Good news from the UK: the legacy parties have both taken a beating. Congratulations to Sarah Pochin and Nigel Farage.

Bad news from the UK: they still have four more years of Uniparty misgovernment ahead. Starmer et al will carry on the destruction started by Blair and faithfully continued by the Tory party for fourteen dreadful years.  Nonetheless Reform has won an important battle on the electoral front.  Now they face the long, brutal war to make real change happen.  

Blair’s Blob will fight back.  They will launch strikes, lawfare and endless non-compliance tactics to defend their privileges and luxury beliefs.   And they still have another four years to mandate folly in Westminster. We can see the level of intransigence of the Blob in the recent publication by an NHS Trust in defiance of the recent Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender. 

Clearly if Reform go on to National Government in 2029 they face a gargantuan task.   Mr Farage will find himself elected captain of the Titanic half an hour after she has struck the iceberg.   Furthermore, to extend the metaphor, he will have to contend with the crew he inherits claiming that scientific consensus has determined the iceberg does not exist. But the situation in the UK is so dire that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore it.  It has become acceptable to say that we are screwed.   Decay is everywhere, on ordinary streets in ordinary places.  The moral, social and physical decline will accelerate.   Violence will soon be as commonplace as shoplifting on the boarded-up High Street.

The dangers, the turbulence and the conflicts are not confined to formerly Great Britain.

 Formerly Irish Ireland is disintegrating too.  France,  Germany, and Romania are actively undermining their own social contracts. Throughout the West, regardless of political affiliation, Governments have taken sensible concerns, analysed them with narrow, dysfunctional criteria and ended up with destructive policies. The policies are set without regard to context or consequences and they are always structured by abstract goals.  

Abstraction knows no boundaries so abstract, ideological ‘solutions’  are asserted in every context, in every field, in every industry, in every artistic endeavour, in every village, town, city and nation.   Everywhere that abstractions, from Anti-racism to Net Zero, are prioritized over specific, contextual solutions the results are eventually, invariably, hideous.  

Well-connected grifters cash-in, everyone else loses.  

All of the above is frightening, but the situation is worse than that. So much that is dreadful is happening so fast that we don’t have time to parse the consequences of one catastrophe before another is upon us.  Yesterday’s disasters - the vaccine injuries, the collapse of education and the suborning of science -  slide into the background as the spotlight falls on yet another incident of cretinous policing, gender lunacy, democratic subversion or diversity absurdity.

Almost every action of Government is damaging.  In the UK the public sector is driven by cult-ish beliefs and self-interest.  Young people have been gifted a monstrous national debt to keep their abusers in luxury retirement.  No wonder they are underwhelmed by the idea of work. We have suffered for approximately seventy five years from the encroachment of ideologies. From Maynard Keynes to Susie Green ideologies have been taken more seriously than concrete reality.  The consequences are huge national debt, massive population change, institutional corruption, educational subversion, child abuse and boarded-up high streets.

These ideologies are built-in to the world view of the bureaucratic class so that they do not see the world as we do. Whitehall is a palace of delusions with each directive curated by diligent civil servants who have been trained not to question the procedures they enact.  Perhaps occasionally, in their verdant gardens on a Sunday afternoon, contemplating their return to policies, projects and Gantt charts on the morrow, they wonder to themselves what they are doing …

To see our future look to San Francisco, Beirut and Johannesburg. The enormity of the situation makes it difficult to grasp.  And to see the scale of it, the range of it, not even the whole of it, without being overwhelmed by depression is ever more difficult.  

If Reform, or any other party, are going to turn things around they need to understand the problem is not just waste, grift and wokery.   The essence of the problem is that the vast majority of our elected and appointed governors have distorted perceptions.  They don’t just disagree with ordinary people about facts.   Their entire world view is shaped by abstractions.  Where you and I see choosing the best candidate for the job, they see racism.  Where we see voyeuristic men in toilets they see liberation.  Where we see weather, they see doom.  

To these people no context is determinative.  All situations are merely instances of generalisations. This is a profound distortion of perception.  None of us, of course, can claim to see things perfectly, but equally we must not deny that these dominant misapprehensions are maleficent.

Hence the necessary changes are not just fiscal, legal and social. They are philosophical and perceptual. We need to promote genuine pragmatism and a way of thinking that does not assume the primacy of abstract categories.  This is more than a paradigm shift. We need to overthrow the dominance of paradigmatic thinking.   We need to stop making policies and start applying principles appropriately in each context.  This is not easy.  It will be difficult and mistakes will be made.  But at least some of the time we will do the right thing. 

The ancient metaphor of the Ship of State was fitting.  A wise leader knows how little they can predict and hence how fallible are policies.  He or she sets a course and deals with trouble as and when it arises.  We need the pragmatism of a helmsman and the guidance of principle. 

Reform will best serve the nation if it rejects the Uniparty’s centralised follies and reduces policies to a minimum.  It can campaign nationally on national issues and trust its excellent new councillors to find sensitive solutions to local problems. This is a good time to show the world a better way to govern.

-o-

I explore the genesis and dangers of abstract thinking in my book, "The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it". It is accessible and entertaining. According to a recent review,  "This book is worth the time of pretty much everyone in the world. It's as close as possible to spending hours of your free time with somebody interesting, bright and gentle, who relates to you a lot of stories ... The most pleasant audio book this reviewer has ever listened to."

It is available by clicking here, (see also further reviews) and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.