Category: Education

Civil-Liberties, Climate-Change, Economics, Education, European-Union, Islamism, Media, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Bring on a General Election: and yes, even a hard-Left, Corbyn-led Government

A General Election would provide the opportunity, both for the Conservative defeat needed for it to lance the boil of its own Left-‘Liberalism’, and for the experience of a hard-Left, Corbyn-led Government necessary to lance the boil of Socialism.

Note: this is the long (and updated) version of the article first published at The Conservative Woman on Friday 22 June 2018. 

That Theresa May, on Wednesday 20 June 2018, survived that afternoon’s vote on Tory arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve’s amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill, which sought to give the House of Commons power in effect to halt Brexit in the event of no deal being agreed with the EU, was no victory, but yet another fudge, kicking the can down the road.

It was preceded by a Prime Minister’s Questions of quite staggering awfulness, not only from her, but from almost the entire House, with both sides first fawning over an Imam whose public utterances at the very least imply he wants any criticism of Islam banned, then competing furiously to virtue-signal their achingly politically-correct Left-’Liberal’ credentials at every possible opportunity.

That, plus the long-evident reluctance of most of its overwhelmingly pro-Remain membership to accept and implement the EU Referendum result, finally convinced me. The present Chamber is moribund, even rotten, led by a Prime Minister who is Dead May Walking, and another election is needed.

Why am I so keen on a General Election now? Or, if not keen, nevertheless reluctantly convinced of the necessity for one, despite the potential baleful adverse consequences? For three reasons.

Firstly, with both political attention-span and memory being relatively brief among the vast majority of the public who wisely don’t pay much day-to-day attention to politics, by the time 2022 comes round, many people will have largely forgotten the 2017-18 attempted, if not actual, betrayal of the 2016 EU Referendum result.

Not to mention, also, being bleakly realistic, that some of those now most angry about that betrayal and thirsting for the chance to wreak electoral revenge may, by then, no longer be around to vent that anger at the ballot-box. An early election would mean that voter frustration with both parties has an outlet before it subsides.

Next, the current Vichy-‘Conservative’ Party needs to suffer a heavy defeat, along the lines of the 1906, 1945, and 1997 landslides, to bring about either a split with, or a purge of, its Cameroon-Blairite Left-‘Liberal’ wing, whose current ascendancy is driving the Party Left-wards, both economically and culturally, with dire results.

Remember, in the last year alone, Theresa May has proposed having the State fix the price at which energy suppliers can sell their product: signalled an intent to intervene in the price/demand side of the housing market instead of liberalising planning controls to incentivise supply: threatened to crack down more on ‘hate-crime’ and ‘Islamophobia’, aka free speech: promised to control and police the internet: approved lifestyle and behaviour-nudging taxes: resiled from tackling mass uncontrolled immigration: and proposed throwing another £20 billion at an unreformed NHS while praising it fulsomely in ever more reverential terms.

And that’s before we consider the Miliband-Lite Tories’ eager appeasement of the Green Climate-Change lobby, the racial and religious grievance industries, an increasingly corrupt and partisan United Nations, and, above all, a vengeful and intransigent European Union over Brexit.

This resolute Leftwards march is no temporary expedient, but merely the latest phase in a process which has been going on for years, even decades. The great failings of the ‘Conservative’ party since the end of World War II, with the exception of the 1980s which sadly must now be viewed as an aberration, have been its reluctance to counter the Left intellectually, and its consequent willingness to accept the Left’s policies, especially when attractively packaged, for the sake of occupying office.

Indeed, the writer Peter Hitchens recounts remarks by YouGov’s Peter Kellner, man of Labour and the soft-Left through and through, to the effect that from time to time a Conservative government must be allowed to occupy office, so as to maintain for the electorate an illusion of pluralism and choice, but provided that it does nothing to unravel previous Labour administrations’ policies. Wittingly or unwittingly, the ‘Conservative’ Party has been happy to comply.

