Summary

Over the past twenty-five years, right-wing politics has shifted from a focus on ideological solutions for governance to a more cynical and anti-democratic stance. In the 1980s, right-wing politics openly debated the best methods for running a country. Today, it has increasingly aimed to undermine democratic principles, impoverish the working class, and promote a politics of cynicism, which focuses on stoking hatred towards various groups, such as immigrants, Muslims, and progressives.

This new right-wing cynicism has led to attacks on institutions meant to educate, inform, and protect the public. It has devalued coherent debate and expert knowledge, as seen in figures like George W. Bush, who, despite his intelligence, was elected partly due to voters’ desire for an anti-intellectual stance. This trend continued with Donald Trump, who embraced and amplified this anti-democratic sentiment, celebrating misinformation and undermining democratic norms.

The politics of cynicism also extends to attacking law and order and has even fostered physical violence against targeted groups. The right-wing narrative often involves promoting a white supremacist agenda, which justifies or sympathizes with violence against minorities and critics.

Overall, the right-wing’s current approach seeks to erode democratic values, suppress genuine debate, and channel political discontent into a divisive and violent ideology.

More Detailed Summary

In early August 2024, the UK witnessed a wave of far-right violence, marked by coordinated riots led predominantly by white men. These riots, which occurred shortly after the Labour government took office, involved attacks on the police, vandalism, and targeted harassment of asylum seekers, including attempts to burn their residences. Such acts blatantly contravened key British values like the rule of law, freedom from persecution, and freedom of speech.

Nigel Farage’s response to the violence highlighted his alignment with the perpetrators’ concerns while disavowing the violence itself. Rather than simply condemning the riots, Farage framed the violence as a reaction to fear and societal unease, subtly validating the rioters’ grievances and predicting further unrest. His rhetoric implied a partnership with those involved, leveraging the violence to amplify his political message and indirectly encouraging more of the same.

Farage’s approach was echoed by other right-wing figures. Byron Davis, a Conservative, bizarrely justified the violence as a legitimate political response to the Labour government’s actions on immigration. Donna Jones, Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, similarly suggested that the riots were a reaction to perceived threats to British sovereignty and immigration policies, framing arrests as insufficient without addressing the root causes of the unrest.

The rhetoric of violence and hatred has deep roots in contemporary right-wing politics, often targeting vulnerable groups like immigrants and Muslims. This tactic mirrors historical precedents, such as Milosevic’s use of fabricated atrocities to justify violence against Kosovans, and more recent anti-immigrant rhetoric from figures like Suella Braverman and William Hague’s rhetoric of British people getting theircountry back. This narrative creates a sense of invasion or threat, galvanizing public hostility and legitimizing violence against these groups.

The politics of cynicism, which underpins much of this rhetoric, serves to distract from substantive policy discussions and improvements. Politicians and media figures on the right often focus on stirring up hatred and division rather than addressing real issues or proposing constructive solutions. This strategy not only fuels public anger but also diminishes the quality of democratic debate and governance. The pervasive cynicism, fuelled by media and social media dynamics, effectively turns politics into a spectacle, diverting attention from meaningful reform and strengthening the grip of powerful interests.

The rise of such cynicism has profound implications for democracy, potentially eroding its principles from within. The manipulation of public sentiment to justify violence and hostility serves the interests of both domestic and international actors, including authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, who benefit from weakened democratic institutions and destabilized societies.

The Detail

Over the last twenty-five years, the right-wing of politics has changed. In the 80s one could say that right-wing politics has an ideological concern with the best methods for running and developing a country and world and it, more or less, was pretty open with voters about what that needed to look like. Now those ideological concerns have changed – there is a growing movement to end democratic politics – to impoverish, impoverish and immiserate a grand proportion of the working classes – and to through a smokescreen over these intentions – by presenting the consumers of politics and voters – a politics of cynicism, defined by a mainstream working class hatred for others.

