In 1997 one of Britain’s greatest philosophers, Roger Scruton, described Tony Blair’s pending election victory in the United Kingdom (UK) in an essay consisting of the following sentences. “Victim status will become universally coveted. New classes of victims will be discovered by the week”. “Universities will become obsessed with ‘politically correct…pseudo-subjects’ such as ‘race and gender studies’”. “Honours will be awarded to pop stars, cultural postmodernists and the milkers of the ‘voluntary sector’”. “Vice-chancellors will be dull progressives with backgrounds in engineering or soil sciences, while the important advisory bodies will be composed of political activists, with a track record in anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-nuclear, anti-homophobic and other forms of anti-bourgeois agitation”. 

There were more, and every single one of them materialized. “This will be the most important effect of Mr Blair in power,” he wrote, “the triumph of political correctness”. 

Scruton was ended in 2019 by a combination of dishonesty from the so-called centrist left and mediocrity from the so-called centrist right – things these respective groups excelled at.

A journalist for the leftie The New Statesman, George Eaton, framed him, took his words out of context, presented it to a hopeless Conservative government who then fired him from an unpaid role.

The incident became social media roadkill, but the rage that filled Scruton’s supporters was underestimated. Douglas Murray, arguably Scruton’s most prominent student, located the tapes of the conversation, and Eaton’s mealy-mouthed excuses – one of which included a gem that: “he was proud to get a racist sacked” – were defenestrated.

After a flurry of apologies, Eaton was demoted, and Scruton would die eight months later.

Pursuit of power

New Labour’s pursuit of power, and what it planned to do with it, was inviting. Everyone aspired to equality before the law, equal opportunities, the protection of rights, and characteristics.

So, it was the case with Blair that temptation to equity’s fundamental architectures had the potential, most felt, to battle the entrenched class divide that had defined politics for the post war generations. The only problem was that Blair had no intention of doing so but would open the door to the most illogical forces being platformed in the mainstream.

One example occurred in 2003, when a government purportedly obsessed by political correctness did the most politically incorrect thing ever – by poodling-up to an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.

Those who didn’t believe Scruton in 1997 were suddenly faced with a set of highly complex decisions to which there were only two real responses: to pursue the farce led by political overlords, or locate individuals, groups, and movements that were more serious about Blair’s initial pledges, chiefly the need to build a society around the obscure principles of: “social justice”.

This takes us to 2025, where a man called Zak Polanski emerges as the winning candidate to lead the British Green Party.

Eco-fascist

Polanski was a former Liberal Democrat, and before that, a hypnotherapist who once claimed that manifestation could result in women augmenting the size of their own breasts without visiting a plastic surgeon.

Polanski’s politics and the way he presents them have seen him described as: “the UK’s first eco-fascist in parliament”. An openly gay Jewish man, he is pro-Gaza and: “anti-racist” – and bemoans the: “obsession” with boat migrants arriving via the English Channel. This rage, he feels, needs to be directed toward the financial elite.

“There is no problem with money,” he frequently claims, “there is a problem with allocation.” But Polanski’s views on the country’s finances are somewhat narrow: there is no mention of the cost of long-term borrowing, or public spending, or indeed fears of a recession and the chaos of employment statistics. His most emphasized point is of course the environment: should he sniff the type of power many feel is in his grasp, the consequences would be astonishing.

He is serious and must be received accordingly.

Consensus

Polanski is an expression of the failure of the Blairite consensus which captures the administration of the United Kingdom from 1997 and crosses party lines. Other: “centre-left” administrations across the world are suffering the same thing: people who said they were left and would do left things, lied, so created a vacuum for people who really wanted to see left things happen – and believed they could do better.

The Blair continuum in its various forms across the languages and accents of the world is in denial. This emerged from last week’s Global Progress Action Summit held in London, where the leaders of Australia, Spain, Iceland, Norway, and Canada along with a raft of activists held discussions a week after Donald Trump’s UK State Visit – ostensibly to share ideas (important: you can’t share ideas that your contemporaries already possess).

These leaders and their media supporters claim that the biggest threats to their administrations and populations come from this partially mythical grouping known as the: “far-right” movements, it is said, that are inspired by Donald Trump, or Nayib Bukele, or Javier Milei, or closer to home, Nigel Farage. Only one of these four have the kind of executive mandate that has allowed him to turn his country from dangerous to safe.

Scholarship and tradition

Scruton stopped short of predicting responses to his own predictions; perhaps scenario mapping, for a man of his scholarship and grasp of tradition, would be too tragic a pursuit.

Or he just knew: New Labour, and the way it thought, and the way it sought to teach others to: “think”, would be a busted flush and the country that ran through his veins was over in 1997: for him, for every single British working family.

Today, Scruton’s remarks appear not just as unnervingly prescient, but as the consequences of meaninglessness. The left as they appear are not threatened by the: “far right” but by the: “far left” – who have incorporated a wide range of features that they frequently update.

This emerging force hates Blair, and it hates his heirs. Keir Starmer is now the most unpopular Prime Minister in British political history. Much of that same hate can be found across the world.