The emergence of the polymorphic One-Party State

Why would Costa Coffee, probably one of the UK’s blandest brands, suddenly decide to champion self-harm in the name of the new-fangled gender-bending cult? Surely, they should steer clear of ideological controversies and stick to their primary business of serving wholesome non-alcoholic beverages and snacks. Yet their marketing team decided to feature a topless transman with visible mastectomy scars. I have nothing against us celebrating the natural diversity of human bodies, but the operant adjective here is natural. It’s one thing to raise awareness of medical conditions that may warrant the removal of body parts, but it’s quite another to celebrate and normalise body mutilation among vulnerable young people. I very much doubt Sergio Costa had this in mind when he opened a coffee roastery in London 52 years ago and later set up a chain of family-oriented Italian-themed coffee bars. Today only the brand remains. In 1995 the Whitbread group took over the business and oversaw a large expansion with thousands of outlets, franchises and vending machines popping up around the UK and abroad. In 2019 the Coca-Cola Company acquired Costa in a $4.9 billion deal. Only big organisations can afford to go woke. Smaller for-profit businesses would go broke if they alienated 99% of their clientele.  That’s because large corporations care more about the extra funds they get from major investment banks to promote Environmental, Social and Governance or ESG for short, which is about more than filling the countryside with delightful windmills and solar panels to provide clean renewable energy. What, you may wonder, has gender-bending got to do with environmental sustainability?

In the age of abundance and consumer-driven growth, manufacturers had to satisfy the needs and desires of their broad customer base, which included millions of ordinary workers with families. In our pursuit of happiness, we had to strike a balance between the competing demands of economic expediency, social wellbeing, and a healthy environment. In the years of plenty, the political debate in the prosperous world centred on the relative merits of laissez-faire free-markets and state intervention to ensure minimum safety standards, protect disadvantaged groups and combat corruption. Alas governments and large corporations have for all intents and purposes merged. They now all sing from the same hymn sheet, but with a cruel twist. The big banks with their NGOs and think tanks pose on the far left. It is hard to distinguish the policies of Europe’s Green parties from the wishes of George Soros, Larry Fink, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. They agree on climate change, UBI, gender theory and biosecurity and, of course, they all worship St Greta Thunberg.

The spectacle of pluralist democracy is kept on life support with WEF-aligned parties appealing to the emotional sensitivities of different sections of the electorate. Just as Labour had thirteen years to upskill young adults in deprived welfare-dependent communities, the Tories have had 13 years to stabilise migratory flows to more sustainable levels. The opposite happened despite all the rhetoric. Indeed, the only rallying cry Labour have left is the mirage of our NHS, as if the enforcers of covid-era midazolam protocols and purveyors of puberty blockers have our best interests at heart. Likewise, the Tories still lend lip service to the concept of self-determination as expressed in the 2016 referendum on EU membership, but then signed the UN’s Global Compact for Migration and are poised to approve the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty with principled opposition restricted to Reclaim Party MP, Andrew Bridgen, with murmurings of dissent of Tory Party backbenchers like Esther McVey, Sir Christopher Chope, Sir Charles Walker or Desmond Swayne.

An eye-opener for the state of British politics was the Tony Blair Institute’s recent Future of Britain event, hosted with barely a hint of irony, by two journalists from the nominally impartial BBC, Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis. It featured alongside international leaders such as Emanuel Macron via video-link, Sir Keir Starmer and Tory Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace. As they mapped out our transition to a low-carbon AI-enhanced world, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a creepy parody of a WEF event discussing how to micromanage the useless eaters outflanked by smart robots at the bottom of the labour market. You may wonder why we should accept advice from the guy who misled us over the real reasons for the 2003 US/UK-led invasion of Iraq and why anyone would trust a conference because it has the blessing of two BBC stalwarts. That’s because the target audience is not the general British public at all, but younger members of the globalised managerial classes working for NGOs and thinktanks who will oversee the kind of change the Global UniParty wants to see.