So on the face of it, the political consumers and voters are now focused on a politics of cynicism, which is now focused on a hatred for others (rather than on the question of what can be done to improve the conditions and strength of our country and people). In practice, this hatred is being targeted onto a variety of different groups. This helps give the politics of cynicism a popular appeal amongst cynical working class voters. In the 21st century politics of cynicism the hatred is directed at asylum seekers and immigrants (poor ones), Muslims, trans-gender people, progressives and liberals (renamed the ‘woke’). It helps to have foreign enemies too. This might include the Chinese, the Russians and whoever else.

Curiously, some of the old hates of the 20th Century have been left behind. Hate against Black people, Irish people, gay people, Asian people. Though, arguably they are just below the surface and underpinning some of the new hates.

The politics of cynicism is of course essentially anti-patriotic to the extent that we take patriotism to mean a love for the country and everyone who lives within it. Because it is about, in part, attacking and diminishing British people, in an attempt to take away their rights and freedom to chose and identify with a particular religion and its practices.

Although of course a lot of what has been called patriotism has historically been about one group of people living off the labour of another, or exploiting another, or getting a kick out of subjecting some minority or poorer part. And encouraging all those who are being exploited to celebrate their exploited role and identify it as a love for their country, as a form of patriotism.

A large part of the hatred that has been promoted by the politics of cynicism, has been aimed at institutions that are intended to educate, inform, advise and guide, and protect the masses. There have been attacks on education, expertise and law and order.

One of the manifestations of the attack on democracy, has been an attack on the value of creating a platform for a genuine debate over what the best way of organising and running the country.

Part of this attack on the value of creating a platform for a genuine debate over what the best way of organising and running the country has been the development of a political mockery of an attempt to have a serious and genuine debate. Coherent thought, an ability to articulate oneself intelligent and clearly, has not only been devalued, it is now, in some places, mocked.

We can see the devaluing of it as early as the election battle for the US Presidents in the early 2000s, with the election of George W Bush in the early 2000s. Bush was, by most standards a reasonably intelligent man, but like many people would, he wilted under the spotlight of the world’s media at times, and would find it difficult to string together a coherent sentence. Much of the media, especially to the centre and left, had a good laugh at his struggles and disability. But I could feel a change in the air at that point. Whereas in the past this might have led to people seriously questioning his fitness for offer I could feel a combination of sympathy for him, a resolution to vote for him anyway, based in part for a hatred towards the liberal media who were trying to make mileage about this. I think the election of George W Bush – one of the most stupid presidents the US has had – twice – marked a new turn in how at least some voters felt about what they wanted from a politician. They wanted stupid, they wanted someone who had scorn for their enemy and not the ability to articulate an argument for why they had a better way of doing things than their enemy. They wanted no debate, no democratic public discussion or deliberation. They wanted their leader to scorn all of that, and to just simply have his way, and for the others to shut up and put up. They wanted to vote for an idiot to spite the clever liberal democratic left. Such a vote is akin to a mini-political riot. Cut your nose to spite your face stuff.

But we can see more clearly the mocking or repudiation of public debate years later. Michael Gove, for example, in the debate on Brexit, when asked about which experts thought there was an economic argument for leaving the EU, torpedoed the value of even having a public debate, with the comment ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (see here).

When Trump came long shortly afterwards, in a sense it was Bush mark II. Arguably, he was able to galvanise a real sense of anger on the right, that America had elected a Black president for two terms, and was on the verge of electing a woman. Since elected he has been doing it even better. Sometimes making sense, sometimes not making any sense at all. And people love it. Every stream of nonsense that comes out of this mouth, that doesn’t address the question, or where he seems to contradict himself, or which doesn’t seem to have registered an understanding of the question, or which seems to show a complete lack of knowledge of the subject matter or the personalities involved, function as a two fingers up to the democratic process which energises the new politics of cynicism on the right. More recently, Trump was more to the point in his campaign for the 2024 election when he said he would act as a ‘dictator’ and when he told an audience that after the 2024 election people wouldn’t need to vote again because he would have fixed it so good. (see here)

One of the manifestations of the attack on democracy, has been an attack on being genuine, on saying what you think, on what is, broadly speaking true. Boris Johnson did it too, in that interview, when they asked him how he spent his time, and he said he made cardboard cutout London buses.

