Conventional UK politics is in crisis. By this I don't mean merely that things are bad. I mean that destabilizing forces have strengthened and stabilizing ones have weakened.
To see what I mean, think about financial markets. When these are stable, it's because they are dominated by negative feedback processes. If an asset price falls, "buy on dip"traders and value investors buy it, thus helping to stabilize prices. During crises, however, the opposite occurs: there's positive feedback, whereby falls in prices beget further falls. This can happen because information cascades cause people to sell because others are doing so; during the tech crash of 2000-01 Amazon's price fell by over 90%, as much as that of stocks that subsequently became worthless. Or it can happen because falling prices trigger margin calls which cause investors to avoid illiquid assets, depressing their prices even more, and to sell anything regardless of quality merely to raise money; this was part of the story of the 2008 crisis. Or it can be simply that falling prices lead people to sell to cut exposure to what they see as risky assets. This is what happened with portfolio insurance strategies (pdf) in the 1987 crash and with the liability-driven insurance strategies in the gilt market in the autumn of 2022.
Although the details of these crises differ, they share an essential feature: positive feedback mechanisms become more powerful, thus generating instability. We might define a financial crisis as one in which positive feedback mechanisms are strong, relative to stabilizing negative feedback ones.
There's an analogy here with politics. It used to be thought that the dominant character in electoral politics was the "median voter" who occupied the "centre ground". Any party that strayed too far from this median would thus lose out to the one that could capture that "centre ground". And so there was negative feedback, whereby deviations from the centre ground would eventually be corrected.
We've seen such stabilizing negative feedback only recently. Both Truss and Corbyn were victims of it.
But I suspect that such stabilizing processes have become weaker, and the destabilizing processes have become more powerful.
Take, for example, Brexit. The median voter now opposes this: a recent Yougov poll found that only 31% say UK was right to leave EU. The conventional theory says that the parties should therefore be moving towards this centre ground. But Tories and Reform are not, and Labour's movement is inadequate.
Or take economic growth. One might imagine that 20 years of near-stagnation would provoke intense debate about how to change policy to boost growth. But it hasn't. The Tories stopped thinking about economics years ago, and Labour's ideas stop at anything that might challenge the interests of rentiers or incumbent companies. Instead, what's happened is exactly what Ben Friedman described in 2006: stagnation has bred intolerance and racism. Instead of seeing negative feedback, whereby stagnation leads to policies to improve growth, we have positive feedback: stagnation leads to a retreat from serious thinking into culture war BS.
Which contributes to another area where negative feedback is weak - immigration. Net immigration almost halved last year. You might imagine, therefore, that those who were worried by it in 2022-23 would be less concerned now. They aren't. Quite the opposite. The right is merely demanding even bigger drops in migration. Cutting immigration isn't enough for them.
Which might explain why the "problem" of small boats hasn't been solved. Logically, the answers should be simple: process asylum claims efficiently and permit asylum seekers to work whilst their claims are being processed. But this hasn't happened. Instead the government prefers to make facile gestures to appease the right. Negative feedback would consist of: public concern - policy response - falling migration - public satisfaction. This mechanism is broken.
It's not just stagnation-induced intolerance that explains this breakdown. Another factor is simple ignorance. Most voters wrongly believe that net immigration rose last year. And Yougov have found that almost half of voters think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally - a portion that rises to almost three-quarters amongst those wanting large numbers of migrants to leave. But the truth is that less than 10% of immigrants are here illegally.
Now, in a stable political culture, we'd get negative feedback; mistaken perceptions would be corrected. But this isn't happening.
Of course, one wouldn't expect the right-wing media to inform people correctly. But the BBC doesn't do so either. Since Brexit (and possibly before) it has often preferred to report controversies as merely "he said, she said" without asking who is right. Former assistant political editor Norman Smith said in 2016:
There is an instinctive bias within the BBC towards impartiality to the exclusion sometimes of making judgment calls that we can and should make. We are very very cautious about saying something is factually wrong and I think as an organization we could be more muscular about it.
Since then, the problem has got worse. Patrick Howse says its idea of impartiality (rather than the pursuit of truth is "fundamentally dishonest and logically absurd", adding: "if you give equal weight to lies and the truth, you take the side of the lie."
One reason for this is that the corporation's commitment to public service is undermined by a commercial mentality which leads it to appeal to consumers. Adam Bienkov reports that it has "drawn up plans to win over voters of Reform UK". Hence its abject apology to Jenrick when a Thought for the Day contributor called him a xenophobe. Hence too it allowing the right to set the agenda, reporting much on migration to the detriment of issues such as inequality, economic stagnation and underfunded public services.
The problem is, though, that chasing customers isn't always consistent with telling the truth.
What it is consistent with is dumbing down and coarsening public debate. Let's take another example. Back in 2008, David Cameron claimed that the Labour government "has maxed out our nation’s credit card." This was gibberish at the time and seems even more so now that government debt has tripled since then. If negative feedback mechanisms were working, people would have driven this idiotic trope out of the discourse, pursued by derision and scorn. But they didn't. Instead, Laura Kuenssberg repeated it and Sir Keir Starmer, believing it a good attack line, turned it onto the Tory government. And so we have another positive feedback mechanism; moronic gibberish gets perpetuated and spreads. And this isn't merely a problem of rhetoric. Ignorance of concepts such as opportunity cost, comparative advantage, transactions cost economics and regulatory capture are all contributing to rank bad policy-making.
It's not just the media that has replaced stabilizing negative feedback with positive feedback, though. So too have politicians.
When Enoch Powell delivered his "rivers of blood" speech in 1968 Ted Heath sacked him days later. Compare that with Badenoch permitting Jenrick to remain in office despite associating with neo-nazis.
It's not just the Tories that aren't holding the line against the far-right. Nor is Labour. As Antonia Bance said:
Myth-busting doesn't work, so no, I am not going to waste my time correcting misconceptions and arguing with my constituents.
The government takes a similar view. One of Starmer's spokespeople has said that protestors outside asylum "hotels" are “right to protest” in order to express their “legitimate concerns” about migration - sentiments not extended to protestors against genocide.
The problem with this is not only that it is morally obnoxious. It's that it doesn't work as electoral strategy. Labour's support is falling as it leaches more voters to the LibDems or Greens than to Reform. As Anand Menon says:
You don’t fight Reform UK by making its strongest issue the national priority. Nor, as countless political-science research projects have illustrated, do you effectively combat the radical right by accommodating them.
In our FPTP electoral system, this risks letting in a Reform government. And so the negative feedback we saw under Heath - whereby politics was stabilized against the spread of racism - has been replaced by a positive feedback mechanism, whereby mainstream politicians legitimate fascism. 
Of course, you'd expect Ted Heath to be to the left of today's political-media culture. But so too was Thatcher. One of her defining ideas was a reverence for the rule of law. "For justice to prevail the most basic requirement is the rule of law" she said. "The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob." Her epigones do not share these sentiments. Whilst Jenrick has been supporting mobs of racists, the press has been lionizing a woman guilty of inciting racial hatred. Again, Thatcher was a source of negative feedback, wanting to uphold the law against detabilizing forces, whereas today's right is a destabilizing force.
All I'm doing here is spelling out a few mechanisms in support of David Allen Green's recent attack on the complacent idea that "unpleasant situations will resolve themselves" and that balance will be restored. For this to happen, there must be negative, stabilizing, feedback mechanisms. But our political-media class has weakened these, preferring to pander to racism.
I'm not surprised that so many in this class choose barbarism over socialism. What is surprising is that they choose barbarism even over liberal democracy.
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