Do Politicians Really Believe In Anything?

I’ve been fighting with my computer for the past few weeks/months, trying to prevent it from installing Windows 10 updates.

I’ve got nothing against updates. The problem is that these days they never manage to install.

Anyway last night the computer defeated me and started installing an update. After about 4 hours it had only managed 22% of the update, and got no further. This is what usually happens. So I did what I usually do: I turned off the computer.

And then this morning I turned it on and waited while it took ages to “undo changes made to your computer”. After a while it managed to do that. So now I’ve gone hunting for advice for how to stop Windows 10 updates. I’ve done this before, and taken the necessary steps, but the computer just ignored it and carried on trying to install updates. With luck this time it’ll pay attention and stop doing this. But I’m not optimistic.

…

As far as I can see, the Remainers have won, and Boris Johnson now has a minority government after kicking 21 MPs out of the Conservative party, and could be evicted as Prime Minister at any time, and a new General Election called. But the Remainers don’t want to do this, because most of them will likely lose their seats in Parliament in a new election. So they’ll probably now hang on as long as they possibly can, doing their level best to make sure that no Brexit can ever happen.

But James Delingpole thinks that the eviction of 21 Remainer MPs from the Conservative Party is wonderful.

We Thatcherite revolutionaries are finally getting our party back. Taken a long time. Feels brilliant. No sympathy whatsoever for the squishes who’ve been holding it hostage and are now irrelevances.

He doesn’t seem to be much bothered that we won’t get Brexit. He’s just glad that Boris has started taking the Conservative Party back.

While a few brave souls – from the likes of Norman Tebbit in the Thatcher era to heroes like Steve Baker in the present – have stuck up bravely for conservative principles, often at the expense of career advancement, most have just gone with the flow.

That flow has been an almost continuously leftwards direction. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar or an idiot.

He’s got a point. David Cameron re-branded the Conservatives more or less as a new Green party. And Theresa May described the Conservatives as the “nasty party”. Neither of them were really conservatives. They were both political trendies going whichever way the political wind was blowing.

But I wonder if Boris is himself going the way the political wind is blowing. And these days it’s blowing strongly in a Nationalist Populist direction, all over the world. People want their countries back from globalist bureaucracies like the EU and UN.  So maybe Boris is just re-branding the Conservative party as a Brexit party in the exact same way as Cameron re-branded it as a Green party, purely as a way to win votes, and not because he really believes in Brexit. Do any politicians really believe in anything?

And which party was the real “nasty party”? Not the Conservatives. Only about 35% of Conservative MPs voted in 2006 for the UK smoking ban. But 90% of Labour MPs voted for it. And 95% of Lib Dem MPs voted for it too. So I think that makes Labour and the Lib Dems the real nasty parties, with the Lib Dems slightly nastier than Labour. And I’d been voting for the Lib Dem bastards for the previous 25 years, so help me. I thought they were classical liberals. But they weren’t. They were just another political party pretending to be something that they weren’t. There’s nothing liberal about smoking bans: they’re utterly illiberal.