The Craftsman, Substack and The New Parties
Why the next revolution in Britain could be emailed
By 1726, England’s revolution against absolute monarchy and executive excess had stalled, according to Lord Bolingbroke. The Whigs, once the party of Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, had abandoned their programme of constitutional reform in exchange for power.
The settlement of 1688-89 wasn’t going to be fulfilled. Leading Whig Robert Walpole had rose to the top of government following the South Sea Bubble collapse of 1720, arguably the first major stock market collapse.
Walpole was appointed First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in 1721. But his detractors would later use a prerogative term to describe him: “prime minister”.
Bolingbroke, a former Tory minister, accused Walpole of allying himself with power-hungry Tories, the traditional supporters of the Crown. The charge was that they had formed an elitist and anti-libertarian faction, the Court Whigs.
In response, Bolingbroke teamed with William Pulteney, later the Earl of Bath, to launch The Craftsman in 1726. It was a highly popular paper which regularly railed against Walpole and his administration, whilst attempting to expose political corruption (‘political craft’).
It sometimes used satire to achieve its goals, publishing works by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Otherwise, Bolingbroke used the outlet to promote his idea of a Country Party.
Unlike the Court Party of Walpole’s establishment Whigs and Tories, the Country Party would seek to secure parliament’s independence from the Crown and, amongst other measures, fight against moneyed interests.
The enterprise failed after Walpole resigned in 1742 and some Patriot Whigs, a faction of Whigs who allied with Tories to dissent against Walpole, re-joined the government.
But Bolingbroke’s ideas lived on into the American revolution, with Thomas Jefferson later praising him alongside a more radical writer, Thomas Paine. John Adams was also a follower of his teachings.
Today it looks like modern Britain is having a Bolingbroke moment. Dominic Cummings, who is synonymous with the Brexit revolution, and Matthew Goodwin, who once chartered the rise of Euroscepticism as an academic, are both apparently planning to launch their own political parties.
In not dissimilar fashion to The Craftsman, Cummings and Goodwin have used their own outlets to rail against an elite Westminster faction, the Labour and Conservative parties.
For Cummings and Goodwin, much like Bolingbroke’s arguments against Walpole, the government and opposition may have different names but they actually offer exactly the same major policies: both have proven to be pro-mass immigration, both parties campaigned against Brexit, both are highly interventionist and both roughly subscribe to the same macro-economic outlooks.
Unlike Bolingbroke, Cummings and Goodwin can rely on Substack-driven subscriptions to help fund their causes. And it looks like Cummings, the former campaign director of Vote Leave and chief adviser to Boris Johnson, is already on manoeuvres.
He’s registered a new business, People's Action, and is now speaking to the mainstream papers again (Cummings was also interviewed by YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel six months ago). The previous holding title had been ‘The Startup Party’.
Both Cummings and Goodwin want to take advantage of the Tories' expected (but not guaranteed) downfall at the general election, with Rishi Sunak’s party 22 points behind Labour. And at least Cummings expects Labour to do badly in government:
“Watching the two old parties approach the election and fight it, crucial voters will conclude: ‘we desperately want change, we keep trying to vote for it but the old parties can’t give it, but we only have this rubbish choice so time for change, Starmer’s crap but not as bad as watching the Tories on TV for another four years’ etc. So Starmer will win but without enthusiasm anywhere beyond his inner circle.”
But it remains unclear how Cummings plans to dethrone Labour and the Conservatives in future elections. For Goodwin, meanwhile, he will only launch a new political party if he reaches 100,000 followers.
Elsewhere in the media, GB News host Nigel Farage is yet to reveal whether he will contest a seat at the general election. HIs Reform Party underperformed its poll ratings at the local elections and Farage can earn well on the media circuit (especially with the US elections coming up).
But The Independent’s David Maddox reckons he will go for it, competing for the Essex seaside constituency of Clacton, a Eurosceptic hot spot. And what would be at stake? An unfinished revolution of course.
A couple of months before Conservative MP and fellow GB News host Jacob Rees-Mogg urged Farage to join the government, a very senior Vote Leave figure told me Farage could become Tory leader after the election. That doesn’t seem so mad now.
🤔 Other tech and media news I found interesting
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The radio star lives on. Radio listenership has hit a record high in the UK, surpassing 49 million people.
Apple to the rescue? Semafor looks at how the major tech company could help publishers.
Link decay latest. 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later, Pew Research has found.
Rob Ford update. The pollster and political scientist has given another excellent breakdown of the local election results in the UK.
Another OpenAI deal. Reddit is the latest media platform to make a deal with Sam Altman’s company. But, after quitting the business, where will former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever end up?
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