 There was a really interesting question asked of Boris Johnson on Wednesday by Sam Coats from Sky News immediately following Joe Biden being sworn in as the US President of the United States. I thought it was a strange question at first, but the answer it elicited I think reveals some of the difficulties the Tories will have going forward. So let's take a look. Do you think that some senior politicians in Britain seem to? The President Biden is woke. I can't comment on that. But what I know is that he's a fervent believer in the transatlantic alliance and that's a great thing and a believer in a lot of the things that we want to achieve together. OK, so that answer is not why I made this video. There's nothing special about it. It's an identikit 6.5 out of 10 formulaic response of a British Prime Minister to a new President of the United States. We had this thing in common. We both care about it. That's what I'm looking forward to working on. Case closed. But it doesn't end there. Before we go any further, when I first heard this, I saw it on social media, I thought this really betokens how stupid, how uniquely mediocre the British media is. But I think it's more to it than that. On the one hand, you could say, well, look, more than 100,000 people have died of COVID. I think more than 1,600 people died on the Wednesday when that question was asked. On the one hand, you could say, well, given COVID, this is a really banal, stupid, pointless question, has zero relevance to most people's lives in this country. That's what my initial thoughts were. But then Johnson got himself in a bit of a muddle. And I think his inability to give a straight answer and that muddle, like I say, I think, sort of points towards problems the Tories might have in the terrain of the cultural going forward. And insofar as nothing wrong with being woke, what I can tell you is that I think that it's very, very important for everybody to, and certainly I will put myself in the category of people who believe that it's important to stick up for your history, your traditions and your values and things you believe in. He is really reaching there. He is really reaching. But what I want to say is the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, anybody who wants to attack Boris Johnson politically come 2024, January 20th, 2021, Boris Johnson said there's nothing wrong with being woke. There's nothing wrong with being woke. I'll go on to the rest of the answer in a second. What was interesting is that his spokesman afterwards told the Daily Mirror they weren't actually sure what the word woke means. So we've got Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, saying he has no problem with woke and we know why. It's because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, you might not agree with their policies. You might think on healthcare, education, you know, college fees, etc., they're not good. I would think that. But clearly on issues of sort of socially liberal issues, trans rights, they've repealed the legislation that Trump introduced to stop trans people being in the army. Kamala Harris has her pronouns in her Twitter bio, little things like that. These are things which if it was a politician in Britain, Boris Johnson would be going for them. And so in that sense, it was a very clever question because it really gets to the heart of, well, you want this relationship with the President of the United States, which is the Prime Minister of Britain you kind of have to have. But at the same time, your kind of golden ticket electorally means you can't really go to town on that anymore. Can you? Which I think is interesting. So like I said, the aid says they don't really know what it means. Boris Johnson says he has no problem with you being woke. Let's go to Sunday, Sunday, not a year ago, not six months ago, several days ago. This is Robert Jenrock. He's a relatively senior minister. I think he's Secretary of State for Housing and a few others. We will save Britain's statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past. Now, this is the line which is where woke is repeated again. That awful sin. Latterly, there's been an attempt to impose a single, often negative narrative, which not so much recalls our national story as seeks to raise part of it. This has been done, at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a cultural committee of town hall militants and woke worthy's. So we have a problem with woke worthy's, if you're Robert Jenrock. We don't have a problem if you're Boris Johnson and Boris Johnson's advisor, who speaking to the press doesn't even know what the term means. So it looks like the tour is a bit of a mess when it comes to their war on woke and clearly they've had a war on woke for a long time. Even though I don't really like the way the word is deployed in the UK context. It comes from African Americans. Basically, it means the culture war basically means if you believe in equality under the law, right? It basically means I want to treat other people like I'm treated myself. That's basically what being woke means. Essentially, you know, it's not much deep. It's not much deep. There's more to it. It's much deeper than that. So they're in a bit of a pickle. And they're not quite sure where to go next. And I think that was revealed actually in the rest of Boris Johnson's answer. Whereas, you know, you can be woke, but for me personally, I think, you know, and he started to reach for the all the all the certainties of conservative ideology, our traditions, our history, our values. You can't see the free market anymore because the tour is running a half trillion pound deficit this year. He can't say private enterprise because they were paying the wages of more than 10 million people this year on furlough. So the toys are having to go to their safe space. They're happy place of values, tradition, sort of Berke and conservatism, which doesn't really mean very much. You know, it's one thing to say church, family and faith, but Boris