The new cynicism towards democracy has even been directed at law and order at times. We saw this in the way Trump celebrated his mug shot when being taken into custody. In the UK we saw it in the way that newspapers and politicians turned against the courts and House of Lords, when they made rulings or decisions on Brexit. The implication here is that democracy is old hat – and so are any laws that you don’t like – decided through a democratic process – and serving interests and preferences which are different to yours.

The politics of cynicism has bled into physical violence directed at various people drawn from the groups that the hostility has been aimed at. A week before the Brexit referendum, Thomas Alexander, a man who hated liberals and the left, murdered Jo Cox, MP for the Labour Party in 2016. During the act of the murder, according to one eye witness he said, “Britain first, keep Britain independent, Britain will always come first.” (see here)

The right wing politics of cynicism, already had a set of political messages lined up, a set of myths, values and messages: based on a white supremacist narrative, that supported and promoted (or which sometimes tacitly accepted) violence directed at asylum-seekers, immigrants, Muslims, the Labour party, liberals and lawyers working in the interests of asylum seekers and migrants. It has also involved politicians and people in positions of power, rather than directly criticising those who have used violence (against the police, property and other people) to attack the rule of law, to rather work in partnership with those committing the violence, by using their violence and the interest that is drummed up by the violence, to to amplify a political agenda:

Against immigration and immigrants in particular.
Which justified the violence, or empathised or sympathised with the feelings, rationales and logic of those committing the violence. What Trilling called the ‘‘you may not like what the rioters did, but they had a point about immigration and Islam’ point.
Which blamed the violence on the policies of the government – admonishing those who actually committed the violence from any personal responsibility for having conducted the violence.
Which remained silent or excused those committing the violence.
Which attempted to fuel an idea that the Labour government were determined to discriminate against white people, by allowing non-white communities to commit violence, whilst holding the white people who exercised the violence during the riots to account.
Which encouraged more violence – by spreading the idea that more and greater violence will follow.

Right wing forces are channeling facts & information into a white supremacist mythology and movement. The right wing politics of cynicism, already had a set of political messages lined up, which it has used to channel, make sense of all the things that have happened since the violent right wing riots and terrorism started.

The narrative involves a set of myths, values and messages: based on a white supremacist narrative, that supported and promoted (or which sometimes tacitly accepted) violence directed at asylum-seekers, immigrants, Muslims, the Labour party, liberals and lawyers working in the interests of asylum seekers and migrants.

We can see examples of some of this stuff in the way some people have responded to the far right UK violence. In early August 2024 gangs of mainly white men carried out a co-ordinated set of riots across the UK, one month into the Labour government. The riots included attacks against the police, the destruction of property and vehicles. It also included terrorising asylum seekers, by trying to burn the buildings in which they were staying (see here). These actions, collectively, transgressed several of the key British values: rule of law, freedom from persecution and freedom of speech (and belief etc).

