you could think of the political situation a little like bacteria and human bodies. The bacteria in human bodies have a short life span compared with their hosts, and are driven by evolutionary forces to cooperate for their shared benefit. Because numerous generations of these microorganisms rely on human survival, a disease that kills its host would not be selected for in a long percentage game, because the evolutionary optimisation is for bacteria to sustain themselves by feeding on humans while inflicting minimal harm. Analogically, you could say politicians behave in a similar way regarding what they can get away with to serve their own ends (dictators even more so). Too much duress on the population and they face a civil resistance, or even a Hobbesian collapse of society – so they aim to act with as much self-interest as possible without killing the host organism (the electorate), so to speak.

What’s happening now is that the balance in this relationship has been so heavily disturbed that large swathes of the population have simply had enough. Enough of being lied to, patronised and extorted. Just as an overgrowth of harmful bacteria can overwhelm the body's defences, the political class in the UK appears to be pushing the limits of what the public will tolerate, extracting ever more from the system while offering less in return. Decades of short-termism, self-preservation, and opportunism have weakened trust, not just in mainstream parties, but in the nature of political governance itself, much like an immune system worn down by repeated infections.

I don’t know whether there will be enough momentum to radically change the way governance is manifested, or whether this period will just turn out to be a slightly extreme iteration of the cycles of political pendulum swings we’ve seen time and time again. But I feel fairly certain that the widespread discontent is real, and that something will eventually give way to a new political paradigm. Whether by reform or rupture remains to be seen – but pay close attention to what is going on, and I predict it will become more and more evident.

Politicians Lie More Than You Think

Here's why politicians lie way more than you think. There are generally two ways to lie. One type of lie is called "suggestio falsi", which is the suggestion of something which is untrue or deliberately telling an untruth - such as about where you were last night, about breaking something and blaming someone else, about not being at an event you claimed you attended, and so forth. The other type of lie is called a 'suppressio veri' type of lie, which is concealment of truth - such as failing to disclose conflicts of interest, ignoring information about negative consequences, not revealing the true costs of policies, and so forth.

Because suppressio veri lies are less blatant and slipperier due to the ambiguity of what they omit, they are harder to directly confront, more widespread, and therefore the most insidious and destructive kind of lies told in society. And they are mostly the kind of lies that underpin the political system - they are habitual tools of manipulation that erode trust and exploit people's assumptions, allowing politicians to shape narratives and control perceptions without outright fabricating facts. In the way that politicians craft the squalid art of omission and indirect duplicity, it could be argued that they, and the media that amplifies and legitimises their distortions, are society's biggest liars.

The Science of Your Political Soapbox

 

One of the other most important things we’ve learned in the past 20-30 years about humans as political thinkers is just how much the left and right are genetically predisposed to their beliefs. In other words, when someone annoys you with their dodgy, ill-conceived political opinions, seek solace in the fact that they often can’t help it, because a significant part of what they think is likely to be ingrained in their mental hardware.

Our moral judgments arise from a set of psychological foundations shaped by evolution to help us thrive in social settings – and there is strong evidence that left and right wing adherents tend to prioritise these moral foundations differently. I said in a recent blog post that leftists tend to more strongly emphasise values like care/harm and fairness/reciprocity, while conservatives consider a broader array of moral considerations - adding loyalty, authority, and sanctity to their core concerns. And personality traits, such as openness to experience and conscientiousness, are partly heritable, and they also correlate with political orientation. Openness to experience is associated with liberal or left-leaning views, and conscientiousness is associated with conservative or right-leaning views. This is especially backed up by twin studies, which have shown that identical twins (who share the same genes, of course) are more likely to have similar political views compared to fraternal twins, who share only about half their genes (I say ‘around half” because the specific combination of DNA inherited by each sibling is random, which leads to slight variations around the 50% average). These findings suggest that genetics potentially accounts for around 30-40% of the variation in political attitudes, with environmental and cultural factors (like upbringing, life experiences, and social influences) making up the majority of the rest of the percentage.

Don’t get me wrong, political beliefs are not fixed and unchangeable – there is a complex interplay between genes and environment – and all dubious political views have the potential to be revised with better reasoning and stronger empirical analysis. But, given that we know that these differences in moral priorities appear to have a heritable component, where genetics predisposes people to certain orientations and beliefs, it ought to make us wiser in how we discuss politics – and also encourage us to take the political rants we see with a huge dose of salt. In fact, when we see our friends waxing lyrical about politics and social justice online, perhaps we can amuse ourselves with the thought that they may have a degree of limited control over these views like they do limited control over preferences for spicy food or their fear of heights.

