The loss of values and truth

 Indulgent West

Elica Le Bon is bewildered by the West’s appetite to “sacrifice values on the altar of tolerance”. I think she’s being generous. I would suggest that we sacrificed our values on the altar of indulgence.
We swapped restraint, duty and self-control for a world of self-love, instant gratification and cheap highs. Duty became old-fashioned. Shame, even after poor behaviour, was considered not just outdated but outrageous.
Judgment was (ironically) condemned.
We swapped fortitude, tenacity and responsibility for dependence.
Restraint for licence.
Christianity for crystals. Courtesy, respect and moderation gave way to uninhibited freedom and finally to permissiveness.
There was no right or wrong.
Everything was relative. Thus we were ripe to be asked to tolerate the intolerable. And we had no grounds to refuse. Because in a world of moral and cultural relativism we can’t declare any one behaviour or any one culture better or worse than another.
But that’s simply not true.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

Finally A reality check

 US leads the way in reversing cultural decline of the West

KONSTANTIN KISIN

Since speaking at the last Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, it’s clear that the tide is turning and our American friends are leading the way.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled.

This is happening not just in the US government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.

Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave $US3m ($4.7m) to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Kanye West would have done it for free!

Thanks to the end of censorship on X, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.

So that’s the positives, but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia.

Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.

I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of Britain and much of the Western world.

But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things human beings have invented over the past two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. One of simplest things most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.

But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here. 

We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: If you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer.

Because we all know the answer.

We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.

A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history. Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history.

Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them.

Recent election results around the world bear that out.

Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches and ill-advised hand gestures.

They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.

We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired. So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.

On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner.

The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward.

Free speech is not a rightwing value or a left-wing value, it’s a Western value.

The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”.

Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first, and white, black, male, female and all that other stuff a distant second.

And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.

None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.

We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t? So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty.

The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner, yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.

Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

Idealism the road paved to hell

 Idealism the link between medicine and monsters

Melanie Phillips

The fall of the Syrian dictator ­Bashar al-Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants also qualified doctors? Assad is by training an ophthalmologist.

Among the godfathers of Islamist terrorism, there has been a steady stream of doctors. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s henchman, was a surgeon who practised at Egyptian army clinics, a Saudi Arabian hospital and with the Red Crescent in Pakistan.

George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Fathi Shaqaqi, a founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were doctors.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas leader behind the human bomb attacks against Israelis in the 1990s, studied pediatric medicine and taught parasitology and genetics.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was found guilty of crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars, qualified as a doctor and psychiatrist.

Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the despot of Ivory Coast from the 1960s to the 1990s, started out as a doctor. His contemporary, Hastings Banda, who ruled Malawi in a reign of terror and fed opposition members to crocodiles, trained as a doctor in Tennessee and at Edinburgh University and practised medicine in England.

In Haiti in the 1960s, Francois Duvalier, a qualified doctor who won popularity through a campaign against tropical diseases, used his nickname Papa Doc to win trust and justify his repression.

The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore also wondered about this phenomenon. In an article in 2013, he noted that Assad chose to specialise in treating the eyes ­because this involved less contact with blood. Yet Assad is up to his own eyes in blood, having presided over the slaughter of some 600,000 people in Syria’s terrible civil war.

Despite their ruthless behaviour, however, such people usually don’t view themselves as killers.

Assad often used the language of medical healing and cleansing.

Such individuals may see themselves as fighting injustice or doing the work of God. Indeed, they often view killing as the highest form of sanctified duty. In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden signed a fatwa declaring: “The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.”

Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammad, told CNN in 2012: “Before you call me and my brother terrorists, let’s define its meaning. If it means those who are bloodthirsty merciless killers, then this is not what we are about.”

This is because jihadi killers believe they are treating a diseased organism in the form of the non- Islamic world that must be purged of spiritual poison and made healthy by the application of Islam.

Maybe the reason so many tyrants and terrorists turn out to be doctors is because the idealistic ­impulse to treat sick people translates, under the pressure of ideology or perceived injustice, into a desire to remedy the apparent sickness of the body politic. That’s why the national conversation about Islamic human bomb terrorists is always conducted entirely at cross-purposes. The West believes that such terrorism can be motivated only by despair. On the contrary, the jihadi bomber believes he is achieving the highest possible ideal of holy work.