Nigel Farage issued a statement a few days into the thing. He could have simply denounced the violence, recognising that it ran counter to the British way of life and British values. Called for justice to be done. And perhaps emphasised the importance of using the democratic process and forums for debate to resolve differences of opinions and policy preference, and sign off.Instead he tried to explain the violent behaviour as a ‘a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease’ and then caveated his lack of support for ‘violence’ and ‘thuggery’ – and therefore insinuating his sympathy for the fears, discomforts and unease that he said triggered the violent behaviour – by going on to talk about his own ‘worries’ about ‘the events in Southport’ and what he called ‘societal decline’.In other words Farage implied personal identification and sympathy with what he regarded as the concerns of those involved in the violence, which he said also reflected the concerns of ‘tens of millions of people’.So Farage was in effect working in partnership with those engaged in the violence, by using the interest and concern generated by the violence, to amplify and platform his and their apparent political message (which in words, remained unclear, but in terms of the victims of the violence obviously had something to do with clearing asylum-seekers and Muslims from the streets of Britain). In his performance he is conveying that when someone whose concerns he shares [and these are not articulated in a concrete manner, or explicitly – they are just related to ‘the events in Southport’] apparently uses those concerns to justify street violence, that it is fair for him as a politician to use the interest and concerns generated by those acts of violence, to articulate and amplify those concerns to a wider audience. In other words, Farage is using those acts of violence as a springboard to amplify his political message. In this way he is exploiting the violence, by using it as an opportunity to get a political message across – his political message – but what he also perceives to be the political message of those doing the violence. So what he is saying with his mouth is I don’t support violence, but what he is saying with his performance is but I do agree with their concerns and I do think its OK to use the interest aroused by their violence to amplify their concerns to a wider audience.So on the one hand he was saying that he didn’t support violence and thuggery, and on the other he was working in concert with those involved in that violence and thuggery, to sympathise with and platform their shared causes.Farage insinuated that the cause of the problems, including the violent thuggery, lay with the government, which had created situations and circumstances, which he had regarded as legitimate, which had triggered the violent thuggery. This moral interpretation of who and what was causing the violence, appeared to absolve the people who actually did carry out the violent thuggery for any personal responsibility for those behaviours.He is at very least implying some kind of imagined sense of understanding of the minds, emotions and disposition of those engaged in the violence – that if their demands – which are also Nigel’s demands – are not met – in due course – then they will feel justified and motivated to engage in even more violence. This is an amoral telling of the story in some respects. Nigel is not saying whether this is right or wrong, just that it will probably come to pass. And yet at points, he does tell a moral story – but the immorality – he wants to place with the Labour government – they are the cause of the problems, and therefore the violence. Morality when he applies it does not condemn those who actually carry out the violence.And so, having established his willingness to work in partnership with the violent thugs, and having formed a union with them, and having implied that they were absolved of any personal responsibility for their violence, Farage then explained that he expected even more violence to be forthcoming. He then makes a prediction that the violence which has been seen ‘is nothing to what could happen over the course of the next few weeks’. Seen in the context of what he had said before, Farage’s prediction might be interpreted by some, rather as an incitement to more violence and a threat to the Labour government to more violence.(Farage said, ‘I don’t support street violence’ but what he didn’t do was admonish those who had taken part in the violence on the street).But Farage was not the only politician to form a union with those who participated in the violence by identifying and sympathising with their cause, to use the violence to amplify and platform their political message – and to thus legitimate violence as a political tool – and to encourage more violence (just to be clear it was his performance and what he did overall that arguably encourages more violence, he did not make a
statement which said that he encouraged more violence).
Byron Davis, the Conservative just said out straight what Farage, or Farage’s speech-writer had been at pains to avoid saying, he said the violence was ‘politically justified’ because of the actions that the Labour party MPs had taken, whilst the Conservative party were in power, to block a Bill on immigration (see here). It is such a strange thing to say. To suggest that violence against Muslims and asylum-seekers is a justified political response to one political party exercising its democratic right to vote and express its freedom of expression. Donna Jones, the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner, said that protestors were focused on ‘the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty, the need to uphold British values and in order to do this stop illegal immigration’ (see here). In the same vein as Farage, who put the blame for the violence on the Labour party, she suggested that ‘arresting people’ (presumably because they had broken the law or had done something to prevent order) was ‘treating the symptom not the cause’ (see here). Suggesting that somehow the rioters were justified in their violence given the circumstances and the government’s policy.
The wife of a Tory councillor has been arrested after calling for hotels housing migrants to be set on fire on the day of the Southport incident. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, last Monday, Lucie Connolly wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——- for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government [and] politicians with them.” Mrs Connolly, who was a childminder at the time, resigned her registration with Ofsted, the regulator, on Tuesday. It followed Childcare.co.uk, a listing site, confirming that it had suspended a childminder from advertising on the platform after receiving information about a “highly inappropriate tweet”. (see here, Telegraph).
Telegraph headline reads on 7th August 2024: Telegraph readers:‘Riots aren’t the cause, they’re a symptom’
‘Are the left elite to blame for the violence in Southport as they continue to smear and ignore angry communities?’ GB News asked in an online poll on 1 August. (see quote here)

A key part of the politics of cynicism is a hatred directed at people, who are poorer, different, weaker, desperate, smaller in number, or up and coming and resistant. Lets thinks now. The poor generally, transgender folk, asylum-seekers, feminists protesting against mysogyny and Muslims to name but a few. Lets have a look at some of these groups and how they become the object of hatred and scorn.