Left Turn to Ruin: The Decline of Modern UK Society

 

It’s well-documented across various research areas that, from the perspective of an average leftist and an average conservative, the latter consistently demonstrates a better understanding of the former's viewpoint than vice versa. In social experiments, conservatives were more accurate in predicting how leftists would respond to moral and political questions, whereas leftists were less accurate in predicting conservative responses (I have a blog post from 2016 discussing this discordance, focusing on the Ideological Turing Test).

The evidence suggests that conservatives are better at taking the perspective of leftists, because they tend to emphasise and balance a broader range of moral foundations, including loyalty, authority, sanctity, in addition to care and fairness. Because conservatives are more cognisant of all five foundations, they should be better equipped to understand the perspectives and the consequences of political theory better than the narrow range of considerations upheld by the left.

I’m also fairly confident that the average conservative is more intelligent than the average leftist. And I should imagine that the evidence that shows conservatives tend to balance more moral dimensions in their reasoning is because, on average, conservatives display higher cognitive abilities, particularly in conservative values in economics and the foundations for a stable society. But that said, as I laid out in my Blog on three dimensional left and right wing politics, while conservatives often display a preference for order, structure, and stability, leftists are often more open to novelty, complexity, and change – which means a thorough political analysis from any UK citizen must involve reflecting these different ways of processing information.

All that said, I’m fairly confident that the fact that leftists tend to balance fewer moral dimensions in their reasoning, and exhibit a narrower set of perspectives on how the world really works, sheds light on certain political dynamics in the UK, particularly when considering the left’s approach to socialist policies, climate alarmism, and woke ideology. Most leftist commentary on wealth redistribution, extreme climate activism, and identity politics is undermined by the same defects as demonstrated in the Ideological Turing Test. And a lot of this is driven by misguided views about care and fairness – both of which are noble qualities (and, of course, key tenets of conservatism too – something many leftists miss, which is a further part of their moral dimension problem) – but they are frequently abused by being taken into excess at the expense of other important values, or often just simply used as virtue-signalling shibboleths as markers of ideological identity without deeper engagement or consideration of the broader picture.

One of the problems in the UK right now is that, as the Conservative Party has become a centre-left party, it now mirrors many of the same errors that undermine the political left, gradually destroying its own core values in the process, and diluting its own ideological foundation as the party of small government, free market values, personal responsibility, and individual liberty.

And the excessive leftist influence on UK society extends way beyond the woes of the Conservative Party. We have a state that’s far too large for the size of the economy (which, alongside Gammon’s Law, is the main reason why public services are in crisis), an overly-regulated, bureaucratic society, economic stagnation and increased welfare dependency, a sickness and mental health crisis, the continued erosion of free speech and open debate, a widespread identity crisis, a cost of living crisis (exacerbated by bad government policies), an immigration crisis (remember to heed Comte’s famous warning that ‘demographics is destiny”), a decline in educational standards, half-witted environmental policies that result in significant economic burdens for businesses and households alike, and waning trust in institutions and political leadership.

A continuation of this will inevitably lead to collapse, as it did in the 1970s. The seeds of economic stagnation and societal disintegration have been planted, the current public services will buckle under these unsustainable costs, businesses will continue to be choked by perverse over-regulation, and myopic environmental measures will sow the seeds of their own destruction. Things will get worse before they get better – and years henceforward, we’ll look back on this period with lament.

If we ever do wake up, it must be to the reality that the only societal forces that have consistently fostered human progression, liberty, and stability are the free-market principles of trade and competition, personal responsibility, a smaller state, fewer regulations, equality before the law*, egalitarianism, meritocracy, and the protection of individual freedoms.   

*Equality before the law has historically been the cornerstone of justice – it is literally the only kind of equality that a society needs as its bedrock. With equality before the law, the natural concomitant is equality of opportunity; because with equality before the law, it should mean there are no artificial barriers to equality of opportunity. Unfortunately, equality before the law is increasingly being undermined by laws tailored to favour certain minority groups through mechanisms like positive discrimination and identity-based policies. These approaches create new forms of inequality before the law, where the majority is unfairly discriminated against, unjustly (and artificially) elevating group identity over individual merit and fairness.

How To Talk About Politics

Jonathan Haidt’s elephant and the rider metaphor develops Hume’s famous “reason is the slave of the passions”, and illustrates the elephant as the powerful, emotion-driven part of the mind, while the rider symbolises rational, controlled thought trying to steer it. However, the elephant often steers the rider, as emotions, instincts, and ingrained beliefs influence our actions and shape our reasoning. While the rider may believe they are in control, they frequently justify decisions the elephant has already made, highlighting how emotional impulses frequently overpower rational thought, particularly in tribal areas where the beliefs of your in-group are what you feel compelled to defend, even if there’s no empirical basis for them.

