What do Reform voters actually want?
Immigration is their biggest complaint, anyone could have guessed that.
But looking at some of the other data suggests something more interesting:
78% of Reform voters believe: “Rich people in the UK are able to get around the law or get off more easily than poorer people”
74% of Reform voters believe: “Big businesses in the UK take advantage of ordinary people”
73% of Reform voters believe: “Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth”
71% of Reform voters believe: “Utilities like energy, water and railways should be run in the public sector”
Having a memory is illegal in Britain, but I think often about Gyles Brandreth, in 2016, going up to random people in Guildford (voted 55% Conservative in the 2017 general election) and pitching polices to them.
A lot of people supported Corbyn’s policies - scrapping university fees, an end to privatisation in the NHS, restoring the 50% tax rate for those earning over £150,000 - until they were revealed to be Corbyn’s policies, at which point the punters would balk.
If these people are protest-voting, there is a lot of shared ground for the left to gain.
The immigration narrative needs to be tackled strongly, but there is a lot of space for other policies that are going to give people more money, and keep Britain a green and pleasant land.
As the man says, anything can happen in the next half hour - imagine what can happen in three years.
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What sort of egotistical maniac would actually dress themselves up like Jesus?
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1938 that nobody has any rights. That they are “entirely gratuitous — amorphous and vague, sad.” A poor lie the powerful tell themselves.
In the West, the rights we’ve come to rely on — media freedom, civil society checks and balances, due process — are being eroded. The rule of law, as the UN Secretary-General put it, is being outmuscled by the rule of force.
Where did these rights come from? Most of our liberal democracy was built after WWII. We built the United Nations. We adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We held these truths to be self-evident.
But they were never self-evident. They were a story.
The moral launderer, as scholar Alec Ryrie argues, moved from Jesus Christ to Adolf Hitler — whose unique evil gave liberalism its anchor — and now to no-one. Meaning breaks down. You get racist jokes with 10 million views on a Sunday afternoon.
Sartre again: “Existence is not something which allows itself to be thought of from a distance; it has to invade you suddenly, pounce upon you, weigh heavily on your heart like a huge motionless animal.”
The left has always been good at stories. The right fears them — one gay kiss in a movie and they believe the entire normative system will collapse.
It is not enough to tell these stories, though. You cannot afford that paralysis. If meaning is constructed rather than given, then how you construct yourself — through politics, through protest — is the point.
Live and recount. And live so right that it is impossible to be taken away.
I went to a lecture recently that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
It started with a 17th century tech utopia - a perfect imaginary city with a temple at its heart, built by a man who believed that knowledge and faith were the same project. You might have noticed that tech billionaires trying to build their own idea of that today - but while ‘sovereign nations’ are doing superficially similar, they’re fundamentally different.
The old utopians had a shared conception of the good, a transcendent horizon, a reason to submit to something larger than themselves.
Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen have only themselves. What they’re actually building is (I’m sorry) Rick and Morty.
New piece on Wealth of Notions. Link in bio.
Children are getting exposed to the same ideas (and traumas, seeing their potential peers obliterated in the Middle East) as adults, much earlier.
They are exposed to “media-delivered ideas” - content aimed at adults and viewed mostly over the internet – much sooner than previous generations. They are not bonding with each other through shared experiences - known as ‘status homophily’ - but through beliefs, attitudes, and values - known as ‘value homophily’ - regardless of demographic difference.
Millennials have the same thing, but in reverse. It’s arrested development. Lego costs a thousand pounds, the same media is rebooted to monetise nostalgia. This is the only outlet, as the cost of living crisis, and the inability to go through the general markers of adulthood - marriage, buying a house, starting a family - constrain emotional growth.
While that’s depressing for the left, it’s not for the right. They are capitalising on it through stupid memes about stupid foreign policy, when the White House posts edits of the Wii Sports mixed in with tactical strikes.
You might also know this as ‘everyone is 12’.
Read the full article at wealthofnotions.substack.com
It’s hard to escape the squalor of the United Kingdom. Since Margaret Thatcher’s cultural victory, her spawn Tony Blair, and the subsequent austerity years, the parts of the country that were made for people have been hollowed out to transfer wealth to business-owners and the general ‘elite’.
For a time, escape was available on the internet. But now, the same model is creeping from the real to the unreal.
The left is “losing” the internet to “Reactionary Digital Politics” — an ideology that is loose and fluid, defined by opposition to the democratic revolution of the past 200 years. They are not interested in a contest of values. For them, to talk about a politics of the Good or Justice is intrinsically wrong.
The results of Thatcherism closed down civic spaces, and what might have been digital equivalents — NeoPets, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin — do not exist in the same way. Like the youth clubs, the children are trapped in the same cage we are: four websites, all posting screenshots of each other.
Young people thus must exist digitally on X and TikTok, both positioned on a sliding scale of ‘radicalisation machine’. Destruction is simpler than construction. Anti-politics is simpler than politics.
This is why the right’s obsessive focus on schools looks less like a moral concern and more like a territorial one. Classrooms are among the last remaining sites where left politics can happen without being immediately decontextualised and weaponised.
The right doesn’t need to win the argument. It just needs the argument to become impossible to have.
Read the full article at Wealth of Notions, link in bio.
Ads are coming to ChatGPT and that’s means OpenAI’s hyperpersonalised psychosis machine has more motivation to gather people’s data and a) sext them b) convince them they’re the messiah and c) isolate them from everyone they care about
Over an April weekend, thousands of volunteers tested waterways and lakes across Britain as part of the Great Water Blitz, organised by the environmental charity @earthwatcheurope .
They tested for nitrates and phosphates - chemicals that can make water undrinkable and poison animals. The data captured will be passed on to the Environment Agency, the government body that monitors water quality, and used to hold water companies to account.
Last year, a September campaign revealed alarming levels of pharmaceuticals including antidepressants, caffeine and nicotine. The state of Britain's waterways has become a public scandal with privatised water companies condemned for pumping raw sewage into rivers and seas and more generally failing to meet environmental standards.
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