Immigrants generally. It is a classic political device, to suggest that a vulnerable minority group, against which you intend to galvanise hatred and violence towards, has in some way perpetrated some act of violence against your people. You could see it in the way that Serbia under Milosevic started telling more and more stories about Kosovan attrocities in Serbia to then create a justification for violence against Kosovans. The classic line then developed on the right, in the politics of cynicism, has been the idea that immigrants have invaded Britain. This gives the sense and idea that somehow immigrants are banding together to take over Britain, in a co-ordinated attack. This kind of language is a classic political device, to galvanise hatred, suspicion, hostility and violence towards asylum seekers and poorer immigrants. In 2022, one day after an immigration centre was petrol bombed in the UK, the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, talked about an ‘invasion of our southern coast’ by people coming over the UK to claim from abroad (see here).

Against Muslims generally. Robert Jenrick saying people shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ should be arrested (see here, 7th August). And anyone who campaigns in the human rights of Muslims. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were smeared as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary. (see here, 7th August).

The language of invasion goes hand in hand with the phrase, which was kicked off by Williams Hague, and that has often been used by Nigel Farage, and was used by people to explain why they were rioting and protesting against asylum seekers (see here) we want our country back.

The European Union and European immigrants in particular. Again, here we have an institution, which the UK voted to join, and which was free to leave. But the rhetoric, started by William Hague, in 2002 (see here), was one of somehow the EU has taken the country away from British people. That somehow the EU through an act of aggression had taken over Britain. Which of course is complete politics. But Hague didn’t care about presenting a truth or the facts. He wanted to create a myth, and a feeling of hatred, hostility and violence for the institution and everything that it represented. “Elect a Conservative government and we will give you back your country” said Hague, but no-one had taken the country from anyone in the first case. This wasn’t a fucking counter-insurgency against a foreign invading force. But Hague had decided to create a sense and feeling as if it was, as part of a campaign to create a violent hostile reaction to the European Union, and the type of liberal centrist, socialist, political operators, in whose interests the European Union was creating policies. OK, admittedly, the EU’s bureaucrats were not the kind of vulnerable people that the new politics of cynicism often goes for. But this attack also created a sense of hostility for new immigrants who had entered the UK – and who in Hague’s terms – were taking the country out of the hands of those who rightfully owned it. Hague was promoting a violence and hostility towards these people. Hague was one of the leading shit-stirrers, one of the first proponents of the politics of cynicism in 21st Century Britain.

Having said all this, in the 21st century, for now, curiously this new politics of cynicism, whilst being accommodated by democracy, it also accommodates democracy. Politicians are called far-right and they are. But in the 1980s, based on our understanding of what happened in Italy and Germany when the far-right got into power, there was a sense that far right politicians quickly cancel democracy when they get into power and become ruthless dictators. Perhaps arguably, the politics of cynicism is about creating the conditions for the destruction of democracy. Either in the long-term. Or by eating the concept of democracy from the inside out – so that all that remains are the words and sounds – creating a state that is ‘democratic’ in the way that Putin might describe Russia – or in the way that Saddam Hussein – with this 99% election results – might have described Iraq.

People are lapping the politics of cynicism up. They are enjoying a politics which focuses hatred on to a group. Its making them feel excited. Its a riot, a lynching. People want to focus their energies into making someone suffer. Why? So they can feel some power? That’s why they chant stop the boats! Or take part in a riot and smash a supermarket up – because it is run by a Muslim. Because its easier to do that than organise to take on organised capital, and improve the lot of the common man. People are lapping it up, and those who pull the levers of the politics of cynicism are loving it too, its a very successful strategy of divide and rule. In some ways its about creating a caste system in the UK, where those who are being trodden on by others, are encouraged to focus their energies into sticking the boot into someone even more unfortunate than them.