The Party therefore needs an unequivocal electoral defeat and period in opposition, to force it to re-think from first principles what it stands for, then devise a portfolio of policies that aren’t merely politically-promising, but intellectually-consistent, in order to be able to capitalise on it when the Corbynite-Labour bubble bursts.

Finally, the boil of Socialism now seemingly infecting so much of the electorate needs to be lanced. But with the increasingly soft Left-‘Liberal’ ‘Conservative’ Party having totally abandoned making a robust case for low-tax, small-State, civil-libertarian, free-market conservatism as the engine of prosperity, freedom and growth, in favour of timidly apeing Socialist-Labour in the vague hope of a few Corbyn-Lite policies enticing voters back, I  cannot see that happening without a new generation of voters experiencing for themselves the malign reality of a hard-Left government.

Psephologically, before the 2017 General Election, the Labour-to-Conservative crossover point – the age at which people switch to voting Conservative rather than Labour – was assumed  to be roughly 34. 

Age predictor UK politics

But the 2017 General Election, the first with Corbyn as Labour leader, changed all that. The post-election analyses moved that crossover point back by an entire decade or more, to somewhere between 44 and 49 . . . . . 

UK GE2017 voting by age groups comp

. . . . . and Labour now enjoys majority support in all voter age groups between 18 and 45, including the highest-ever ratings among under-30s since 1964.

Hist under-30s support Labour & Sep 17 vote intent by age comp

This shouldn’t be altogether surprising. It’s now nearly 40 years since Britain last had an economically-Left Labour Government (in contrast to the culturally-Left governments of all parties which we’ve had for about 35 years), so that almost no-one under the age of, possibly, 55 at least, has any memory or experience of actually living under one.

Add to that two more factors: firstly, the predominantly Left-leaning sympathies of the UK mainstream media, which means Corbyn’s socialist policies are seldom subjected to the critical examination and questioning directed towards their smaller-state, lower-taxes, and free-market leaning equivalents: and, secondly, the left-wing bias of the Education profession by which two generations have been indoctrinated . . . . . .

Teachers voting intentions 2015 & 2017 GEs comp. . . . . . . . and it’s arguably astonishing that Corbyn’s socialist prescriptions, superficially so enticing to those who’ve never suffered them in practice, aren’t even more popular. 

This is why reminders of hard-Left Labour’s insalubrious history of either supporting or at least excusing tyrannical Communist dictatorships – even while it simultaneously condemned the West of human rights, free speech and the rule of law as fascist – cut no ice. The past is truly another country.           

Corbyn does support some bombingThis is why pointing out Corbyn’s uncritical support for the IRA throughout the 1970s and 1980s, even as it was blowing up British women and children on the streets of the United Kingdom, doesn’t resonate. To today’s devotees of the Corbyn Cult, this is ancient history. It’s 30 years since the end of the Cold War, isn’t it? It’s 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement, isn’t it?

This is why warnings of strikes, power-shortages, punitively-high taxes, and fiscal mismanagement from Labour runaway spending and borrowing, have so little political cut-through with voters, from Generation X-ers through Millennials to Generation Z-ers. They’ve never actually seen it in Britain, so they just don’t believe it: and in my view, nothing short of experiencing for themselves the horrors of living under a left-wing Labour government will dispel their illusions.

In short, we’ve arrived at one of those points which seem to occur every 40 years or so, where a major political upheaval is needed to generate political resuscitation and renewal.

Yes, of course there are risks, and very serious ones, from a hard-Left Labour government, and as someone who abhors every manifestation of Leftism, I’m the first to acknowledge them. The Corbyn-McDonnell Terror won’t be pleasant. But capital markets, via demanding higher borrowing rates, and threatened or actual capital flight, via reduced tax receipts, have a habit of curbing the worst excesses of economcally-Left Labour governments.

In any case, is that really so worse than the alternative? Of years of a Continuity-May ‘Conservative’ Party, ever more in thrall to mushy Left-‘Liberalism’, governing hesitantly and ineffectively while the hard-Left poses self-righteously as Salvation Denied?

Just as, to cure a malignant cancer, painful chemotherapy has to be endured, so rejuvenating conservatism and defeating Socialism may require some temporary hurt. But the sooner the treatment starts, the less painful it is, and the sooner comes the cure.

