Form and content

This week: the party of personal responsibility strikes again; and the new cargo cult-ism.

There’s a phrase I keep thinking about at the moment. It comes via the Guardian’s Alex Hern, though he maintains he wasn’t his own coinage: 

“hot dog tories”, the Very Serious Commentators who have identified critical problems with the state, from the inability to build anything to the utter catastrophe of the NHS, and dedicate themselves to working out how to fix it

The reference, if you’re less terminally online than I, is to this sketch by Tim Robinson:

It’s a good label – like the man in the giant hot dog costume, the Tories are very clearly responsible for the mess they’re trying to find someone to blame for. But I think it goes further than Alex suggests. It isn’t merely a matter of cynical right-wing commentators looking for a way to retain credibility in the face of problems they know they share the blame for. (As if our media would ever stop quoting someone, just because they’d been demonstrably wrong about everything. Nick Timothy still has a column!) It’s a condition afflicting large chunks of the British right. 

Consider this Telegraph column by Eric Kaufmann, with the headline, “School indoctrination is turning British youth woke – and Tories remain silent”. You don’t need to read it – not because it’s nonsense, though it is, but because you can almost certainly sing along without bothering. At both school and university, you see, young people today are exposed to a bunch of “woke” ideas about white privilege and patriarchy and imperialism being bad. As a result, they believe all sorts of loony lefty things that would horrify their elders. 

The problem, apparently, is the lack of support for free speech – the unspoken implication is that, if they were only allowed to hear right-wing arguments, they’d almost certainly agree with them. The term Kaufmann employs for all this is “cultural socialism”, which is a phrase that definitely has no uncomfortable historic connotations whatsoever. 

The key point for our purposes, though, is this: