Amelia dresses up to meet Lord Liverpool
The former cabinet ministers Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick’s defections to the Reform party suggest that the disastrous “Conservative” governments of 2010-24 may indeed finally be extinguishing that long-lived and very occasionally illustrious party. Yet Reform’s Nigel Farage has shown himself prone to the faults of the 2010-24 “Conservatives” in barring original thinkers such as his ex-colleague Rupert Lowe from becoming or remaining Reform MPs. With such leadership and structural flaws, neither party will regenerate Britain. That regeneration must await the arrival of the next generation, hopefully well represented by the splendid purple-haired Goth AI avatar Amelia.
For those not up on the twists and turns of social media, “Amelia” was developed by doubtless ludicrously overcompensated consultants at the behest of the “Squishy Rishi” Sunak British “Conservative” government for a roleplaying educational game “Pathways – Navigating the Internet and Extremism” in which she was an attractive “Goth” girl with purple hair who expounds views held by Hackney-based consultants to be “far-right” and is thus an Antagonist. As anyone with the intelligence of a hamster could have told them it would, this backfired.
Amelia is naff but rather a hottie (possibly especially to those from my 1960s teenager generation) and her views are in general platitudinously obvious – not Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Much Blood” or anything of the kind. The fact that Amelia has become a social media hit is down to the policies of all British governments since 1997 attempting to cover up their failure to act in the interests of their electors by using the police to arrest and even imprison those citizens who express views that dissent from leftist orthodoxy.
Before 2006, we could have hoped for a Conservative government to save us from this tyranny imposed by Tony Blair’s Labour government, but it has been obvious in the last two decades that “Conservatives” are as likely to intensify the censorship as to remove it, as they should. On immigration also, “Conservative” governments have talked of restricting the flow, at least of illegal immigrants, but have done nothing of the kind – the final betrayal was the “Boriswave” of illiterate alien predators that followed Johnson’s “reform” of immigration rules from January 2021.
As I have pointed out previously, there is a structural reason for this. The first sign that things were going drastically wrong was Michael Howard’s disgraceful defenestration of the brilliant Shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury Howard Flight (R.I.P.) before the 2005 election, when Flight’s constituency was forced to “deselect” him. As part of David Cameron’s pernicious “modernization” project after he gained the party leadership that year, the partial control over candidate selection by Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) became effective total control. No candidate is eligible for selection by a local constituency party who has not undergone a rigorous ideological weeding out at CCHQ, the panels at which are uniformly metropolitan and fashionably “woke.”
Before 2017, women and candidates from ethnic minorities were given preference as such, so partially evaded this control, which is why we got the somewhat conservative Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch as “Conservative” cabinet ministers. Since the 2017 election that loophole has been closed, so minority women “Conservative” parliamentary candidates must now perforce be as “woke” as blond Aryan candidates with faint German accents.
It appears that Farage has structured Reform to impose the same central party headquarters restrictions on ideological diversity. Certainly, his defenestration of Rupert Lowe, by far the most creative thinker among his modest group of MPs, was indefensible. Lowe appears to be the best chance we have for some genuinely creative policymaking on the right of politics. (Sir John Redwood and Jacob Rees Mogg performed the same function in the “Conservative” party, and Redwood at least should have been a senior member of every Conservative cabinet since 1990, if not Prime Minister, but they are now both out of Parliament.)
Without Lowe, beyond his continuing support of Brexit, for which we should be forever grateful, Farage has shown a dreadful tendency towards ideological policing of his colleagues. If he has set up the Reform Party headquarters to have the same control over candidates as CCHQ, a Farage government will be identical to the 2010-24 “Conservative” governments and a complete disappointment, surrendering always to the Blob and making no progress on rectifying Britain’s problems.
Britain cannot afford another “Conservative” or Reform government dominated by the center-left; too much damage has been done. The 2010-24 government was a grotesque failure on immigration, but its malfeasance was not confined to that issue. Boris Johnson travelled specially to Ukraine in 2022, encouraging the Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy to reject the peace deal with Russia then being negotiated, a trip that has resulted in a re-run of World War I’s Western Front for four years and over 1 million dead, Ukrainian and Russian. Theresa May made attainment of “net zero” carbon emissions a legal requirement. That has doomed the British economy to decades of high and rising energy prices, all in pursuit of what is now quite clearly a leftist scientific hoax by which no competent statesman would have been fooled. But then Oxford University, from which May and Johnson graduated, is especially weak in science. Finally, the 2010-24 governments, after a feeble attempt at “austerity” in their early years, indulged in an orgy of public spending, succumbing to every alarmist fallacy relating to the COVID-19 outbreak (the lack of science, again) to damage British civil liberties and waste incredible amounts of money, much of it through fraud.
Reform, on the basis of its first couple of years, seems likely to be no better. Farage is a brilliant salesman, but also a pathological control freak, who does not tolerate rivals like Lowe, and is all too tolerant of other well-spoken value-free encyclopedia salesmen like Robert Jenrick. With such people in charge, and access to winnable Parliamentary seats tightly controlled, there will be no access to power for those who have good ideas or might otherwise offend the woke Blob, any more than there was in 2010-24. More time will go by without proper root-and-branch policy reversal, as the country slides ever more deeply into the despond of multi-ethnic socialism.
That’s where an Amelia Party comes in. An Amelia Party, being rooted in Amelia’s sound British common sense, would never have been fooled by the “climate change” scamsters, so Britain would have North Sea Oil and no windmills. An Amelia Party, while sensible and moderate, would solve the immigration problem once and for all by slowing to a trickle the flow of random foreigners into an already grossly overcrowded island. That would itself solve some economic problems, such as the grossly overinflated cost of housing and the lack of resources in the National Health Service. An Amelia Party would not start any foreign wars, since it would not be able to find Ukraine on a map (and would take a pragmatic view of Ukraine’s Eastern boundary, when it found out the current boundary was set by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the last gasp of approaching defeat by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918).
An Amelia Party would allow full freedom of speech, since Amelia herself is an icon of that belief. However, it might engineer say a 2-year extension of present restrictions, but reversing their effect, so that the BBC (which Amelia would defund, abolishing the license fee, finally) could not propagandize the electorate against her before her policies were in place — “hate speech” during that period would be defined as that which showed hatred of ordinary native Britons. Naturally, an Amelia Party would deregulate, since Amelia would correctly believe that regulations are instruments of oppression devised by the over-educated against the prosperity of ordinary people.
Finally, all we need is a Svengali, who would persuade the young and impressionable Amelia to follow the economic policies of Lord Liverpool, that brought the first great wave of British prosperity and entrepreneurship. With such a Svengali, government would be cut back far more radically than in even Elon Musk’s DOGE dreams – if it was possible for Lord Palmerston to run the Foreign Office with 36 staff, at a time when Britain ruled a quarter of the globe, it should be possible now in her much reduced state.
Since Amelia’s foreign policy would be isolationist, there would be little need of massive defense forces. The substantial social security bureaucracy, so oppressive to all with whom it comes in contact, would be effectively removed. Agriculture subsidies would be abolished, and replaced by Corn Laws, which would protect British agriculture only if it was economically worth protecting. Tariffs would be instituted, and as far as possible government would be financed through tariffs and sumptuary taxes, so that ordinary people of limited means would pay very little tax. Finally, income tax would be sharply reduced to a low flat tax, with little or no need for form-filling.
There are ways to run Britain properly. Amelia knows what they are; we should follow her sound common-sense judgement. Should she be given the chance to govern, I would be more than happy to volunteer as her economic Svengali!
-0-
(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)