Policy Stacking

This story focuses on the UK, but is relevant anywhere. Politics in the UK has come to grinding halt, the Conservative Party advertises the idea of change whilst the Labour Party has members of the bourgeoisie high up in the chain of command. The politics has settled into neoliberalism with rest of the west — especially the anglo-sphere, which has seen a recent bump in shared identity with realisation of Brexit and AUKUS, for example. This has resulted in waining sense of internationalism previously implicated by the EU and thus an increased sense of nationalism and imperialism, implicated by the USA. Even though the ramifications of this is intensely political, I argue that they were not introduced politically.

Brexit’s marketing, for example, focused mostly on the amount of money the government could save by leaving the EU, not a philosophy such as nationalism. Since politics has become complacent in neoliberalism, day-to-day political discourse has been refashioned into culture-wars and microscopic changes in policy. We’ve taken our eyes way from the fundamental systems that govern us and look instead at how we may add onto it, so much so that the idea of ideology is essentially dead to the voting population. Following this development, we can see how the major political parties have become more similar over time.

Internally, in the House of Commons and so on, there is a greater emphasis on pragmatism rather than an adherence to a certain philosophy. This allows for the state to regulate everything and everyone justifiably, enforcing a specific morality, lifestyle or other item previously pertaining to the individual only. To give an example, there is little reason to not get vaccinated, and doing so would greatly benefit people around you. Members of the government will probably agree, so they may create a vaccine mandate. The problem is, having the state enforce any form of medication is politically terrible and hardly liberal. Allowing it to happen in a dire situation may create a precedent for it to occur again (less justifiably) and again (for an even worse reason), until it becomes a viable agent for corruption. Currently, the government only really adds more to itself, more bills, more laws and more regulations. A phenomena I dub “policy stacking”. An interpretation of identity politics today can be that the left and the right that care only for identity politics aren’t really changing the political system, but rather which way the tower of policy sways.

With the a-politicisation of politics, the UK has witnessed the authoritarianisation of politics. I fear that this trend may continue towards a form of ecofascism in the nearish future, which is not an unreasonable fear. Ideologies exist for a reason, we should not try to abandon them. The debate remains unfinished.