A letter to a technocrat

We cannot bring in sensible reforms until immigration is resolved

The earliest of my memories which have a political tinge take place in the backseat of a car being driven to one of many interminable extended family get togethers at my Grandparents’ house, way outside of London. Parents, aunties, uncles; whoever happened to be driving at the time, would point with frothing rage at random newbuilds which were then springing up in and amongst the countryside as the decline of cities (outside of London) continued at pace during the early 2000s.

Any sign of visible change, no matter how minor, seemed to cause them excruciating mental pain. The pathology was so severe that, if it were to presented to a therapist, they would start searching for some traumatic explanation for the frothing mouths and the gnashing teeth. The psychological root of this allergy to progress, this mass cultural phenomenon which has degraded this country economically and scientifically from what it was to what it is now, can be explained in part by the brutalist experiments in architecture following the War - but another transformation of the Mid 20^th century left a deeper mark which transformed how the average middle to lower middle class person conceptualised of the state - immigration.

The experience of Commonwealth immigration and the attendant official denialism of the pain that it inflicted on it’s native hosts - the first grooming gangs in the North of England, White flight in London away from the Carribean crime wave, later the race rioting - led many ‘suburban fascists’ to the irrepressible conclusion that the State was not merely an irritation but an actively hostile force. It was no longer ‘their country’. Contemporary propaganda packaged increasing ‘diversity’ in with wider social progress, including the hated brutalist architecture, the shrinking countryside and all manner of now forgotten culture war issues like plastic wheely bins.

It is this demographic, which now populates the ‘Red Wall’, that has becoming the dominant political constituency in Britain. It is to their tune that both Reform and Labour are dancing. Whilst there may be tough rhetoric on immigration, the package also includes multivarious reactionary credos such as the nationalisation of ‘British Steel’ and continued support for totally unsustainable entitlements. Whenever spending is cut, their perception is that ‘the bastards’ are stealing from us again - the financial health of a state which they see as actively hostile to them is the last thing on their mind, especially one that spends countless billions on woke fripperies such as Net Zero and five star hotels for migrants.

These are reactionaries to whom I am sympathetic, but whose political platform, if enacted by Reform, would be as destructive as another five years of Keir Starmer. Britain is ungovernable if a Government with an 140+ seat majority is unable to embark on minor fiscal retrenchment on the wealthiest generation in history through cuts to entitlements like the Winter Fuel Allowance. Both Reform and the ‘New Right’ coterie of Conservative MPs have gone very publicly on the record to attack this without offering any solutions to the mounting sovereign debt crisis.

Solving the issues which we face will involve policy decisions that will make the Red Wallers severely uncomfortable. It will include not only cuts to Pensioner benefits and PIP but a souped up ‘Austerity 2.0’ which will not seek to cut spending by imposing targets on Departments (leading to unsustainable cost-cutting in Justice etc) but by tearing out entitlements root and stem. It will also include an entire raft of politically unpopular changes such as radical simplification of the tax code (which, in the case of VAT, will mean cutting exemptions for charities, Whiskey etc, small business threshold), applying National Insurance to pensions, reducing the school leaving age to 16 with to liberalise the labour market, increased inheritance taxes to claw back unearned housing wealth (applied vigorously to farmers), fracking en masse and a move to a regulation only planning regime (with the principle of local consent abolished).

This is the bare minimum that a government would need to do to get the economy growing at a modest 3% of GDP by the end of their Parliamentary Term whilst avoiding having to approach the IMF for a loan. There is no sign that either of the three main parties will adopt any of these policies – efforts were made by both the 2019 Conservative Government and the 2024 Labour Government by progressive leaning factions to use the majorities to ram a economic liberalism through and both times they have fallen flat on their faces. Our current trajectory is towards that of a Reform government which resembles that of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz, leading a stagnant economy dressed up with nasty words about immigrants and thin, watery post-liberalism.

I consider myself a technocrat in the truest sense of that term. I dislike genuine ‘populism’ and any other form of myopic moralism in the form of winter fuel allowances, lockdowns, the BBC, and the cult of the NHS. What should distinguish the politics of the online right from that of George Osborne is that we have the statistical grounding to challenge false narratives about immigration propounded by the likes of Jonathan Portes.

We, those who read those dodgy FBI charts about African American crime on 4chan at the age of thirteen, the original redpill, are the proper inheritors to the European rationalist tradition - who cast a sceptical eye also on those who claim that Britain, the birthplace of Atheism, owes something to ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and that an economy where trade comprises almost 70% of GDP should begin erecting tariffs, or that a country which cannot field a single division should be entertaining the possibility of intervening in a war with China.

It is in that spirit of cool detachment that I propose an alternative course, one that the centre-right will have to follow if it wishes to resolve the current inflection point. Immigration and racial politics more broadly has to be settled definitively as a precondition to economic liberalism. There are two reasons for this; the first being that any government which A) Ends illegal immigration. B) Introduces capital punishment for grooming gang offenders and C) Establishes a stable demographic pattern (trending up) will have build up unassailable levels of political capital with the Red Wallers, to the point that they can hack away at the Welfare state budget after budget without concern.