This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It is too painful to watch. Conservatives are still agonising about the meaning of the General Election of July 2024, but the statistical writing on the wall is clear enough to everyone else. Their party’s share of the votes cast dropped from 43.6 in 2019 to 23.7 per cent. Even in such a transformative crisis, Labour’s share increased only marginally, from 32.1 to 33.7 per cent; in his own constituency Sir Keir Starmer secured half the number of votes he won in 2019. Despite this unique opportunity to inherit the earth, the Lib Dems picked up not nearly enough seats to become the official Opposition, let alone form the government; generally, their voters reasonably assumed that the party had changed its name to “None of the Above”.

The national turnout was historically low, at 59.9 per cent. This means that only about 14 per cent of the UK’s population voted for a Labour government, a precariously small number. The others offered a resounding Declaration of Indifference, the academic term for which is “alienation”. That rare bird, Butskellism, last sighted in 1963, was outclassed in emptiness by Rishi Starmer and Sir Keir Sunak. Here was no mass conversion from conservatism to socialism or liberalism. No such ideological options were available to the electorate.

Each party has its loyal activists, but they almost always look inward to that party’s personalities, policies and faction fights. Even so penetrating a Labour analyst as Jon Cruddas, in A Century of Labour, does not remark that the problems he so well diagnoses are shared across Europe and the United States.

In reality, the election was a disaster for all three major parties. Why? It is worth beginning with the obvious: the political ideologies of liberalism, socialism and conservatism had successively deflated.

The names survive; the great systems of belief and action have faded away. In their day they were great enterprises. They were intellectually powerful and coherent. They were idealistic. They captured the loyalty and enlisted the active participation of large numbers of people who found meaning and purpose in what they did. That world has largely gone.

Each party could once point to powerful theorists and heroic politicians as championing one or other ideology. Liberals could sacrifice at the shrines of Richard Cobden, John Bright and John Stuart Mill. They admired even so erratic a politician as William Ewart Gladstone (his name an anagram of “Mad Agitator, Means Well”).

Socialists could appeal to an international heavyweight, Karl Marx, but had Anglophone theorists and historians from Robert Owen and Henry Hyndman to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John and Barbara Hammond, R.H. Tawney, G.D.H. Cole, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Their movement achieved its greatest success in the apotheosis of a saintly figure beyond criticism, Clement Attlee.

Conservatives had to invent a rival team. They retrospectively laboured to assimilate Whig reformer Edmund Burke (who was not a theorist) with Austrian free marketeer Friedrich von Hayek (who was not a politician). Amongst politicians, they similarly discerned a magic continuity between another Whig reformer, William Pitt the younger; the free trade convert Sir Robert Peel; the widely distrusted Benjamin Disraeli and that inspired careerist whom many Conservatives saw as wrong on every major issue except the most important, Winston Churchill.

One by one, these exercises in wishful thinking lost traction. Liberal England died its “strange death” after 1918 (Britain’s parallel with France’s étrange defaite of 1940). 19th century liberalism stood for two things above all: free trade and democracy. By the referendum of 2016, the Lib Dems instinctively sided with the largest protectionist bloc in Europe (since Napoleon’s) and condemned the UK’s largest ever democratic decision, to leave it.

The failure of Marx’s historical scenario (the inexorable impoverishment of the workers leading to an inevitable communist revolution) was gracefully announced in 1956 by Labour MP Anthony Crosland; in 1995 Tony Blair amended Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution to retain a token reference to socialism but to deprive it of specific policy implications. It became meaningless.

In 2019 Prime Minister Theresa May summarily and without due process ejected from his honorary position Sir Roger Scruton, the most important conservative writer since Burke, after a magazine damned him for holding opinions he had never held. It seemed she knew nothing of either thinker. May will probably be remembered in retrospect as a straw in the wind rather than as a changer of the weather, but that is the point.

The result of these three deflations is the current dearth of ideas, which impoverishes all major parties equally. It is, indeed, a bonfire of the verities.

This has consequences for conduct in public life. The three great ideologies, in their day, at least provided a degree of discipline on the words and meanings of politicians. Today more and more voters perceive more and more MPs as saying one thing and doing the opposite.

This is not exactly news: politics always had a tactical component. A gradual drift away from a shared (or at least an affirmed) body of ideas reached a turning point, however, when opportunist would-be emperors were too often denounced for lacking clothes. The 2024 General Election was both a marker and a catalyst of changing opinion.

Since the three great ideologies had been expressed in English, politicians of all parties were unprepared for the new language that has upstaged so many of them since the mid-1990s. Let us call it “Wokeish”. How will these three groups of politicians cope with this new language in future years? It is a problem for all of them equally.

Some may revert to old certainties, as a few Liberals in the 1920s might announce that what the electorate really wanted was a return to the policies of Mr Gladstone. But this comforting response is unlikely to be effective. Two communicators of genius, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle, both campaigners for reforming causes, present a similar analysis: those causes had just won substantial victories when they were captured and taken in wholly different directions. But how to win them back?

How might any party react to this new situation? It may be that each will see the need to recast the terms in which the debate is conducted. If so, they might begin with a reconsideration of the unhelpful binary “left” and “right”.