This radical disjunction has reportedly been understood by none other than the daughter of MI5’s director-general, Ken McCallum.

When he finally told his children the nature of his work, his daughter asked him: “Dad, the people that you work against, do they think they’re doing the right thing too?” As McCallum said, this was a good question. Indeed, his daughter had grasped an important point. It’s a fair bet that bad people don’t wake up in the morning and think “How many evil deeds can I perpetrate today?” They all justify to themselves the terrible things they do.

Assad claimed he was fighting the war to protect his country against religious fanatics. Russia’s President Putin claims that, by invading neighbouring countries, he is reuniting his dismembered motherland and righting a historic wrong. The Soviet Union thought it was creating the workers’ paradise.

Hitler thought he was ridding the human race of impurities. The 18th-century French revolutionaries thought that, by guillotining aristocrats during the Terror, they were saving France from a corrupted elite.

We may look at the bodies piled up and perceive, in the fanaticism that secured their fate, a monstrous abuse of power. To the perpetrators, however, the idealistic end always justifies the horrific means. Over the years, many philosophers have concluded that idealism is the road to hell. This is because ideals are a fantasy of perfection detached from reality.

They set up binary choices – oppressor versus oppressed, corruption versus purity or, as activists chant, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.

But life is messy. People disagree profoundly about which ­ideals to pursue. The divisions are often blurred and the choices overlap.

It’s because utopia is unattainable that those pursuing ideals such as the eradication of want or prejudice end up browbeating, scapegoating or wiping out those seen to be standing in their way.

Monstrous individuals tell themselves the lie that they’re fighting the good fight. Assad told himself such a lie; those now fighting to replace him are undoubtedly men in the grip of similarly lethal illusions. Idealism can express noble emotions; but it is also a ­direct line to tyranny and worse.

The Times 

The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

 

The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

ALEX MCDERMOTT

Since the defeat of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, Indigenous truth and justice commissions have continued to extend their reach throughout different Australian states. They are all based on the assumption the Uluru Dialogues articulated: the problems that plague Indigenous communities can be traced back to the original trauma of dispossession.

Yet reality tells a very different story. Were 1788, and the train of colonial occupation that followed on from that, the primary cause, then you wouldn’t find such wide variation among Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians in urban areas and regional centres are hard to distinguish from the rest of the population in those places for levels of wealth, health, education and life outcomes.

The human crisis that produces and reproduces the Gap is much more clearly locatable. It is in the remote outstations of homeland settlements, and around some towns in isolated parts of the Australian interior. It is where there is no economic life outside the government provision of welfare and social services, and no jobs other than those government creates.

These places, where basic social order and safety have largely vanished, have been described by Noel Pearson as worse than Third World countries.

Let’s face it: 1973 and 1974, not 1788, better explain this longscale traumatic hurt and human damage. Those are the years when the new policy of self-determination, and the remote homelands ideal, properly took hold.

The idea that Indigenous peoples should themselves collectively decide the terms on which they would engage with Western life and settler society first emerged in the 1950s, thanks in no small part to the Australian Communist Party. As of 1931, communists argued that indigenous minorities in the advanced capitalist countries were oppressed colonial peoples. The glorious Soviet Socialist republics were “selfdetermining”, they declared – so should be indigenous minorities.

In an age of decolonisation, the idea had obvious appeal. Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who believed separating indigenous from other Canadians was a retrogressive step, and an inherently undemocratic one at that, issued a white paper, An End to Separatism, against it.

In Australia, Paul Hasluck, the commonwealth minister for states and territories, and thus the Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, shared Trudeau’s views.

Under his stewardship in the 1950s and 1960s, government repudiated the policy of protection that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

There is a solid argument advanced by Tim Rowse, an emeritus professor at Western Sydney University, that protection helped stabilise and rebuild the Indigenous population. But it undeniably treated Aborigines as inherently different, secondclass citizens, to be kept apart from the ordinary population. Hasluck instead sought a system “under which Aborigines were recognised as Australian citizens and were regarded as having the same status and rights as other Australian citizens”. Aborigines should be equals, treated equally.