Fortune favours the brave. Bring on that election.

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Education, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Academics and Socialism

Indoctrination of the university student and graduate population with the predominantly left-wing political attitudes prevailing in higher education has a growing effect on British elections

Note: this is the longer version of an article first published at The Conservative Woman on 2nd October 2017.

Why”, asked Laura Perrins, Co-Editor of The Conservative Woman on 22 August, “should you risk sending your children to university for a full three years of left-wing propaganda?”

For the parents of any young adult raised in a household even moderately inclined towards social conservatism, EU-withdrawal, a smaller state, lower taxes and free-market economics, this is an increasingly pertinent, even worrying, question.

Because, as Laura pointed out, after three years at an educational establishment which institutionally not merely disagrees with your views, but positively hates them and thinks they (and consequently you) are evil, your children will more than likely emerge from it thoroughly marinaded in left-wing thinking (and hating you in their turn).

The young’s voting patterns in recent election results certainly seem to bear this out. The YouGov analysis of voting by age group in the 2017 General Election shows that, in all three age-groups spanning the ages from 18 to 29, the Labour vote was over 60%.

Higher Education and Academe as a bastion of left-wing indoctrination is an impression that’s widely held. But to what extent is it true?

Fortunately, we have some empirical data from within the last two years. The chart below shows the results of a poll taken shortly before the 2015 General Election, asking for the voting intentions of UK University academics.

The responses leave little room for doubt. In no discipline did the intention to vote Labour drop below 40%, while you have to go as low as 20% in every academic discipline before encountering a voting intention other than Labour or Green.

Overall, the academics’ voting intention went 83% to the four main parties of the Left (Labour, LibDems, SNP and Green), while in the General Election proper, their vote share was only 47%. In other words, university-tenured academics inclined towards parties of the Left at a frequency nearly double that of the electorate as a whole.

A similar poll of UK academics’ voting intentions was conducted in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum, by The Times Higher Education Supplement. Here, the results were even starker.

In no discipline was the intention to vote Remain below 80%, while in only one discipline, Engineering and Technology, did the intention to vote Leave break through the 15% threshold. As everyone now knows, the result was 52%-48% for Leave. Once again the academics leaned Remain-wards at a rate more than 1½ times that of the voting population.

So, on the face of it at least, the perception of the University experience as being an academic indoctrination process in Europhilia and Leftism has some evidential support. If you have the impression that your child has emerged from University brainwashed into an ardently-Europhile Leftist who hates you and everything you stand for, you’re probably right.

But what seems explored much more rarely is: why this should be so? Why should the supposedly academic and intellectual elite overwhelmingly incline towards leftist and statist parties and policies that concentrate decision-making power in bureaucracy rather than democracy, and reject those which favour liberal-individualism and free-market competition? And do so, moreover, at a incidence nearly double that found in the adult population as a whole?

Well, the first thing to remember is that this phenomenon isn’t new. Hayek analysed and excoriated it decades ago in his “The Intellectuals and Socialism”, famously referring to “the professional second-hand dealers in ideas”.

Politically, the Academic and Intellectual Elite has an aversion to capitalism and free-market competition because, being a system based on voluntary exchange reflecting consumer preferences, it doesn’t confer on them either the superior societal status or the monetary rewards to which they consider themselves entitled because of their (assumed) far superior intellect.

Arguably, Robert Nozick put it even better in his 1998 essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?“

“Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit.”

This is especially marked when they compare themselves with people successful in what, to them, is the rather grubby business of designing, producing and marketing products that people will voluntarily part with their hard-earned, post-tax cash to own. Think, for example, how much more popular in the public mind James Dyson is than A C Grayling. The old disdain for “trade” has crossed over from the Aristocratic Landed Elite to the Intellectual Academic Elite.

Consequently, the academics and intellectuals incline, politically, away from free-markets democracy towards the more collectivist politics of markets-averse, leftist-statist bureaucracy. Not only does it value them more than competitive free-market capitalism does: but it can also use the coercive power of the State, manifested via the taxation system, to enforce on wider society at least a financial recognition of their assumed superior intellect and desired superior status.

