According to The Spectator this morning, 'Britain is frozen with fear', or so its main headline for the day says.
When, however, you look at the article, it says:
There are three levels of modern political fear. First, and this is serious enough, there is the fear of losing one's social status and career, of ‘cancellation'. Taking a position against the consensus that dominates the progressive establishment still marks you out.
Then there is the fear of facing the truth, because it is overwhelming, and it would also mean accepting that you have been not only wrong, but have been proved disastrously wrong. (And even worse, that the people you despise were correct.) This applies across the board, to the Supreme Court foot-draggers, China avoiders and mass immigration enthusiasts alike.
And third, and this is the big unmentionable: actual physical fear for your life and the lives of others.
As exercises in mistatement, or at least disconnect between a headline and an article go, this is spectacularly wrong.
I agree Britain is frozen with fear right now, but you have to enjoy considerable white male privilege to think that modern political fear is the real crisis we face.
The fear actually suffered in the UK right now is of:
- Poverty
- Homlessness
- Joblessness
- Meaningless existence
- Hopelessness among young people
- Unaddressed climate change
- Discrimination, including by the state
- Physical fear, mainly amongst women and migrants, but also amongst minorities of all sorts
- The military jingoism of politicians
- Rule by politicians utterly out of touch with reality
There are more, but I offer this list to make my point. There are reasons for fear in this country, but the fear politicians are suffering is very largely of their own making, and they have the power to ease it. Their fear-inducing incompetence, from which even they are suffering the consequences, should not be the cause for our concern. We know how to be rid of them. What should worry us is the list I offer. Those politicians appear to have no idea how to address those issues, and that is what we should be worried about.
When the chattering classes begin to notice, we might get politics that matter in this country, but it seems that The Spectator, as mouthpiece for the Tories, has no idea what is required of it, seeking only to preserve its privilege above all else. And that, in a nutshell, is why the Tories deserve the fate they are suffering.
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Something’s gone wrong with the formatting of your post, Richard. The quote from the Spectator stretches across the whole page with the right hand part of it being obscured by the RH side bar.
Hi
That’s sorted now.
Thanks
Richard
The most spectacularly wrong-headed listing is ‘the fear of facing the truth’, when the very essence of right-wing thought is flight from evidence and reason, preferring various ‘authorities’ – aristocracy, tradition, religion, strong-man leaders, etc… while the left is characterised precisely by reliance on evidence and reason.
Bye bye Tories, and Labour, it wasn’t nice knowing you.
Sounds as if Fraser Nelson has put his twopenneth in.
I’d contend that not facing the truth is exactly the thing that has brought the Tories to their present state. Instead, the Spectator’s version of the truth is on a par with Trump’s. it is what he says it is and that version has divorced itself from objective facts. People whose salaries depend on the Spectator/Trump truth cannot be blamed for pretending to believe it, whether they do or not. Sinecures are hard to come by, but they have to look in the mirror sometimes and check their moral compasses from time to time. Claiming to believe in a thing that is objectively not true is, I understand, liable to lead to cognitive dissonance and mental problems in normal human beings. the logical conclusion has to be that Trump and many of his followers are outside the normal range of the human psyche.
I treat anything written in The Spectator with extreme cynicism given its ownership and its awful mendacious editor.
Agreed
Thanks for reproducing this.
It proves – if ever any proof were needed – just how fascist the Tory party really is?
All they’re doing is accusing others of their very own behaviour – getting their accusation in first to an exclusive and minority group-think, making themselves out to be victims of what are in reality are their own crimes against humanity.
It would be pathetic but for the real harm they have caused.
The Tories are utterly un-redeemable in my opinion.
And mine
Late…..Soviet….. Britain.
The politburo (LINO+Tory+LibDem) does not know what to do, the old policies (let’s have a bit more austerity that’ll sort things out, stick up interest rates yeah!!)) don’t work (they never could. Irrelevance beckons. Fear? the usual policios are shitting themselves – just like the old SovU polito – they simply did not have the mental capacity/the knowledge to know what to do. As for Pravda – I mean the Spectator (and other tory trash mags) – they don’t even know what the party line is – anymore.
Which leaves a couple of open questions: which political parties can address what ails ordinary citizens, how to stop the Deform fascists from taking over (and how to sort out disfunctional institutions such as the BoE and the FinMin)..
As a song from teenage years goes; Fear is a weapon of mass destruction. Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction. Where were they 20 years ago when the government proclaimed Iraqi WMD was #1 problem in the world. I am still waiting for their action. They have no real courage.
Talking of fear, what on earth is this figure about?
“The turnout for the Labour Party deputy leadership election in October 2025 was 16.6% of eligible voters”.
Is this people fearful of upsetting the Leadership by not voting for the “preferred candidate” but not wanting to actually support that preferred candidate? So abstaining?