by Donna Rachel Edmunds, TCW
SPEND a few minutes on X and you could be forgiven for thinking the right is winning. On issue after issue, public opinion leans in a conservative direction. Immigration, crime, national identity, the limits of the state: poll after poll shows majority support for positions broadly associated with the right. Reform UK leads national polling. Millions of voters are desperate for real change. People are waking up.
Now is our time, right?
Wrong.
We’ve been here before: Brexit was a real shock to the political establishment, the voice of 17million people, as Dominic Frisby so eloquently sang, telling the establishment to f*** off. Three years later, to hammer home the point, the people gave the Conservatives the mandate to follow through with that vote and Get Brexit Done.
And then . . . nothing happened.
It’s easy to blame the Conservatives for being rubbish, (and that certainly didn’t help), but the real fault lies not with the politicians at all.
Power is located not in Downing Street, nor in the Commons, nor the Lords. No, the real power is out there, spread throughout the institutions, all of which have gone rogue.
There’s an interesting parallel to be had here with the current war in Iran. According to journalist Richard Miller, Ayatollah Khameini gave individual orders to various military units to act unilaterally if he was killed. The result is that the war cannot now easily be stopped because there is no chain of command. The Americans can negotiate with whoever takes charge in Iran, but that person will have no way of standing down those units. It’s also making the situation far more chaotic: one of those units hit Oman, which is supposed to be a neutral state in this war, capable of hosting peace talks when the time comes. Not any more!