Johnson doesn't get a church. He repeatedly cheats on his partners and his wives. So I guess that that leaves the flag. Sorry, flag, family and faith, church, family and faith, whatever. You get the picture. That kind of conservative idea of of celestial power being translated into the earthly realm through the monarch of the divine right of kings. And, you know, that's kind of effectively continued to some extent through these Berkin conservative arguments, 18th, 19th century. Anyway, we don't need to go into that. My point is he was appealing to conservative arguments, which are very, very old and not new. But let's pick those apart. The traditions. Tradition doesn't mean anything. You know, people have had traditions of cannibalism. Doesn't mean it was good or incest or polygamy. There's all sorts of really screwed up traditions. And we don't do them anymore because they were wrong. It was traditional to think the world was flat. That was tradition. It was a tradition to think that, you know, the. People in sub-Saharan Africa weren't actually humans. That was a tradition. Slavery was a tradition. They did it. Tradition in itself is a good thing, is is clearly wrong. Clearly, it's an odds with the idea of human progress. We'll put that to one side. History is an interesting one because that, of course, comes through the Robert Jenrick article as well. It's about statues and public discourse and the kind of story we want to tell ourselves about what Britain stands for and where it comes from and what its values are actually. So history. Here's where I disagree with you, Boris Johnson and Robert Jenrick. You aren't worried about censorship of history. You aren't worried about people rewriting history. You're worried about history being told in the first place. You're worried that right now the one-sided account we get of Britain will change to more accurately reflect the facts. What you want isn't history. There's a word for it. So that's a P. It's called propaganda. That's what you want and you don't want any deviation from that. You want a set of historical facts, which aren't entirely accurate, generally aren't accurate at all, purely because you agree with them and they're advantageous to you and you like the sound of them, not because that's actually how things worked out. Now, I'll ask you this. Maybe you're British, maybe you're not. Were you aware that in the mid-19th century, British and French soldiers went to Beijing and they torched the summer palace and they burned it for three and a half days? Several hundred people burnt to death inside. So many treasures were looted that today, just from that one episode. They can be found across 40 galleries and museums around the world. Did you know that? Did you know that millions of people died in the 1940s in the Bengal famine or that millions died at the end of the 19th century and multiple famines in South Asia and India? Are you familiar with the Irish famine? The fact that today, Ireland has a population smaller than it did 150 years ago. That is not normal. That doesn't actually, that isn't really there in any country with a major population. That level of population crash. And that's because you had effectively the political imposition of famine by the British state in the 19th century. Now, there are multiple episodes of that. You know, we could talk about, are you familiar with the fact that there were concentration camps in Kenya after the Second World War when the British were fighting against the Mao Mao insurgency? Did you know that in Malaya, Britain innovated tactics which were used by the Americans in Vietnam? Did you know that the first use of napalm, recorded use of napalm in war, was by the British in Greece against Greek partisans immediately following the Second World War who'd helped defeat the Nazis? Now, you probably didn't know those facts. They happened. And that's because we don't teach history. We teach, sadly, to too great an extent, propaganda. Or, let's be fair, we've moved away from that in the last 30, 40 years and the Dories want to go back. They want to go back to Wellington and Nelson, and why Britain's always under the side of justice and righteousness and why generally speaking, brown people and foreigners are always wrong. Doesn't matter if it's true, that's the propaganda they want you to believe and to internalize. So, no, you don't care about history, Robert Jenrick. Boris Johnson definitely doesn't care about history, the complete opposite. The people who are bringing down the statue of Edward Coulson and actually asserting the facts about who he was and what he did, they're the people that care about historical facts. And then, finally, values. Values. This is something of a bugbear for me and it's not just with the Tories. You see it with politicians across the political spectrum. Kier Starmer says it, I believe in values. What values? Fred West had a set of values. Dr. Harold Shipman had a set of values. They're not particularly good ones. So, what values? I don't, by the way, I think any politician is as monstrous as those, but this is the question you have to ask. And then, adding to that, just saying you have values, like saying, I'm an honest person. You aren't an honest person just because you repeatedly declare you're an honest person. It's not a declarative act to be honest. It's through your actions. People don't say, oh, that guy's really honest because he keeps on telling people he's honest. So, he must be honest. No, they say, well, I've observed their behavior a long period of time and they embody the characteristic, the quality of honesty. Okay, so show don't tell when it comes to values. And Boris Johnson, when he shows, we know what his values are. He's a pretty nasty guy. You know, I don't need to go into the multiple details of this from being involved in the potential beating of a journalist who'd upset his friend, Darius Guppy, to somebody who was with him at the spectator. While he was married, there is the claim that he heavily