The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

A friend send me a photo of yet another paywalled article from The Times. It’s written by Gerard Baker and entitled:-

A lefty in the White House? That’ll be Trump

The thesis is that President Trump is as statist as the American Left. Sure, he’s vastly superior on personal liberty and doesn’t want to control his citizens’ thoughts. He’s doing a good job on attacking wokeness and even taking on the first and greatest task of every Western leader right now – purging academia.

America’s (and Britain’s) relentlessly leftist “educators” still pose a greater threat to the West’s future than any external enemy.

However, it’s true he’s no champion of free trade – no Milei. It’s difficult to discern any economic theory behind his thinking in fact. He seems just to be running the Federal Government like it was a business empire.

His administration is busy expanding the role of an interventionist state in a way that few in the West have dreamt of since Francois Mitterand’s doomed experiment of socialism in one country and Tony Benn cooked up plans for a new Britain. In little over six months, his administration has seized critical ownership stakes in some of America’s largest companies, extracted a sizeable share of revenues for the government from other companies’ business, told chief executives what they should be doing with their investments and prices, and struck deals with foreign countries in which they agree to put hundreds of billions of dollars at the disposal of the US government…. There is no doubt that what Trump is doing marks the biggest break with American economic orthodoxy in generations … It directly contradicts the orthodoxies of laissez-faire economics since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The American public are no fans of Austrian economic theory either. Let’s face it. Most voters have no understanding of economics at all. Most politicians want it to stay that way.

Trump’s supporters are just happy to see their tormentors on the run. The Left has gone crazy on both sides of the Pond. It’s almost too easy to beat them with even a remotely united Right. Their transgender insanity alone is enough to hoover up every un-indoctrinated voter.

The British public is likely to feel the same way when – as seems inevitable – Nigel Farage’s Reform Party wins the next election.

I rejoice at the prospect of Labour and Conservatives being punished for their shameful neglect of our interests. It’s hard to know which to hate more. Labour for advancing insane policies or the Tories for pathetically failing to reverse them when in power – or at least in office. However I am worried about what Reform will be able to achieve, if anything. Because if they fail to bring a democratic solution, the people are now angry enough to solve their problems by other means. Leftists keep asking why we’re putting up those flags. I am afraid they’re battle flags. The British people are signalling that, as they so often have before, they’re prepared to die under them.

So Reform’s difficult-to-envisage success really matters.

The problem is not just that Reform will follow President Trump’s lead in being statist and interventionist. There are no firm principles behind its policy as yet. I see no luminaries in its midst who are likely to form any. Where’s their Sir Keith Joseph and their Centre for Policy Studies? Margaret Thatcher worked hard in Opposition to develop a policy platform. Every bit as hard as she worked in power to build on it. I see no sign of any party of the Right doing that.

They don’t need to, any more than Trump did. They can just point at Labour’s uselessness on economic growth, housing and immigration control; their continued nonsense about men growing cervixes; their shielding not just of rapists but of the public servants who were accessories after the fact to their crimes. They can point to policemen arresting us for saying “muppets” or tweeting angrily about our children being murdered.

Reform has no serious experience of power. Its Ministers will be putty in the hands of a Civil Service that has long been more of the problem than the elected politicians. The Conservatives failed so badly (not that it’s any excuse) because they couldn’t overcome the resistance of the Establishment, the Blob, the Deep State or whatever we now call the entrenched cadres of the state apparatus and their media toadies.

When a government becomes so powerful; intruding into every aspect of our lives, the people most attracted to operating the levers of that power are going to be – mostly – wicked. I know you don’t want to believe it of your cousin or sister on the state payroll gentle reader but you have to ask yourself some serious questions. For example could you even be a British policeman right now? Could you be sent to intimidate your neighbours into fearful silence, or to arrest the fathers of raped teenagers? If you’ve read this far, your answer is almost certainly “no”.

When I see a young policeman now, I don’t see the friend and protector my parents brought me up to expect. I see a state thug. I ask myself what kind of moral degenerate could apply for that job. I feel the same in the presence of most employees of the British State. They know they are crushing the life out of the nation by their parasitism and yet – listen to the demands of London’s Tube drivers this week– they don’t care.

It’s progress that – thanks largely to Elon Musk’s intervention on the rape gangs issue and President Trump’s new dawn of hope – my friend and I (former partners in the same law firm) have different worries about the future than a year ago. Change is coming. God knows it’s needed, but from the crooked timber of Mankind no straight thing can be made. It’s going to be messy and full of mistakes. The path ahead has more pitfalls than pavement. A successful journey is doubtful.

Trump was outsmarted and thwarted in his first term and had the testicular fortitude to come back for a second try. Our nation’s future hangs in the balance on such matters as Nigel Farage’s health – physical and mental. He’s made far too many sacrifices already and he’s only there because no alternative to him has emerged. He doesn’t have Trump’s iron will, though his petulance often makes it look like he does.

His first term will make Trump’s look easy. An incoming US president can replace the higher echelons of his Civil Service at will. Farage will have to overcome the resistance of the Blob. He has the benefit of having been so consistently denigrated and smeared for so long that his enemies believe their own press and underestimate him. That’s the only favour they’ll do him. He needs to assemble a team not just of MPs, councillors and so forth. That is a big enough task in itself. He also needs to find people to staff those higher echelons. If he doesn’t find a way to behead the Deep State, he’ll fail. The consequences of failure are scary.