It was through Hasluck that Aborigines regained much of what they’d lost or been denied under protection: civil rights, and the right to vote federally, in 1962.

But after Harold Holt’s drowning, Hasluck narrowly lost the partyroom vote to John Gorton and shortly after effectively left public life. With Hasluck gone no one else seriously pushed back against the new policy concept of self-determination.

Conflated with the shame of the recently junked White Australia policy, assimilation and even integration became bogey words, freighted with the stigma of racism.

Hasluck’s policy was condemned for violating the Indigenous right to decide for themselves.

Like multiculturalism – another buzzy, yet originally nebulous word that became policy without public debate about what it meant – self-determination germinated under the Coalition, was supercharged under Gough Whitlam, and then became orthodoxy.

Even to question it was to be tarred with hankering for the bad old days of assimilation. Yet self-determination produced failure on a vast, indeed cataclysmic scale.

Activist bureaucrats such as Herbert “Nugget” Coombs enthusiastically endorsed the idea that Indigenous communities in remote regions should be established largely outside modern capitalist Australia. After Whitlam’s 1972 election victory unemployment benefits were made available to all Indigenous people, even if they lived in communities where there were no jobs. It proved to be one of the most poisonous policy decisions of the 20th century.

In the 1950s and 1960s Aborigines had been employed at remote settlements and missions in government-run enterprises, which enabled them to work and live there. Piggeries, orchards, chicken runs, vegetable gardens, sawmills, bakeries and butcheries flourished.

After 1972 young people knew they could get paid more money by not working – “sit-down money”, or the dole. The enterprises collapsed.

In many areas self-determination’s wave of social destruction was made worse by the equal wages decision of 1967. On pastoral stations Indigenous cattlemen worked in a largely cashless economy. They were paid for work largely in rations, clothes and basic accoutrements, while continuing to work and live with their families on traditional country. The rations were often paid to the women, giving them considerable influence.

Once equal pay came in, pastoralists switched even more quickly to new technology, and to more skilled workers to run their stock.

Combined with the total loss of incentive to work from sitdown money, and the new ubiquity of the modern cash economy – including guns, grog, pornography and drugs – the traditional societies of remote Australia began to rapidly disintegrate, precipitating a dramatic rise in rates of offending and incarceration.

The fate of Vincent Lingiari’s Gurindji people illustrate this tragedy all too vividly. Writer and historian Charlie Ward describes how welfare payments, infrastructure development wages and “unprecedented amounts of funding” from the government fundamentally compromised Gurindji autonomy in the years after Whitlam had poured a handful of sand into Lingiari’s open palm in 1975.

Younger generation Gurindji refused to work in the Gurindjioperated cattle operation, rejecting their elders’ traditional authority.

A society that “had masterfully sustained itself by hard work and self-motivation” fell apart, chiefly “as a result of government assistance given under policies of Aboriginal selfmanagement”.

Indigenous policy has been our greatest failure. Ultimately, it is not just a failure of policies but of ideas. In a society where all Australians depend on each other – economically, socially, politically – the notion that any group can be “selfdetermining” is a fantasy.

Fifty years after the Whitlam government raised that fantasy into a religion, it’s time reality was given a stronger say.

Alex McDermott is an independent historian.

No road to net zero

 Eco heroes leave reality to ‘someone else’ 