The politics of cynicism based on a hatred for democracy, for genuine care, debate and listening and argumentation, has resulted in people electing people, who they know are going to abuse their position, and their country. They are either hoping that the person elected will abuse others. In certain cases people also know they will most likely abuse them too. It is real cut your nose to spite your face stuff. First seen in Italy, when they voted for Berlusconi in 1994, they were voting for their own Trump. They knew what Berlusconi was like, and they wanted to see what life would be like when someone took a wrecking ball to all the conventions and rules and expectations that come with a democratic society. Remember people are voting for this stuff. They’ve had enough. But enough of what? Of having to behave? Of having to deal with the fact that they are getting a pretty raw deal. That things are generally getting worse. Of having to listen to the opinions and feelings and views of other people, and listen, and empathise and sympathise?

The cynicism has become a form of entertainment and the entertainment has become all-consuming. People love to consume this cynical politics – especially when it is done with colour, humour and drama – and Johnson, Trump and Farage all do it so well. This couldn’t and wouldn’t happen without the role that social media applications, and the companies who are using technology like factories, to mass produce these products. So now we see politicians saying weird things that they know don’t make any sense, poorly constructed sentences, because they know it will get clipped and copied – by enemies as much supporters – and no news is bad news. We find them carefully crafting insults, injecting humour. Boris Johnson is the speaker par excellence in titillating his fans with latin, obscure English words and poetic language.

And lets not forget that the world of technology has turned the consumers into producers. For the first time in history, the proletariat has the ability to produce its own culture. In previous years and generations the ability to produce the media and messages have lain in the hands of the state and the capitalist classes. Its not that the state and capitalist classes don’t still have this power. Its just that people now have the power to create their own products. That might have been thought of as a democratising dream, empowering the working classes. But at least some part of the working classes appears to have been empowered to consume and reproduce cynical products and ideas. Arguably, and here is a thought. The ability to produce content or reproduce it has helped increase the addiction of people to both social media and the polititainment of cynicism.

The politics of hatred is not just something that people enjoy listening to. It clearly is having real consequences. It underpins the hostile nasty sadistic policies of incarceration, psychological terrorism and emiseration that successive Conservative governments have unleashed and developed on to poorer immigrants and asylum-seekers. A politics that Theresa May gave birth to, and which continued throughout the terms of the various Conservative governments up to Rishi Sunak. In more recent years it has helped buoy and encourage and empower mob violence in town centres across the UK, in the summer of 2024, which has included attacks on British people, British property and British businesses, owned by people who chose to identify as Muslim.

The politics of cynicism takes people’s minds away from thinking constructively about what can be done to enhance the strength, material life and well-being of the country. Often cynical politicians offer almost nothing in the way of strategy, vision, programmes and projects. Donald Trump has no big ideas about how to grow the American economy. Boris Johnson had nothing to offer the United Kingdom – neither Cameron or he had an idea about how they were going to grow the UK’s economy after taking it out of the European Union. Ayuso, the Voxish mayor of Madrid region – belonging to the Partido Popular in Spain – spends all of her time coming up with memish put-downs of the centrist president – but offers no vision as to what she wants to do to enhance the lives of people in Madrid. In this way the politicians no longer have to achieve things or be constructive in their term – they instead focus on fuelling the sense of hatred for the opposition or whichever groups – their voters have voted them in – to to create hostility towards. Ayuso, you get the feeling, will continue to be popular in Madrid Community – so long as she keeps the jokes and insults coming – not on whether she is able to get the local hospital up and running.

