No one can any longer imagine that this is a normal election. Rishi Sunak’s D-Day debacle was no mere campaign gaffe, however large, but the end for a political class that governed without understanding those it ruled. We are witnessing a historic collision between technocratic government and political legitimacy, still not clearly perceived, since Labour’s shipwreck is yet to come.
The recent YouGov survey showing the long-dreaded “crossover”, with Reform 1 per cent ahead of the Tories, was the moment technocracy hit the rocks. Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking.
Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable. Populism is, among other things, the re-politicisation of issues the progressive consensus deems too important to be left to democratic choice.
Immigration was one such issue, climate policy another. Both have stormed back into the political realm. The next will be the declining free market model to which all mainstream parties are committed, and the unlikely agent of its destruction could turn out to be Nigel Farage.
Part of the reason Farage.