CHRIS UHLMANN 

We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel. Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo. Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade. You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale. You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok. The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero. Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city. There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete. Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuelfree. How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live? Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain. Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”. The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept. Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all 1 Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad. This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weatherdependent power in the space of a generation. The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime. Outside this climate church there is no salvation. But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math? Physicist and former Australian mining engineer associate professor Simon Michaux, from the Geological Survey of Finland, has calculated the material challenge of meeting the stated emissions reduction ambitions of the EU, China and the United States. He found that the available minerals demanded by the transition to net zero were a fraction of what will be needed to meet every country’s pledges. Out of the veritable periodic table of elements the green transition will demand let’s take one mineral: copper. In a paper produced this year, Michaux notes, “The human species produced approximately 700 million tonnes of metal over the 4000 years prior to 2020. For global economic demand for copper to continue its current trajectory of growth, another 700 million tonnes would need to be produced in the next 22 years.” The world’s pre-eminent expert on energy systems, Professor Vaclav Smil, has calculated the amount of copper needed to electrify just the world’s vehicle fleet, noting the average electric vehicle contains about 80kg of copper, “compared to less than 15kg in an internal combustion engine car”. “Replacing today’s 1.4 billion ICE vehicles by EVs would thus require more than 90 million tonnes of additional copper supply during the next 27 years,” he said in a paper for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers. Smil went on to detail the staggering amount of mining that would be needed to extract that copper, given the very best mines have only 0.6 per cent of metal in the copper ore. “This means that the extraction of an additional 90 million tonnes of copper by 2050 would require drilling, blasting, removal, processing and waste deposition, amounting to about 15 billion tonnes of rock, a mass equivalent to the world’s annual extraction of all fossil fuels and of all metallic ores, combined.” So, a big job then. Just for the copper needed to electrify the world’s vehicles and not counting the 610 million tonnes of copper that will be required for everything else. And once we have solved the copper question, we can turn our minds to finding the dizzying array of other elements needed for this witches’ brew. It is impossible to predict the future but this much is certain, the path to net zero won’t be mapped in fantasy numbers. That is a road to nowhere. Technology may save us. Faith won’t. 

Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees

 Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees PETA CREDLIN 

At the recent meeting of the G7, the only democratic leader present with an approval rating north of 40 per cent was its host, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. The best of the rest, at 37 per cent, was the United States’ Joe Biden (although this was before his debate disaster), followed by Canada’s Justin Trudeau at 30 per cent, Germany’s Olaf Schulz at 25 per cent, Britain’s Rishi Sunak also at 25 per cent, France’s Emmanuel Macron at 21 per cent, and Japan’s Fumo Kishida at just 13 per cent. Sunak is almost certain to be thrashed in the British elections on Thursday and a way-past-his prime Biden might well be dumped by his party even before November’s US election. Our own Anthony Albanese’s current 42 per cent approval (for a net approval rate of minus 11) looks almost glowing, yet his government will almost certainly go backwards at the next election. 

Not for almost a century has strong and confident democratic leadership been so needed yet almost never has the leadership of the main democracies been so lacklustre. And so, why? First, it’s because almost none of the current crop of leaders has addressed their societies’ underlying problems. Second, it’s because large percentages of the electorate in these main democracies feel politically homeless – indeed disenfranchised. And third, as suggested on this page earlier this week (“The West hasn’t figured out what’s going wrong. Voters are the problem”, 2/7), democratic electorates are, as yet, in no mood to welcome the leadership that’s needed. As the US commentator George Will said during an earlier dispiriting period (the late 1970s), “the cry goes up for leadership from millions of people who wouldn’t know it if they saw it, and would reject it if they did”. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the widespread perception that liberal market democracy was permanently ascendant, the main democracies have militarily, economically and even culturally disarmed. Yet it’s one thing to recognise the gathering storm; quite another to have a plan to deal with it. 

For all its residual strength, compared to China, the US is militarily much weaker than even five years back. Certainly, it’s a long time since the mere appearance of a US carrier strike force in the Taiwan Straits would be enough to deter any thoughts of aggression from Beijing. As the Ukraine war has shown, collectively, the main democracies’ preference for butter over guns means they’re woefully incapable of matching the armaments production, even of Russia, whose GDP in US dollar terms is scarcely a third more than Australia’s. And as the subsequent war in Gaza shows, not only are the main democracies scarcely capable of maintaining two democratic allies’ conflicts at once – let alone three, should China attack Taiwan – but large sections of their people and leadership can’t decide whose side they’re on: that of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, or an apocalyptic death cult. 

Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs. The latest example is our own parliament’s banning of the live sheep trade this week on the grounds of alleged cruelty to animals. And the main Anglosphere countries are full of doubt about their fundamental legitimacy and self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over colonialism, and Australia over the dispossession of the original inhabitants. Very few democratic leaders show unqualified pride in their countries or appreciation of how the Pax Americana has helped the wider world, until very recently, to be more free, more fair, more rich, prosperous, and more safe for more people than ever before in history; and that migrants to their countries have won the lottery of life and should be grateful. And almost none of them are prepared to say that in order to stay free, fair, and prosperous, the main democracies need to be less obsessive about reducing emissions and climate catastrophism, much readier to clamp down on out-of-control immigration, much more strict about morally relativist and culturally self-loathing education systems, and be willing to make at least some sacrifices in support of freedom. The partial exceptions are Meloni, who’s been better at railing against immigration in opposition than reducing it in government; and Donald Trump, although he never quite “built the wall”, didn’t even come close to “draining the swamp” and continues to pretend that there’s no cost to unilateral protectionism and no downside to America opting out of being the world’s policeman. 