And turning people’s minds off away from thinking and questioning how should Britain be run and organised to strengthen and improve the living conditions of British people is having consequences too. I am not sure if what is happening is that politicians are getting away with just any old random shit and incompetence without people realising. Like bullshit programmes like Big Society, HS2 and Levelling Up – all garbage concepts – that people could see through as soon as they were announced – which never had a chance of making a difference to the UK economy. Its not that people didn’t know they were garbage – they just didn’t care – they were too busy focusing on other debates. But also behind the scenes the scenes things are happening, which are not part of people’s political consciousness. So for example, the economic consequences of Brexit had real consequences for unregulated capital in that it meant that UK financial institutions and markets and all the off-shore tax havens, continued to be a safe haven for that money, because they could escape the plans for tighter regulation and taxation that the EU was planning to bring in. In other words Brexit was a huge coup for the institutions and investors, who wanted a financial regime that allowed them, the very very rich, to keep their money outside of the system of taxation, which of course, keeps the poorest in poverty. Now this is a far more important issue for the working classes of Britain to be paying attention to, so it helps that their minds and time is filled with anger towards men, who want to be called women.

And because the politics of cynicism takes people’s minds away from thinking constructively about what can be done to enhance the strength, material life and well-being of the country – politicians no longer bother with trying to make things better – and the well-being of the country goes down the drain. Classic case in point was Brexit – which in the absence of an evidence based plausible alternative way of doing business with the world – was, economically, an act of shooting yourself in the groin. And yet by this point the politics of cynicism had enough followers and fans, that people in the UK were willing to vote for their own demise if it meant getting over one liberals, Jeremy Corbyn, the left, socialists, the Germans, clever immigrants, immigrants who worked harder than they did. Since Johnson took over the politics of cynicism absorbed a huge amount of energy and attention within the Conservative governments and in the media, such that the government did almost nothing to improve the living conditions and ways of working in the UK. Some have argued that the election of Starmer in 2024, was a sign that the country had had enough. Perhaps. But it could equally be argued that Starmer’s victory – was in part, because some part of the country want even more – it seems – even more cynicism – which is why 4 million people voted for Reform.

In other words, and to repeat myself, whilst this new cynicism does not present itself as having an ideology, there are forces, underpinning it, which do have ideologies. Which newspapers pushed Brexit, who are they owned by, and why was it in their economic interests to push it? The new cynicism occupies peoples’ conscious minds with hated for the other, and it can give people spectacles and orgies, hate speeches, insults, political oratory and poems of hatred and spectacles of sadism (that barge in Essex for immigrants, and flying immigrants to Rwanda) – whilst all the time – in the background transforming the rules and regulations, and rights of people – to protection against assault and abuse in the workplace, health services, welfare services etc.

And because the politicians of cynicism, when in power, no longer bother with trying to make things better – the country goes to shit.

It is perhaps, no surprise then, that within western democracies powerful non-democratic forces. Russia and China. Are investing billions of pounds in feeding the zombie matrix – and finding ways of controlling and influencing the minds of people – to create conditions, situations, perspective and ideas – which bleed into and break out in rashes in terms of the political results, types of politicians and policy choices that western democratic states end up producing. The more China and Russia can get politicians of cynicism into power the more they can weaken the western world, and then, with time, eat it. Russia of course, is, and always has been one of the most powerful cynical political states ever to have existed. The Tsarist empire has a history of the aristocracy treating the masses like cattle. And Russia today under Putin seems to be hell-bent on sacrificing its own men like battery chickens, to destroy the west and create carnage, rather than using its immense resources and talents to create one of the world’s greatest economies and civilisations.

There has always been a fair amount of cynicism in right-wing politics. Essentially its about the capitalist and upper classes justifying the wealth that they accrue and denying it to others. There is stuff growing, that you can eat and use to make things, and stuff being made every year. And the rich get more of it, and do less of the work generally to make it. And they need to create an ideology that justifies that. That has often involved casting the poor and working class as lazy. To suggest that the poor deserve their poverty. Interestingly, in these culture wars, and cynical times, the effect of this political cynicism is to side track from the rich-poor debate, and instead direct poorer people’s minds towards liberals, immigrants, Muslims etc (and usually the poorer ones).

So what does anyone on the right, who is genuinely wanting to lead a political movement, designed to address the practical challenges of improving the conditions, strength and well-being for their country do? And where do they go?

Steve Baker did an interesting interview a few days after he had lost his battle to be returned as a Conservative MP.