Recently – a mere 26 months ago – I wrote about the decline of Western neo-liberal democracy. I know that because I just re-read the piece, having totally forgotten where I’d left off.

I’m glad I did, though. The events that have recently beaten my brain like an opinion-stuffed piñata are disturbingly similar in tone.

For a politics junkie – even a somewhat-recovering one like me – the events of the last few weeks of British politics have been like high-grade fentanyl.

But what do they mean? I’m doubtless not the only person asking myself that. It’s equally probable my answers are no better than anyone else’s. However, writing them down helps me think them through, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. Lucky you.

Anyway.

Last week, Liz Truss finally made contact with reality. A stoppable force meeting an immovable object. It was an experience apparently so traumatic for her that it triggered an uncharacteristically rational reaction: she immediately quit.

Which is geat, but begs two fundamental questions: how did we get here and where do we go next?

The Price of Huboris

As I might have touched on before, I think western politics has become severely disassociated. Ideology, hubris, and confirmation bias have spawned a writhing knot of problems, all competing with each other for the title of One Big Thing that we can all blame for why everything is so shit.

After years in opposition, the Conservatives returned to power with a renewed image. Seemingly having learned from what caused their downfall over a decade before, David Cameron ousted a floundering and directionless New Labour government on a platform of ‘compassionate conservatism’.

It wasn’t actually a bad idea, particularly in the still-hot afterglow of the 2008 financial crisis; a synthesis of fiscal prudence and new-found consideration to those who bear the uneven brunt of collective hardship. At the time, it seemed like a recognition that while we weren’t all in it together, we should be.

Unfortunately, that impession didn’t last long. Ill-tuned austerity measures quickly made it clear that some of us very much were in it together far more than others. Internal party politics were transformed into national schism – and in the view of many, self-mutilation – in the form of Brexit. Divisions between pragmatism and idealism paralysed our politics for several years. ‘Policy’ in the sense of “collective program of change” was replaced with ‘policy’ in the sense of “one issue over which everyone is ready to kill each other”.

This was a huge problem, regardless of which side of the Brexit debate you were on. Functionally, we didn’t have a government that was governing. For three years.

But eventually, one side won out. We had an election. Labour put forward someone’s well-meaning but painfully out-of-touch uncle, recently dragged from his allotment. The Tories put forward a bloviating sockful of monomaniacal porridge. It was only ever going to go one way.

Likewise, it was no surprise to anyone with even the tiniest crumb of insight when Boris entirely failed to keep a lid on his own inherent dreadfulness. But by then, he’d helped one fringe of the party – the same fringe as the referendum had been intended to keep in check – to win. Their ideas were the best ideas. Everybody said so. They had a mandate. It was huge.

Sound familiar?

The Idea-ocracy

When everything fell apart, many of us watched our despair dissolve into despondent apathy as it became obvious that same fringe would seize power. Liz Truss was a Trojan Horse built of glass and shamelessness, pushed up to the gates of reality by the now-ennobled far right of the Tories. The same people Cameron’s Compassionate Conservative and ill-judged referendum had meant to reduce to the irrelevance which they surely deserve.

And this was because Liz Truss was steeped in the same stuff as those who’d originally pushed for Brexit. They didn’t want freedom for the people. They wanted freedom to practice their own neo-Randian economic theories of disaster capitalism and unfettered market opportunism.

What had happened was there’d been an ideological snowball: the success of conservatism outsing Labour, it then freeing itself of coalition governance, the far right of it hammering through Brexit, and the resounding defeat of Corbynite Labour ensuring that was a very hard Brexit. They were unstoppable. It wasn’t whether the Tories should be in power; it was which part of the party was contributing the most to this relentless success. For them.

None of this had anything to do with how things were going in the real world. It can’t have had, because things had been getting ever-more-rapidly worse for years. It was just ideas, being bounced around in the echo-chamber of the parliamentary Conservative Party – occasionally checking in with the even less-grounded groups like the party membership – and being spat out in the form of legislative agenda.

This is, in every aspect of any significance, memetics. Not just ideology, but idea-ocracy: government by whoever’s ideas excited the greatest response from a tiny, self-selecting portion of the actual electorate. Shut out all the other ideas and just see which one of a small pool manages to out-compete the rest.

And that’s how we’ve got here. Ideas that aren’t checked against reality might well be very stupid ideas or very good ones. The idea you should run a country based on ideas that haven’t been checked against reality is definitely a very stupid one.

The world isn’t a thinktank. The free exploration of ideas is good. The free implementation of them without scrutiny is not.

We’ve Had Enough of ‘Experts’

The ideas behind what we’ve been plunged into – Trussonomics, libertarian free market economics, Chicago-School disaster capitalism – are just that: ideas. They aren’t theories in any scientific sense, because there’s no prior testing or attempt at falsification. We can’t even envision any remotely credible conditions in which they could be tested.

The closest they’ve got to being trialled aren’t exactly shining examples of supporting evidence. For example, while Chile saw a massive macro-economic boom when many of these ideas were implemented, those same changes drove what is now the most extreme socio-economic inequality of any OECD member state.

Being generous, they’re mere hypotheses, with us being the lab rats upon which they’re being tested. Being less so, they’re a toxic broth of self-interest and blind faith. But because the people behind them have talked about them a lot – mostly to each other – we must accept those people are ‘experts’. The Institute for Economic Affairs, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and the self-identified members of the Chicago School of Economics itself. Throughout their ‘consultations’, nobody in these exclusive lobbying groups ever breathed anything but each others’ farts.

Meanwhile, actual experts have been villified and ignored. For years, they’ve been warning of the exact things we’re now seeing. Indeed, right up until she finally threw in the towels – her own and those of her two main appointments – Truss and her clique of ideological sycophants were deriding these experts as nay-saying control-freaks. Evidence has been pushed into a corner, lest it interfere with agendas cooked up in the self-satisfied, steamy heat of glorified private members clubs.

So, it clearly isn’t working. Hasn’t worked. Never was going to work. But what now?

More Experts, Please

We need to get back to reality. Our politics needs to be once again rooted in the interests of the people which it exists to serve. Those people need to have access to reliable, clear, fact-based information to inform those interests. Create a society of Citizen-Experts; not academic theorists, but informed and invested stakeholders.

This is such a basic, formulaic expression of what politics should be that it’s a matter of great dismay that it even needs stating. Writing it feels like an exercise in platitude.

But at the same time, it is true and it is most certainly not the status quo. We don’t need revolutionary ideas that will reinvent society, rushed through via shock & awe. We need considered, progressive, informed decisions that are focused on long-term improvement for everyone, rather than short-term political gain or recklessly testing the wishful thinking of lobbyists.

It didn’t work with Marx, it hasn’t worked with Freidman. Societies and economies do not and cannot adapt that quickly, no matter how much bunce opportunists and speculators might make along the way.

And beyond anything else, we need an election. Any discussion of mandates, regaining trust, repairing reputations or anything else of the sort is sophistry without one. Because, if we’re going to start out as we mean to go on, we should be testing our ideas before going forward.

Currently, the biggest and most pressing idea of all is that the Conservatives have the backing of the nation to continue governing it. If our democracy isn’t broken, the Conservatives themselves should trust that mechanism.

And if it is broken, well… we know whose watch that happened on.