Consequently, most political commentary we read in newspapers and on social media is a reflection of an individual’s tribal and emotional biases, rather than thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis. Because of which, most political opinions are not really edifying – and I think you’re only likely to offer worthwhile contributions if you can master your elephant as a competent rider and transcend the litany of prosaic in-group discourse. I think the most compelling perspectives are those where the agent has tried to transcend instinctive allegiances, in an attempt to cultivate a clarity that allows meaningful engagement beyond the pull of predictable ‘them vs. us’ tribal partisans.

Some Election Musings

 

Let’s start with some quirky facts about this election that have been doing the rounds: 

1} With a turnout of just under 60%, over 17 million eligible voters did not participate, which is almost twice the number of Labour voters. 

2} Labour secured only about 33% of the popular vote, yet won around 66% of the seats in Parliament, whereas the Conservatives received about 28% of the vote but got annihilated. 

3} Reform UK received 4 million votes (about 10% of the vote) but only secured 4 seats, while the Liberal Democrats secured only 3.4 million votes (around 8.5%) but won 69 seats. 

4} Because of the disproportionality of the electoral voting system, Labour's huge majority allows them to govern our nation despite fewer than 20% of the eligible electorate voting for them. 

5} Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour of 2019 gained a greater share of the vote and lost, with Keir Starmer’s Labour of 2024 gaining a smaller share of the vote and winning. 

It’s clear that Labour didn’t win this election so much as the Tories lost it. A significant proportion of the Labour votes were more concerned with getting the Tories out than they were excited about Labour governing under the leadership of serial bullshi**er Keir Starmer. The combined Tory/Reform vote was roughly similar to the combined Labour vote, where the latter greatly came out on top because we have a voting system that produces big victories when the opposition vote is divided. 

It’s perhaps especially noteworthy here that neither of the main parties fought this election on the values for which they used to stand, and both are currently fairly indistinguishable in mutually standing for big state, high tax, over-regulation, eco-fanatical, freedom-restricting, wokeist principles. For someone with my political values, I feel the Tories deserved to lose, but Labour didn’t deserve to win, which leaves a sense of foreboding for people who haven’t been seduced by the empty promises, taken in by the lies, and been enmeshed in the ever-knottier net of institutional thrall and systemic entrenchment. 

And to those who have built a profile around hating the opposition, I’d say that it’s unwise, because being on either extreme of the left vs. right divide is so inadequate to the task of reflecting the true complexities of something like a human society. A country needs and is built on conservative values to conserve the best values in society, and also requires liberal values to challenge the status quo, employ creative inputs, and help us evolve and improve. 

Conservative values play a crucial role in preserving the best aspects of society, such as Judeo-Christian truths, market qualities, innovation, self-determination, personal responsibility, traditions, cultural heritage, and other established institutions that have withstood the test of time. And liberal values are also essential for driving social, economic, and political progress. They encourage adaptability, enabling society to evolve in response to changing circumstances and emerging challenges. A thriving society like the UK will always function with both those qualities at work, harnessing both conservative and liberal values to maintain stability while promoting progress. 

So, it’s a big problem that the Conservative party no longer resembles the party with conservative values. They no longer have a coherent sense of continuity and identity, and they no longer offer a foundation upon which communities can build and thrive. Equally, Labour used to be the party of the working class – but it’s working-class people who are most crippled by Labour’s descent into over-regulation, Net Zero madness and increasing wokeness. 

Consequently, political commentary that pits one side as promoting evil values, and the other as the solution to counter evil, is just not doing the subject justice, or promoting the kind of thoughtful dialogue required to engage in healthy political discourse – especially given that the values on which they used to be divided have been eroded away within both parties respectively. 

But, alas, I suspect the same story will be told, whoever is in power – people will remain wedded to a tribalistic mentality, where most of the good/bad things done by the party(ies) they support and the party(ies) to which they’re hostile are seen through the lens of individual confirmation bias. It’s a very impoverishing way to do politics; seize on the opponents’ errors and ignore what they do well, and capitalise on the preferred party’s strengths and ignore what they do badly – but humans are primed to be that way. 

The best way to successfully defuse conflict in the world is not to be preoccupied with difference and division, but to encourage intellectual freedom, trade and competition, and celebration of assimilation and the ways in which we are similar with shared goals and common human properties. The political system, in its current incarnation, is not fit for purpose in achieving these aims, and in many cases only pretends to want to do so. 

Party politics aside, the old wisdom still holds, and probably always will; if we want material prosperity, we must promote freer trade; if we want better ideas, we should strive for more intellectual freedom; if we want kinder societies, we should work harder to love; and if we want justice, we should seek the truth.