Britain is about to get a greenleft Labour government with a super majority, not because the electorate has much enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer but because voters, especially strong conservative ones, are utterly disillusioned with a Tory party that (Brexit aside) hasn’t governed like one. France could be about to get a so-called “far right” National Assembly majority because the longestablished centre-right party comprehensively failed to respond to voters’ concerns about mass illegal migration that is impacting on living standards and social cohesion. That’s because when parties of the centre (left and right) consistently fail to address popular concerns, parties on the fringe that do so will eventually get traction. Both the Gaullists in France and the Conservatives in Britain have been part of the official “uniparty” consensus that immigration is always good and that renewable power is indisputably cheap, but that’s not the perception of people on “struggle street” which is why all the political establishments, left and right, are under pressure, either from fringe parties (such as Reform UK in Britain) or internal insurgents (such as Trump in the US). Yet almost no one contending for high office, establishment or insurgent, is prepared to tell voters the truth that there are few cost-free changes. Trump has nothing to say about America’s unsustainable deficits beyond “growth will fix it”. 

Looking at the creaking NHS, no British leader is prepared to say that patients simply cannot always get treatment that’s the best, immediate, and for free; so, one or more will often have to give. Here in Australia, it’s generally accepted that the NDIS, for instance, is a fiscal time bomb but no one will face up to the fact that eligibility and entitlements have to be curbed if the scheme is to be sustainable. Our officialdom recalls the fate of the 2014 budget, the last one that attempted difficult economic reform, and concludes that things might have to be much worse before most voters would willingly accept the need to wind some things back. In a democracy, there can’t be strong leadership without strong voters which is why countries ultimately get the leaders they deserve. And yet, some change-for-thebetter might be in the offing. By being upfront with voters that nuclear power is the only way to get to net zero and keep the lights on, and that the inescapable choice is between paying more for a reliable emissions-free system, or even more for an unreliable one, at least Peter Dutton has shown the political integrity we claim to expect of a leader. The question now is whether voters have sufficient collective character to recognise it.  

Crisis of entitlement

 Crisis of entitlement leaves West on the precipice of disaster. MATTHEW SYED 

“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean,” historian William Durant wrote in The Story of Civilisation. “If war is forgotten in security and peace … then toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude.” They are words that are perhaps worth pondering as the Western world moves closer to the precipice while distracting itself with endless cat videos and online spats about whether plaiting hair amounts to cultural appropriation. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. You can hear them in the travesty of an election taking place in the UK, the rightward turn about to hit France’s Fifth Republic and the parody of a debate in which a pathological liar and someone apparently suffering cognitive decline were put forward as prime candidates to become leader of the “greatest nation on Earth”. Yet even now I fear the West hasn’t figured out what is going wrong and why. 

While pundits examine exit polls and consult focus groups, they miss the rot buried so deep in our system that it has become all but invisible. And – if you’ll forgive me for being candid – it has nothing to do with hopeless leaders, Russian bots, high taxes, low taxes or being members of the wrong trading bloc. The problem is Western electorates. Us. Let’s briefly look at what most people agree are the symptoms of political decay. Debt is rising: approaching 100 per cent of GDP in the UK, 115 per cent in France and 120 per cent in the US. These are highs previously reached at the end of World War II, when we had just financed a conflict, after which levels rapidly fell. Today they are set to rise – and rise (partly because of changing demography). The US Congressional Budget Office projects that the share of GDP used to service the federal debt will be twice what is spent on national security by 2041. The Office for Budget Responsibility foresees UK debt reaching 300 per cent by 2070. 

