The left, or those who pretend to be, are in trouble. I’m not talking about their control being threatened – they retain a firm grip on pretty much everything, from newspapers to clothing retailers to sporting bodies, banks, heritage groups, book clubs and supranational institutions like the WHO. Rather, about noticeable mental decline.
Last week at the United Nations, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke. As soon as he opened his mouth, bollocks flew out – pump-action, technical, indiscriminate bollocks, sprayed across the room before everyone could draw breath. He briefly confused his audience with something about a ‘cross border carbon market’ – probably related to his personal hobby of tax – but pursuant academic-y, high finance-y bollocks swallowed that up, then another round of even more rapid-fire bollocks saw everything combine in the groan of 1000 men in Pride speedos talking to each other with balls in their mouths – the ones that speech therapists made patients gargle with to stop them stuttering.
In another room at the same time, his wife Mrs. Carney was also talking bollocks, but unlike her husband’s tax-themed ones, hers were said to be environmental. This husband-and-wife bollocks team put to shame careerist diplomats who thought they’d perfected the art of UN bollocks – so nobody slept as they usually do. The South Sudanese delegates, ordinarily located watching Netflix on their phones in the canteen, charged back into the hall to witness how so much rubbish could be spoken in less than seven minutes. At the end Carney looked out to an audience covered in a thin yellow film, the unmistakable mark and scent of high-intensity bollocks.
He then got on a plane and flew to London – where the Global Progress Action summit was being held – for some cosmopolitan bollocks. Here Carney was joined by the leaders of Spain, Norway, Iceland, Australia, a former Mayor of an American hamlet (Pete Buttgieg) and the former leader of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.
But it wasn’t so cosmopolitan as it was unnerved grasping; it was impossible not to see that this group of self-described centre-left progressives are suffering low esteem episodes. One explanation could be that they’ve been slammed for their responses of ‘he deserved it’ or ‘good’ to American conservative Charlie Kirk’s murder. This has hurt their feelings, and they needed to sit amongst each other and agree for eight hours – then address an agreeable media for another two.
So on stage they were fidgety. Carney entered, as his contribution to a discussion on national identity, a mumbled recommendation for the Prime Minister of the UK to reduce taxes to ‘stop people exploring the right’ – something he’d never do in his home country (which, by his passport before Canada’s election earlier this year, would have been a place called ‘Ireland’).
Keir Starmer was especially nervous – for good reason. In just over a month, a book by a South African writer, Paul Holden, is set to hit the shelves. It is said to contain forensic evidence alleging that Labour breached campaign finance prescripts. Establishment journalists operating as mercenaries for his administration have not uttered a word about it (The Guardian, through its political editor Pippa Crerar, even threatened Holden with a stitchup job). Sources inside Downing Street have fessed up to a permanent response effort created recently to examine just how the Prime Minister is going to exit Holden’s claims.
The collective problem at this summit is aligned to Starmer’s paranoia: many of these leaders have unleashed forces from their own side that want their jobs, who call them sell-outs and believe they are better ‘leftists’. Starmer modelled his entry into Downing Street as a right-on, social justice-y, greenie, luxury beliefs and current thing guy; the people who are making him nervous are really, deeply some or all of those things, and his multiple betrayals have made them very, very cross. Now, a recent acceleration in temperature indicates that these forces are now partial to the idea of making fake-leftists do long-ish stints at the pleasure of His Majesty.
It was to the Labour Autumn conference in Liverpool where Starmer went next. Having enjoyed two days of centre-leftism with his friends, the symptoms of decline were obvious. He started calling everyone racist.
Like Carney at the UN, he loaded then went automatic – and Liverpool looked like Cape Town being insulted on social media in the mid 2000s, or a TikTok of Peter Kriel and Dan Corder and racism intellectual Tristan Kapp talking about racism – or more appropriately, a Gillian Schutte racism novel about racist things that never happened.
There is no clearer sign of power uncertainty and the descent into madness that involves than the spectacle of white men lashing out with allegations of racism. Groups sympathetic to the ANC in South Africa blazed the trail here; back in December 2001, our own Andrew Kenny described this condition for The Spectator: ‘it is very similar to the 15th-century Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) used to convict people of witchcraft. “If we say you are a witch, you are a witch,” has become, “If we say you are a racist, you are a racist.”’ Problem is: just as ANC enthusiasts popularized this, so did they wear it thin; subsequently, it doesn’t mean anything anymore – not even to the English.
The trouble for centre-leftists, for all the absence of ideological opposition, and their extended expression across most of public life, is that they are aspiration vacuous. They don’t have foundations or good stories to tell, so they fly off into incoherent garbage or become possessed with grievance speak. In short, they appear to be finding themselves out – it’s like watching a rubbish adaptation of The Prince of Tides in real time.
No clearer was this than in UK Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband’s address at the same conference. He knows that the way he and his colleagues think is resulting in the cratering of the middle class. So he used his speech to identify what he feels is the greatest threat to his government. Not climate change surprisingly, but also two words: Elon Musk. Quite incredible.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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