To define the political against politics may seem only to be of interest to a few geeks and wonks who are unsatisfied with the usual utilitarian definitions.  “The stuff politicians do” ... that sort of thing.  But, actually, an understanding of how the political delimits politics, opening in any given time to the new, is key to its historical dynamic and also to people like us who wish to subvert and even replace that dynamic.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that, “great men” aside, politicians themselves are almost never the source of change.  As we saw with the long and disgraceful Remain rebellion, politicians of all mainstream parties are conservative in matters of their own position and persuasion.  They don’t welcome instability in their own political careers, or anything that might result in them being found out and forced out.

Because the class is self-selecting, its politicking from parliament to parliament, from generation of MPs to generation of MPs, tends always towards something vested and, in the longer term, alienating from the voters.  That self-selection occurs in no small measure on the basis of the possession of certain canonical values and beliefs which themselves refine and radicalise as other influences are brought to bear - for example, the agenda of those who actually fund political activity in this country, and all those who, at once or perhaps twice remove, participate in the process of developing (in our time, radicalising) “the stuff politicians do”.  Thus ...

i. Formal advisors have, of course, been a staple of government since the Pharoahs, and probably earlier.  The breed populating Westminster and Whitehall these days is the SpAd, dozens of whom provide ministerial teams with political strategy options and a very few ... Dominic Cummings being the notable case in Boris Johnson’s government ... with blue-sky thinking.  SpAds fill the party-pris space between ministers and their civil servants, whose terms of service include party-political neutrality.  They tend to come from, and eventually return to, the policy institutes and PR firms which have likewise thickly populated the political scene over the last few decades.  But while they are “in the thick if it” at their ministries or in Downing Street they are as much part of the political class as the honourable members and noble lords of Westminster.

ii. Immediately beyond the Westminster class is the oft-termed chattering class, the professional reporters, commentators and critics of the legacy media, all of whom have daily access to politicians, and whose relationship with them is symbiotic.

iii. Also very close to the politicians is the huge array of quangos, policy institutes, charities and organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and pressure groups such as the British Board of Deputies, the Muslim Council of Britain, Stonewall, and Hope Not Hate.  Their contact to MPs is more formalised, since information really only flows one way and MPs don’t need many of them as such - excepting left-of-centre MPs, of course, who can find gainful albeit chrony employment among the forest of Blairite quangos, international panjandrum bodies, and what-have-you when the Westminster career is done.  Much like Blair himself.

iv. The most cordial of political relations are those between Conservative MPs and corporate and banking interests.  Of course, said interests have to become party donors to gain access to ministers and actual influence over policy.  But it’s always money well spent - and valued by the politicians much more highly than, say, the loyalty of voters.  Career-expired Conservative ministers who have proved useful can expect to rack up a fine collection of non-too-taxing, two-afternoons-a-month non-exec directorships and consultancy arrangements.  Keeps the wolf from the no longer ministerial door, doncha know.

v. Beyond the clamour from all these entities is the source of the most fundamental input to the political process, and that’s the professoriate: the political philosophers, the political scientists and theorists, the economists, the sociologists, the historians, the jurists, and so forth.  It is their historical function to shape the future.  There are some instances where the political connection is direct.  Freidrich Hayek, for example, shaped Thatcherism.  Anthony Giddens shaped Blairism.  Even archly pragmatic governments such as David Cameron’s have their intellectual gurus (in his case the rather more humble Steve Hilton, an original member of the Notting Hill Set).  As a rule, though, the most historically re-defining government is informed by the most philosophically re-defining intellectual.

vi. Way out in the distant margins are the radical street activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Unite Against Fascism, publicly toxic because of their extremism, but not so toxic that politicians can’t slavishly follow every demand they chant.  And that’s without these groups having any formal contact with them.  In these cases, of course, it’s not always about political cowardice.  A significant fraction of MPs, and not all of them in the Labour Party, very likely agree ideologically.

So these are the six sources of “the new” which feed the political class.  They define the boundary of the political not via their broad output (books, papers, lectures), much of which may never attract MP’s attention or interest, but via their input to Westminster and Whitehall itself, however restrictive that might be, however that may come about.  The political is the totality of theory in metamorphosis and theory already metamorphosed into practise.  The political is all that can be talked about in party political circles. 

We should note at this point that this essentially technocratic arrangement came to real prominence not in Thatcher’s time but a decade later with the drive by Clinton, Blair and Shroeder to fix for all time the then regnancy of the progressive left all across the West.  In part that was to involve ideological radicalisation.  The formal institution of culture war, anti-racism, and political correctness moved wholesale from the American campus, where they incubated in the 1970s and 80s, into national party systems; and at the same time Third World immigration was massively ramped up.

So it was that in his famous and very candid article for the Evening Standard in October 2009 Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, reported “coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The other weapon in the progressive toolkit was the system of appointments to Third Sector bodies at all levels.  John Major’s government had installed Tories in 57% of these appointments.  But Blair completely changed the ideological balance. By 1998, Labour supporters made up 75% of appointees and Conservatives only 13%, a trend which carried right through the years of Labour rule, Gramscian style, and onward to that of Theresa May.  They were the years of the networker in an ideologically progressive, state-funded managerial system allying not in their hundreds but in their thousands with like minds in government.

Blair’s intention - to render right-wing opinion politically inoperable and thereby dominate government in perpetuity - was never achieved.  But he did succeed in insulating party politics from the more inconvenient opinions of the people.  In place of the steering hand of the voting public MPs had all the expert advise and creative thinking they could possibly need.  Politics could function for four or five years at a stretch without once taking account of what the people thought.  And why not?  The votes still rolled in on election day.  Blair won three general elections.  Brexit notwithstanding, he made politics safe for politicians.

For nationalist parties trying to mount electoral challenges dependent on unbridling the will of the natives his dispensation presents a near-insuperable barrier.  How do you make a breakthrough when your own arguments are simply, cleanly excised from every area of the political, and all anyone ever hears of you is the usual mechanical abuse and condemnation?  How do you make a breakthrough when you don’t really understand why the political is so impossible to penetrate ... not just ideologically because the Establishment and the media are hostile to nationalist thought, but literally, because the political is filled to the brim with the unholy marriage of economically hyper-individualist policy and socially hyper-egalitarian policy.  There is no room for kinship when all is individualism.  There is no room for particularism when all is universalism. 

The question, then, becomes one about how to drive a nationalist wedge into the rockface - or, perhaps a better analogy, how to strew the political ground with nationalist seeds.  The good news is that it is possible.