promotes this person having an abortion. By the way, this was the reason why he was expelled from the shadow cabinet in the early 2000s. He was a rising star on the Conservative Party. I think he was 40 at the time. And this was a big blow. Story after story, after story like this. So if we want to talk about values, I don't think Boris Johnson is the best person to be, you know, leading that conversation. So, where does this take us? What I think it shows you is with Trump defeated, and I'm not particularly optimistic about the prospects for getting rid of the Tories anytime soon, because of demographics, because property values are going up, because of media ownership. I'm under no illusions whatsoever. Well, where I think they have a major problem now is that they can't really talk about the economy. They've got no message on the economy. They can't talk about low taxes and private enterprise because the high streets collapsed. We've got many, many precarious jobs. And realistically, we're gonna have 25 years of economic overhead of this, because of this, because of COVID. And they haven't had an economic model since 2000. We haven't had an economic model in this country since the 2000 net crisis. Tories come in, 2010 to 2016, we have austerity, budget cuts for no particular reason. We've lost economic decade on productivity, wages, GDP per capita, home ownership, bunch of statistics. We're clearly going backwards, life expectancy, people over 30 living with their parents, and so on. We've clearly kind of, we're not moving forward in a meaningful sense. And of course, absolute poverty is rocketing, child poverty, you know, food banks and so on, as much as the Tories want to deny these things. So there's no economic story they can tell. Brexit's done, and even if you think Brexit won't be as bad as the naysayers say, they're gonna have problems delivering what they've claimed they can achieve, right? The Tories, when it comes to Brexit, particularly on the hardest possible Brexit, you know, the real Brexit, are gonna really struggle in so much as they've really ever promised. Brexit was gonna be the solution to every problem when that's found not to be the case, even if things aren't terrible, which by the way, I think they very well could be. That's a problem for them. So no message on free market economics, certainly nothing like you had with Thatcher, with Major. No message on Brexit, like they've had since 2016. So you've got the cultural, now that was the plan. That was the plan. It worked alongside Brexit very well against Jeremy Corbyn, although I think Brexit was the primary reason they won that majority in 2019. But with Keir Starmer, they really wanted to lead even further into the cultural stuff. Islington Human Rights Lawyer, Romainer, you know, the left, you can't trust them. They care about these strange cultural issues. That's kind of undone when you've got the world's most powerful politician, Joe Biden, in charge of a country of more than 300 million people, 20 million, 20 trillion dollar economy, some of the world's most successful companies, geopolitical military superpower, and they're doing all the things which you say are beyond the pale. They're doing all the things, whether it's being inclusive to trans people, whether it's, look, policy-wise, Biden won't change that much to Trump in a number of areas, but rhetorically, on immigration, on LGBT rights, on foreign policy, they're not gonna be anywhere near as hawkish as their predecessors. And so that leaves Johnson isolated because they've left the European Union, they've burnt a lot of their bridges with the Europeans, and now Trump's gone too. So you have a context where the Tories are kind of rudderless when it comes to the story that they want to tell. And I think summing up, this tells us about the profound limits and problems of 21st century conservatism. It hasn't got an economic agenda like Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s because the growth is no longer there. I don't think that growth is coming back for a bunch of reasons. It's called secular stagnation. And so it's very hard to be a right-wing populist when you're administering economic inertia and generally speaking, budget cuts, and generally speaking, all the things which you've championed for decades, rising home ownership, even if there's rising inequality, a section of society doing pretty well, that will no longer be happening. And so they kind of appealed to the free market stuff. Brexit was a bit of a sticking plaster and it was a good one, it worked, it's got an 80 majority. The cultural things, what they've got now, but is it enough? Is it a project that allows you to cement changes as seismic as we saw in the 80s? Which is what they wanna do. The 1980s reforged British society through right to buy, smashing the trade unions, privatizing loads of businesses and so on. Boris Johnson's big pitch is to recalibrate the British state and politics in a similar way. I don't think that's possible when your primary political instrument weapon against those opposing you is a cultural war which no longer makes sense. When you've got rising unemployment, when you've got high streets that look like, frankly, they've been bombed, some of these places, actually many of these places were bombed and they was never built back up after 1945. It's very, very, very hard to keep on talking about trans people and pronouns and statues. It's incredibly hard. COVID clearly is the major variable there, but now Trump has gone. It's gonna be very difficult for Johnson to normalize that because he's the only leading politician now in Europe, North America who's talking like this. He's gonna be isolated and arguably the terrain of the cultural war will look increasingly irrelevant. That's my take from a very short one-minute clip, but I think there's something there. There's a glimmer, there's a chink in the armor that this polarizing of the electorate around often stupid, fatuous things may not work for much longer.