Journalists of the Guardian see themselves surrounded by the “far Right”; those of the Telegraph, by the “far Left”. Lib Dems are convinced the derision of others for their shortage of policies merely proves they occupy a sensible “middle ground”.

But “left” and “right” were coined to describe voluntarily chosen seating patterns in the French National Constituent Assembly of 1789; later, they were adopted, and adapted, in attempts to fit far different circumstances. Today the terms only shut down debate, prevent policies being discussed on their merits and promote bitter political division.

As Napoleon said of his (unsuccessful) generals, “They paint a picture and they think it reality.” An effective political language would phase out reliance on metaphors and instead address things as they are. A debate on tax and public spending might dispense with assumptions about left and right and consider instead, for example, the applicability of the Laffer curve, which reveals when increasing marginal tax rates produce decreasing returns.

Theorists might turn to “democracy”. It has long been an easy response to demands for the extension of this ideal that the Athenian marketplace could not be recreated in mass societies. But the internet has undermined that excuse. Voting might now be as easy as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Since the mid-1990s, access to news and information has been transformed and voters empowered. Anyone, anywhere can now watch House of Commons debates in real time. Direct democracy has become as attainable a reality as representative democracy.

But how could the two be reconciled? Universal suffrage was at first resisted as leading directly to revolution; gradually, it was integrated into the political practice of a stable polity. The UK and its component parts have voted in 13 referendums since 1973, but each was a one-off with little thought given to integrating them as moderate and not infrequent exercises into the constitution. But this is eminently possible: Switzerland has held two referendums in 2024 to date; two more are due this year.

Or take that Wokeish preoccupation of race. Historically, the term signified descent (from parents famous in English as Adam and Eve). The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, equally traced humanity to this common origin. The resulting theory, monogenesis, was challenged by religious sceptics who began to assert polygenesis, humanity’s alleged division into indelibly different tribes or races. This, a mistake of early 19th century natural science, might now be reconsidered; if so, debate might helpfully return to recognising only one race, the human race.

Wokeish is equally preoccupied by gender. Again, political activists might be encouraged to learn from modern genetic sequencing that each human has a body built around pairs of XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. Our freedom of action is narrowly confined. It does not include the ability retrospectively to choose our date of birth, our natural parents, or our genetic inheritance.

Equality is another thing Wokeish professes to value. But in what respects? We might recall a pioneering American, Wilson Bentley (1865–1931). A farmer in Vermont, he was an educated man with scientific interests. As part of a research project to discover the structure of snowflakes, he developed a technique for photographing them and discovered their structure was that of a crystal. Bentley observed that each crystal was different, so he took more photographs, and more. Eventually he had a collection of some 5,000 images; all different.

If even snowflakes are all different, are human beings less so? In that case, how can they be equal except in the sense that each has a life to live and a soul to save? These might be thought to be not unworthy political goals. But it would take a new political language to make them achievable.

Perhaps the key concept of Wokeish is victimhood. It is now all around us, supplanting poverty and sickness as the preoccupation of reformers. But this usage begins to discredit itself when it is confined to narrowly defined groups, whether deserving or undeserving, and when its users seem blind to the real sufferings of large sections of humanity.

Victimhood calls for explanation, and this can be historical explanation. In the language of universal human rights, which has proliferated since the early 1990s, anyone whose attributed rights are denied is deemed a victim. Claims to finite resources can be, and hence widely are, redefined as altruistic appeals to the altruism of the elites.

An alternative approach would be to seek to bring about a just society by an equal distribution of rights (in the old sense of specific, defined entitlements) to real people rather than to a universal humanity. The charge that reformers love humanity in the abstract, but hate individual human beings, is as old as the age of the French Revolution. That is a satire that might be revived, and that might deliver good things in the public realm rather than satisfying the elite’s desire to signal their virtue.

Virtue has come to mean something alarmingly different in a secular context. Who will now teach it? Several social constituencies agree that “something must be done” about the Church of England. But too late: that church has effectively abolished itself. Its money remains; its buildings are empty; its theology decays. Virtue must now mean practice.

These responses are open to all three parties, who are equally threatened by a general recasting of political language which they failed to see coming. Indeed, there was such a recasting in the early 19th century, when the key concepts “liberalism”, “socialism” and “conservatism” were coined.

The emergence of Wokeish constitutes another sea change. Its promoters urge that there is no “culture war” which they say is got up by the “far Right”. Its opponents seek to define it, but need to confront it with something that engages with “it” in order to resist it. Without a new English, Wokeish will win.

Language enables action. If the three major parties are to defend themselves and survive, might they denounce each other less and seek common ground more? Or can they only fight the old battles, using the old terms? Our political parties may, after all, have common concerns about war, famine and disease. Perhaps such things will prove to be just around the corner, as they too often are.

It is natural, and even today not easily avoidable, to regard political problems as created by the incompetence or ill-will of one’s political opponents (or worse still, by traitors in one’s own party). In reality, the larger the problem, the more it is likely to be widely shared.

Will current political conflicts find their resolution, and eventually their reconfiguration, in ways that involve all parties in the UK rather than just one of them? If so, might such an outcome be promoted rather than resisted?