It is a most disconcerting experience when you encounter somebody who seems fairly normal but then casually remarks that they are from Venus, or that Princess Anne has been following them about in an ice cream van.
When this happens at scale, and everybody seems to shrug and accept it, you eventually stop noticing. The current Labour conference, for example, is a concentration of lunacy.
Progressivism is a kind of collective hallucination
Away from the conference hall itself, the pottiness is always a little more pronounced. This time round, we’ve had backbench barminess like Dame Emily Thornberry’s enthusiasm for the seizure of private property, or Stella Creasy MP demanding the right to silence people who disagree with her. Junior minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter has made the bizarre suggestion that pubs and dogs are, in fact, a ‘far-right fantasy’.
But the main stage has seen its own share of dangerous delusion. I had naively thought that new Chancellor John Healey seemed quite reasonable, at least for a Labour politician. After Rachel Reeves, even Nosferatu seemed a brighter prospect. But then he gave his big speech, in which he waxed lyrical on the genius of Gordon Brown, and waffled at length about the miners’ strike and the exciting and ‘vibrant’ Labour conference of 1986, when the party was actually at its very lowest ebb.
Education Secretary Lucy Powell dialled up the twee, telling attendees that, ‘in many ways, I lead the Department of Hope’ and promising that she would ‘put children’s hopes at the very heart of everything we do’. Do children actually hope for much more than chips for tea and no homework tonight? Are they given to planning out their distant futures? Maybe little Lucy dreamed of going on TV to scoff at grooming gang victims, as indeed she later did?
Not to be outdone, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood pedalled back on her already pretty mild attempts to limit legal immigration, and has unveiled new ‘safe routes’ for settlers from Afghanistan and Gaza. Why? Because, apparently, ‘Fairness is what unites us in this country. And a fair society is what unlocks the very best of us. Because when people think this country is fair they are more open and generous to others.’ Not so very long ago, we were encouraged to think that Mahmood was a tough cookie, a no-nonsense hard-liner. But this syrupy dollop of abstract, specious guff could have been written by an AI stuffed full of Hallmark greetings cards, and probably was.
What about the very top? At the time of writing, Andy Burnham is yet to deliver his first conference speech as Prime Minister. But we already have plenty of evidence that his delusions are the deepest-seated of all. He genuinely seems to believe – or at least to have convinced himself – that you can tax and spend your way to growth, i.e. that you can get blood out of a stone. Despite what he told Kemi Badenoch when she pointed this out during their first PMQs exchange, theirs is not ‘an ideological debate’. His position is factually wrong. We don’t notice this, because he seems so normal, and because there are enough people who believe in economic magic beans that we have to ‘respect’ it as a position. But drawing up plans to spend money you don’t have is not rational.
Progressivism is a kind of collective hallucination. A clue to understanding it comes with the news that Labour is creating a ‘National Centre for Information Defence’. This is a new department for countering ‘narratives’ about Britain spread by hostile foreign governments. (Wes Streeting has said it will not be used to police ordinary domestic political dissent, to which the only sane reply is a bitter cackle.) Labour’s use of the word ‘narratives’ here is such a giveaway. Narrative – not reality – is what Labour believe in. They must control information, because they are The Good People. This is how the world works for them – if they say that everything is fine, then everything will be fine. If they say the words ‘hope’ and ‘growth’ enough, then there will be hope and growth. Anybody who disagrees must be the agent of a dastardly foreign power.
We don’t need Russian bots to demoralise and depress us. The governments of this century have managed that perfectly adequately all by themselves. Ed Miliband and Bridget Phillipson are more crushing to morale than any nefarious robot could ever hope to be.
For a government that never stops going on about hope, Labour are very depressing. Hope in every heart? More like a pain in every arse. Their illusions are fascinating, yes, but they are illusions that we literally can no longer afford.
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