A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the terms ‘Polanski’ and ‘young women’ into Google, and promptly fell down a different rabbit hole.
Defining my search terms a little more clearly, it turned out that my informant was correct. So badly deranged are the youngest cohort of female voters in this country that a third of them really do believe that they have found their saviour in a man who until recently promised that he had a technique to inflate women’s breasts through hypnotism but who also thinks that J.K. Rowling is a crank.
It isn’t impossible to see a scenario in which the right is split and the Polanski-ites push through the middle
Interestingly enough, a similar phenomenon is occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. In November’s mayoral election in New York, four out of five young women voted for the socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani. In both of these cases, the skewing of this age and sex group towards the socialist left is especially extreme.
There are plenty of explanations one might give for this trend – most of which always land male columnists in the soup. But one thing that ought to be noted about both Polanski and Mamdani is they do use a consistent set of foundational principles.
Either of them could have uttered the words that Mamdani used in his inaugural address as mayor of New York last week: ‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Of course millions of Russians, among others, could have told Mamdani a thing or two about how warm collectivism can be – if only they had survived its embrace. Polanski uses the same language: ‘equality’, ‘kindness’ and so on.
In a recent interview, he also confirmed that his party’s policy remains that if the Greens ever do gain power, they plan to give up Britain’s nuclear deterrent. When pressed on this – and whether it didn’t just mean that Britain would be naked before a nuclear-armed Vladimir Putin, Polanski gave a positively Mamdani-esque reply. He said that while giving up Britain’s nuclear weapons he would ask Putin to do the same. Persuasion would be the name of the game – showing, I suppose, that the leopard has not changed his spots all that much. If Polanski does retain such confidence in his persuasive powers, I would dearly love him to sit down opposite Putin and try to persuade him to grow a pair of double-D bazookas before convincing him to give up his nukes.
In any case, people who are opposed to such ideologues, and who wish them never to be anywhere near the levers of power, must come up with deeper ways to counter them. In the New York mayoral race it seemed a little too easy to take Mamdani down. A smorgasbord of extremist past statements and a CV at least as empty as Polanski’s looked sure to do for him. But a race which split the vote across multiple divides saw him coming out on top anyway, carried by a tidal wave of far-left pabulum. He now runs the biggest city in America. And it is possible to see a future scenario in this country in which the right-wing vote is split and the Polanski-ites push through the middle.
If that does happen, it will not be because of the sheer brilliance of Polanski’s personality, any more than that was the case in New York with Mamdani’s. It will be because the right has missed the opportunity to state some fundamental principles of its own. What might those be? I can suggest three that form a good foundational framework.
The first would be ‘order’. The radical left is very good at talking about ‘freedom’, as is the right. But ‘freedom’ is too vague a concept on its own, and in any case, there is no version of ‘freedom’ that does not dissolve into anarchy unless there is some complementary concept of order. The radical left doesn’t like to be pushed on this. For instance, they simply like to state how much freer we would be without police on our streets, or how much safer our societies would be if our prisons weren’t full. These are nakedly idiotic claims, which wouldn’t survive one night’s experimentation. But the right needs to be better at arguing this case.
The second principle is ‘fairness’. The left talks endlessly about equality and equity. The right often rightly points out that these are not the same thing and that equity (equality of outcome of everyone in society) is not just undesirable but impossible. Less common to hear is an assault on the idea of ‘equality’ as a guardrail-less principle.
We do not favour equality in sports or athletics. We know some people have innate advantages and that there are a variety of ways to make up for disadvantages. But ‘equality’ is a tough one for many on the right to run against, because there is a grain of truth in the desire. Which is why ‘fairness’ is such a better counterweight. A child can understand the idea of fairness. And an adult can understand that if one person has worked for something and another has not, the two people should not be treated equally. It is much better, and more precise, to talk about ‘fairness’ than ‘equality’.
Finally, I would add ‘accountability’. This is one of the principles which the left and many Conservatives have utterly abandoned. In recent years it has been almost impossible to hold anyone in Britain accountable for anything. Keir Starmer and co make mistake after mistake and break their promises all the time, but are never held accountable. It seems that they no longer expect to be, either.
So there is some place to start. Order, fairness and accountability. Get those in the right order and you will get much else in the right order too. Get it wrong and the hypnotists will have their day.
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