Fertile Grounds for Revolt

The Dutch Manure Mountain in all its steaming glory is the perfect metaphor for the centrally planned lunacy of EU climate policy. Soviet-style gluts have long been a feature of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy but, at least in the old days, the misdirected financial incentives produced wine lakes and butter mountains which exuded the allure of a cornucopia. 

You might think that the sensible thing to do with manure would be to use it to enrich the soil in the time-honoured tradition of Dutch farmers that made the country one of the world’s leading agricultural producers and exporters. The diktat of Europe’s elite however is that the manure has to be destroyed because of its high concentration of nitrogen (which contributes to greenhouse gases and acid rain) and its potential to leach into waterways. The EU is already issuing stiff fines and sanctions to those who fail to comply.

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The centre-right coalition led by Mark Rutte wanted to “solve” the nitrogen problem by getting rid of even more of the nation’s farms. Dutch farmers were not impressed. So while the mountain of manure hasn’t been able to fertilise Dutch farms it has driven the rapid growth of a farmers’ revolt (above). 

The collapse of Rutte’s government last year was brought about by the large number of asylum seekers accepted into the Netherlands. Both issues contributed to Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV) winning by far the largest number of seats (thirty-seven seats out of 150) in the Dutch parliament. 

The success of Wilders, dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe”, sent shockwaves through the EU. Its progressive elite is petrified at the prospect of “dangerous” populists making further electoral inroads in the European Union parliamentary elections in June. 

It was this moral panic that inspired Quadrant  and the Danube Institute, a leading centre-right think-tank based in Budapest, to hold a public debate probing the nature of The Populist Moment at a sold-out event in Sydney in April. If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch it on our website or at the website of our digital partner, ADH.TV. 

As David Martin Jones said at the debate and in his article in this month’s issue, the term populism, coined by Richard Hofstadter, was always pejorative and deliberately so. Hofstadter used it to label what he saw as the post-McCarthy right-wing politics of paranoia. Together with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, he located populism somewhere on an “F scale” where F stands for fascism, which is concealed everywhere, “especially in the false consciousness of post-war, Western, liberal, consumer capitalism”. 

The demonisation of consumer capitalism is a constant in the progressive narrative and while Marxism, communism and socialism are presented as acceptable, “populism” is smeared as a protean, shape-shifting form of fascism. For an example of this one only has to look at the odious way former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating praises China, as Maurice Newman writes this month, glossing over its horrific human rights abuses and saving his venom and contempt for the United States.

Educated, left-wing elites have branded as populist, and therefore as crypto-fascist, any idea or social movement that rejects their globalist, woke narrative. For example, Germany’s AfD is presented as dangerously racist or anti-immigrant, largely because it opposes uncontrolled illegal immigration or rates of legal immigration that are so high that they put enormous pressure on the social services, wages and house prices of Western democracies.

Progressives then denounce populism as a “threat” to democracy, but as former Prime Minister and Chairman of Quadrant Tony Abbott writes in his piece on populism this month, “If it’s the elected populists that worry you, isn’t that mistrusting democracy itself?” which, as he says, “we should never do”. 

In reality, Europe’s progressive elite so mistrusts democracy that since January German Social Democrats have been debating whether to ban the AfD, which is supported by around 25 per cent of voters. Banning democratically elected parties to save democracy is just the sort of political oxymoron that is in vogue with Europe’s authoritarian elite.

This then justifies calls from the Left to “quarantine” populism by erecting a “cordon sanitaire” against extremism. They have been so successful in this task that, as Istvan Kiss, the executive director of the Danube Institute, said in our public debate, centre-right parties are refusing to enter into coalitions with populist parties. In the Netherlands, Wilders has struggled for months to form a coalition with centre-right parties. In Portugal, centre-right parties preferred to enter a coalition with socialists rather than work with Chega, the populist party on the right with the third-largest number of seats in the Portuguese parliament. In Spain, the socialists preferred to work with separatist Catalans indicted for crimes against the country’s constitution rather than enter into a coalition with populists.

IN THE FACE of all this, why have centre-right parties so lost their way? As Lord Frost in an article in this issue points out, based on a speech he recently gave at the Danube Institute, what has gone wrong with the Conservative party in the UK is that they have uncritically adopted the policies of the progressive elite. It is these policies, such as achieving net zero emissions by 2050, which has net zero chance of achieving its goal but, along the way, will cause widespread poverty and social dislocation. 

As Tony Abbott puts it, it is not climate change that’s threatening to make normal life impossible, it is the policy to deal with it. This point is driven home in a very polished documentary by Martin Durkin that was released in March called Climate the Movie—The Cold Truth which, of course, you cannot watch in mainstream cinemas or on mainstream television channels but is available on YouTube at the time of writing this editorial. 

The film features interviews with eminent scientists such as Professor Steven Koonin (Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration), Professor Richard Lindzen (a former professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), and Dr John Clauser (Nobel laureate in physics in 2022). Scientists such as these who have risen to the apex of their fields should be listened to with respect. Instead, like anyone that goes against the progressive agenda, they have, as they explain in the film, been cancelled.

What is fascinating in Lord Frost’s analysis is that he pinpoints that the wholehearted abandonment of Conservative principles and policies that has been undertaken in the wake of Boris Johnson’s dramatic win in 2019, his “Red Wall” victory, was based on the mistaken belief that the people that voted Tory at that election weren’t really conservative and therefore, to retain their support, the government needed to adopt leftist policies. This monumental misapprehension is what he calls the Red Wall Fallacy. 

In reality, Red Wall voters are the same people, in the same electorates, who put Mrs Thatcher in power and kept her there. Indeed, as Lord Frost points out, as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Conservatives have only won government when they have won the support of these voters by promising conservative policies.

Unfortunately, as he concludes, the Conservative party has failed to deliver on its conservative promise, particularly in the critical area of controlling immigration and the related issue of delivering policies that help the young in the related area of housing. 

Reversing the big-state, centrally-planned de-growth policies of the Left is not for the faint-hearted. What is required is Churchillian courage to tell people the truth; that what is needed is far less state involvement in the economy, and a huge improvement in state effectiveness in controlling borders, funding defence, policing streets, defeating extremists, standing up for the nation and its history, and pushing back against postmodern woke ideas infesting public institutions. 

As Tony Abbott contemplates the challenges facing centre-right parties in Australia he concludes that Australians will vote for a party that is “passionate for freedom, passionate for small business and the family, and passionate above all for our country—as long as they can find one”.