This is the huge buried election news lede, if you ask me:
The Tories won the smallest number of seats since the Tory Party came into being in 1832, a truly staggering failure to drum up enthusiasm for any more Conservative rule. They hold just 121 seats, having lost 252 since the last general election, compared with Labour’s whopping 412. Liz Truss became the first former prime minister in the history of the nation to lose her seat.
Some believe that the last Tory PM, who just half-heartedly walked his party out of power, fits an odd leadership pattern.
The prime ministership itself has been a revolving door, queasily spinning the incompetent as well as the downright villainous into the top job. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. Each of their inadequacies was slightly different: Johnson was an egotistical liar, Truss a blundering clown, Sunak an out-of-touch billionaire, and so on. But together, they all oversaw a grinding degradation of every element of life in the U.K.
They spelled deregulation wrong.
Although at first glance that sounds truly awful, we also have to remember that in some circles outside of Wall Street such characteristics have become strangely normative (e.g. emerging “techbro” silicon valley, overrun by soulless bean-counting “hedge” thinkers).
We don’t have best-seller lists and book awards. What we have is this—the number at the end of the day.
The more villainous, the more clownish… the more likely?
People who cry “bad for business” in criticizing Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX for example, maybe don’t understand the shift in their business to the numbers behind classic military-industrial-congressional corruption.
Twitter was taken over by a wealthy white nationalist who fled the 1988 fall of Apartheid, rebranded the company with a literal Nazi swastika, who now automates information warfare with mass political disinformation… and nobody yet seems to think any of it appears extreme enough to warrant national security level precautions.
Lighting money on fire doesn’t make sense until you consider Twitter is perhaps being paid and authorized by Russia to light those fires (e.g. how Stanford was federally funded for fire-bombing Dresden, kick-starting Silicon Valley).
That’s a symptom of an even broader and less obvious problem in governance regarding the technology firms today amassing power.
We may as well be describing why Wiz landed in court, or Snowflake blames customers for the systemic lack of Snowflake security, or why Google describes massive AI integrity breaches as an exciting new feature instead of a failure of leadership.
The U.K. election, in that sense, hints at a healthy shift towards honesty, and away from public officials pandering to overly political right-wing self-interest technology firms.
Think hard about how Palantir suspiciously “won” a deal to privatize the U.K. NHS data for no good reasons (e.g. some speculate an ex-PM soon could show up on the payroll as thanks).
And then think about American elections ever taking a similar hard shift away from the right towards the center (e.g. Teapot Dome Scandal is allegedly the stuff of how Palantir “won” U.S. Army contracts).. back to enforcing an honest government logically serving the people it supposedly represents.