France – well, who knows what will happen if Marine Le Pen gets the chance to enact her deluded version of populism? Let us rattle through the other problems too: we can no longer build, whether it is homes, roads, railways or power grids. Then there is the addiction to low-wage immigration and funny money (otherwise known as quantitative easing) and our abject failure – notably in Europe – to spend adequately (or wisely) on defence. I gration means paying workers more in the here and now, but it also means that we are not storing up vast fiscal liabilities and putting extra pressure on our physical infrastructure and (if these immigrants fail to integrate) cultural capital. Or take public borrowing to finance current spending. We have a choice: do we resist the temptation to use the credit card today – which implies we will have less of everything else? Or do we max out the Amex, enjoy extra consumption and borrow again next year, saddling future generations with could go on, but allow me to cut to the chase. 

Policy wonks tend to analyse these challenges in isolation and come up with what look like solutions. For example: we can cut public debt by abiding by fiscal rules. The problem is such rules are serially broken or subverted. The same happens to promises on infrastructure, immigration, monetary realism, you name it. And the reason is that the dysfunction is a symptom of a deeper – much deeper – problem. For when you look again, you notice a single and, in my view, unavoidable cause: an inability to make short-term sacrifices to secure a brighter future; to defer instant gratification for long-term success. We have become a civilisation that’s all about “now, now, now” and “me, me, me” – the antithesis of what the West once represented. Building railways, for example, represents a sacrifice in the here and now because the money to hire diggers and pay workers can’t be splurged on day-to-day consumption. But guess what: if we make this sacrifice, in a few years we will have extra connectivity to fuel growth. Similarly, weaning ourselves off low-wage immi crippling interest payments and structural weakness? The latter choice is easier, but also – over time – insidious, chipping away at the vitality of a civilisation. 

My point is that success for nations, as for individuals, requires tough choices. This is what we tell our children, isn’t it? Work hard. Practise. This might not be as much fun as playing another game on the iPad but it will confer blessings that last a lifetime. And we have words, do we not, for children who refuse to make such sacrifices? Spoiled. Entitled. The same, I suggest, applies to civilisations. When Rome was lean and driven, it built infrastructure, created a superb military and grew. A few centuries later, flabby and complacent, it wanted the blessings of success but not the costs. The empire had entered a fantasy land, where expenditure on ever more generous welfare payments and bread and circuses rose beyond the capacity of the state to afford it. So when the money ran out, the emperors debased it, reducing the silver content until the currency was worthless. The West is (I’d estimate) three centuries into its period of global supremacy, roughly the time between the beginning of the Roman principate and Diocletian’s splitting of the empire. And is it not reasonable to note a similar pattern, with China playing the role of the insurgent Vandals? 

Yet instead of confronting the disease, we look for scapegoats: immigrants, populists, wokesters, MAGA, remainers, leavers and so on. Anything to distract us from the more challenging truth that almost every section of Western society has drifted into a state of endemic entitlement. And this is why, if I were prime minister, I’d be saying to benefit claimants cheating the system: I’m coming for you. I’d be saying to the army of rent-seekers in the administrative state: your time is up. I’d be saying to the entitled old: I’m no longer allowing you to use your voting numbers to rig the system. I’d be saying to the mobile super-wealthy: I’m closing your tax loopholes. I’d be saying to cronyist regulators: I’m locking the revolving door. And (some readers might not like this) to the homeowners who enjoyed zero interest rates generated by funny money after the financial crash, and who laughably think they deserve their inflated gains, I’d be saying: I want to claw some of this cash back to make the investments we so desperately need. Yes, I’m coming for you, too. 

But the devastating, potentially terminal truth is that a critical mass of voters are not ready to hear this. They are too  comfortable in the delusion of their own entitlement, pretending the problem lies with everyone else (in this sense, polarisation is another symptom of the rot). And let’s not pretend the problem is short election cycles or hopeless politicians, because these retailers – Starmer, Sunak, Biden, Trump, Farage – are merely regurgitating different versions of the fantasy voters wish to hear, but never daring to tell the whole truth. In a seminal intervention recently the superb Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called the British election a “conspiracy of silence”, but I’d suggest the true conspiracy engulfs the whole Western world. Our only hope is to escape our delusion and embrace realism. For perhaps the killer point is this: as the audacity and brilliance of Western civilisation degenerates before our eyes, it is the world’s autocrats who are rubbing their hands with glee.