This also explains their near-homogeneous support for remaining in the European Union. Yes, academics and intellectuals do favour the EU as an additional source of funding. But because the EU is an essentially socialistic, authoritarian, top-down bureaucracy, they also view it as a means to impose on the UK the kind of Leftist policies which they themselves are attracted to, and without the necessity and inconvenience of obtaining popular democratic consent. Remember, as we saw in the aftermath of the EU Referendum, their opinion of the demos borders on contempt.

This leads to the next question. For how long do the academics’ and intellectuals’ pro-Left, pro-EU biases continue to influence their recipients’ voting behaviours after inculcation?

Conventional psephology held that most had grown out of their youthful flirtation with socialism by about 30, by which time advancing careers, along with marriage, family and mortgage responsibilities, had altered their perspective. Indeed, as late as April this year, a YouGov poll suggested that the Left-Right crossover point comes roughly at age 34.

However, the results of the 2017 General Election have forced a re-evaluation of that hypothesis. It seems that the Labour/Left voting tendency now persists for at least a decade beyond that. As the Ipsos MORI chart below shows, the phenomenon now extends well into the 40s, and that it’s only after 45 that a Conservative-leaning tendency starts to prevail.  

This seems to bear out what Iain Martin has recently written on “the widespread assumption among those aged below 45 that Tories or pro-market people are an inherently bad bunch with motives that are inherently evil”.

Perhaps, though, it could have been better predicted. Because the age distribution of voting patterns in the 2016 EU Referendum shows a similar pattern. Once again, it’s only at the 45-54 age group does Leave start to prevail over Remain.

Neither does this look to be a temporary aberration, attributable to the more fractious political atmosphere before, during and since the EU Referendum. The pattern seems to be persisting, and hardening. The Remain=Labour and Leave=Conservative assumptions are by definition somewhat crude proxies, but it does appear that an overall shift in age-related voting patterns may be taking root for the short-to-medium term at least.

As far as countering it is concerned, the first thing to remember is that this may not, after all, be so historically unprecedented, and so in the end be so permanent, as excitable media comment suggests.

Albeit not of the same magnitude, there have been similar trends observed before, as the chart below of under-30s percentage voting patterns in General Elections since 1964 shows. The under-30s Labour vote almost halved between 1964 and 1983, and again between 1997 and 2010.       

Under 30s support Lab & Con since 1964

However, that might be where the optimism ends, at least for the time being.

In 1983, the Conservative Party, though faced with a Labour opposition similar to Corbyn’s in its socialist programme, was itself ideologically committed to a smaller state, free markets and capitalism, and unafraid to take on its opponents publicly in the battle of ideas. In 2010, it benefited from a widespread disillusionment with the dysfunctional Brown government after 13 years of increasingly tawdry New Labour.

Today’s circumstances, however, are nowhere near so propitious. First, no-one under 50 has much, if any, memory of what life in Britain was like under the last real even semi-socialist government: and given the prevalence of left-wing attitudes in higher education, they may well not have been taught an accurate history of it. To under 50s who lean Left-wards, therefore, Corbynism, however flawed, can seem fresh and exciting. 

Far worse, though, is that, as has been so starkly shown this past week, the Conservative Party is mired in intellectual atrophy, apparently completely incapable of unashamedly making the case against state-socialism and for a lower-taxed, less-regulated and more entrepreneurial economy, capitalism and free markets. So ideologically-sapped, and so devoid of confidence, does it appear, that it is reduced to offering, almost apologetically, diluted versions of previous flagship Labour policies.

Unless the Conservative Party is jolted from its torpor by the prospect of impending ejection from office and replacement by the most disastrously socialist government since the Labour Party’s formation, then the left-wing ideological indoctrination of the young via higher education – and Laura was surely right in her original 22nd August article to suggest that one of Blair’s motives in greatly expanding university access was to expose more to it – will yield results, with dire consequences, not least for those welcoming it.

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