Carl Benjamin, on the Lotus Eaters, recently compared the right-wing ecosystem in Britain to the Middle Ages, with various dukes and barons now expected to declare for either Restore Britain or Reform UK. There are, no doubt, a few sorry sods out there raising their banners for Kemi Badenoch, but in the social media ecosystem, it’s essentially binary.
After some initial confusion, streamers, bloggers, and podcasters are now moving to weaponise their platforms in defence of their champion.
It has come to my attention that a tweet I made just after the announcement has appeared on a few pro-Reform blogs:
Jack Hadfield, writing on the pro-Reform, Tory-Boy outlet Pimlico Journal, describes it as:
There are far too many who care only about signalling their ‘based’ credentials online, rather than implementing change in the real world. This commitment to being the ‘beautiful loser’ is represented best by this tweet which flew around the Lotus Eater sphere after Restore’s launch.
…This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak
The “beautiful loser” line was coined by Sam Francis in his essay, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. The essay is a diatribe against the feebleness of mainstream Conservatism in the face of the mad dog left, their willingness to buckle and suck up the losses while being consoled with gigs in mainstream newspapers and television slots.
Nigel Farage, who literally states that Islam will have to be embraced or defeat is inevitable, is the very essence of a beautiful loser, and those who follow him routinely fall for it again, and again, and again. Even if Reform UK wins an election in 2029, the country will not be saved precisely because the party is comprised entirely of the beautiful losers described by Francis.
Yet, even the idea that the Reform UK Party are mere losers is the charitable interpretation. In truth, it is a second defensive trench hastily dug by the Conservative Party, the beautiful traitors who wrecked the country in the first place.
Thus, there is no scenario in which “we” take power in 2029 under a Reform banner; there is simply a consolidation of the centre within a new containment zone.
The question then is what to do in the no-win situation we find ourselves in when we look clearly and honestly at the political battlefield.
I was not on the “Farage Train” before Restore Britain existed. I had given up on the idea of a political solution.
To posit “taking power by any means necessary” while in reality advocating for a party which will likely have Robert Jenrick as a leader in a few years is a bit of a howler, to say the least.
The grim reality is that we’re rats in a trap. It is indeed true that we’re running out of options; the choice before us is whether to remain in the trap and slowly die out, or chew through our leg and break free of it.
When Alex Phillips warns Young Bob to think carefully about his future, she’s signalling that there are consequences to moving outside of the containment zone - fewer slots in the GB News, Talk TV punditry, no gigs in the Spectator, no invitations to dinners in the Cotswolds.
Just turn away your gaze from the fact that Hope Not Hate vets the members, or that Farage openly despises the idea we exist as a distinct people, or the flood of Boriswave Tories replacing grassroots. Like Cowslip’s Warren in Watership Down, just scoff your face on the conveniently provided lettuce while pretending not to notice the shiny wire laid about here and there.
Did an Indian Buddhist with a Jewish husband endorsing a Sri Lankan Muslim promising he’ll defend Christian values make you raise an eyebrow? Just enjoy the fodder and don’t think about it.
The actual dividing line between the two parties isn’t policy, but trust.
Nobody forced or tricked Farage into filling up the ranks of Reform with Tories; he did so freely and enthusiastically because he views his base as gullible marks who had nowhere else to go. I sympathise with the Reform base more than Farage does, my own family are among them. Yet, despite the fact that it would be better to have a Reform councillor at the local level than a Green or a Labour councillor, when Farage thought the coast was clear and the base was locked in, the knife went straight into the backs of those who thought they were on an anti-Tory, anti-establishment ticket.
The danger of the actual Tory Party being reduced to “Zero Seats” or, at least, having their backs broken was that too much fertile ground was cleared on the right of British politics. Who knows what shoots may begin to sprout through the ground?
This, in my opinion, is why Reform UK exists. To fill space until, eventually and inevitably, folding back into the Conservative Party.
They aren’t trusted because they don’t deserve to be.
Restore Britain is something of a wild card, an unstable element that has been introduced to a tightly controlled system. This is not particularly complicated unless you have incentives to view it differently.
Most of us, however, are not too concerned about being dropped from GB News, the trendy Art-Ho network, or whatever…
Farage just wants to be welcomed to the Tories table after being scorned by them for many decades. Rupert Lowe won't tolerate any Tories who are culpable for the situation that Britain finds itself. Rupert Lowe is out there to change Britain and that makes all the difference.
If there is anything to be criticized in this piece of yours, Mr. Morgoth, it is that - unlike all your other work - what you explain is all-too-obvious or, more correctly, _should_ be all-too-obvious. And yet the mere fact that there is a controversy around it demonstrates that it needed to be spelt out. Thank you for that.