Woke politics sucks, and the young people are awake to it
Increasingly disillusioned millennials and Gen Zers are turning right, and Holly Valance’s headline-making comments take me back to when the Spice Girls came out as Thatcherites.
An Australian woman called Holly Valance, who lives in London, made news this week for saying Greta Thunberg is a “demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism” making school kids anxious and depressed. She said Australia was so woke it was “mental”, schools shouldn’t be teaching little children about sexuality, and added that politicians should stand for something.
If you didn’t watch Neighbours and had no clue that Valance was a singer too – about 20 years ago – join the club. More to the point, why is it breaking news to learn that people of all shapes and sizes are eschewing progressive politics?
Valance, nee Vukadinovic, who was raised by a single mum in Melbourne and left school at 16 to join the cast of Neighbours, proves the celebrity rule of thumb: the more famous you are, the wankier your views.
Superstar Gwyneth Paltrow, circa 2017, suggested women shove an egg-shaped jade or rose quartz stone up their vagina to help “increase vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general”. To make extraction easier, she advised us to thread some dental floss through a purpose-built hole.
Mid-range model Elle Macpherson, who turns 60 next Friday, told us recently about her health battles (of course), her mantra for ageing (of course) and how she’s dating again (of course).
Low-range fame gets you Valance – who now goes by Holly Candy after her marriage to British billionaire Nick Candy – telling GB News’s Christopher Hope that renewables don’t make sense, that Australia went mental during Covid with draconian restrictions, and that lots of women want to stay home to care for their kids.
Valance went overboard in places. She sounds like she’s suffering relevance deprivation or wants her own TV show or a spot in parliament. Still, I say hooray for a former soapie star I’d never heard of sounding kind of normal. Not terribly bright, to be sure. But smart enough not to be woke.
Valance, who says she’s voting for the populist Reform UK Party at the next British election, is secondary to a delightful segue I have been longing to take. Though it does disprove my celebrity rule of thumb, never forget that, at the frenzied, teenage-girl-screaming height of their global fame, the Spice Girls came out as Thatcherites. Interviewing the girl band for The Spectator many years ago, British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore decided to ask the same questions he would in any other political interview. The result is one of the funniest political interviews I’ve ever read.
“We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology – Girl Power. But for now, we’re desperately worried about the slide into the single currency,” Geri Halliwell, the flame-haired Spice Girl known as Ginger Spice, told Montefiore.
It was December 1996. The Spice Girls were No.1 in 27 countries. And Tony Blair was vying for No.10. But the band would have none of that, telling millions of teenage girl fans (who possibly didn’t read The Spectator) that it was cool to be conservative and “we’d never vote Labour”.
What rankled the Spice Girls was the radical push for a single currency. Ginger again: “Britain was the first to break away from the Roman Empire. When push comes to shove, the pounds, dollars and deutschmarks can’t be equal. They can’t all be at the same standard of living.”
Montefiore dubbed Posh Spice (better known now as Victoria Beckham) as the Bill Cash of the Spice Girls. Like the famously Eurosceptic MP who has been a thorn in every modern PM’s side, Posh wasn’t having any of the “impertinence of the bureaucrats in Brussels”, either.
“The Euro bureaucrats are destroying every bit of national identity and individuality … those new passports are revolting, an insult to our independence,” she said.
Montefiore cannily noticed the Burkean stability to the Spice Girls: “These are old-fashioned Tories with the conservatism of the great Salisbury, the radicalism of Thatcher and the monarchical legitimism and sexual athleticism of Viscount Bolingbroke. Unlike Labour, they do not wish to tamper with the House of Lords.”
On why aristocrats should be in parliament: “They’re a mixed bag. A mixed bag is what you want in parliament,” said Ginger. A lovely put-down of every faux modern diversity tsar who thinks inclusion means excluding an entire class of white men.
On why the Girls loved the royals, Ginger again: “If you look at the British Constitution as a big football match, they’re like the most objective referee.”
As Montefiore noted, “Bagehot himself never put it so neatly.”
Returning to Thatcher, Mel B (aka Scary Spice) didn’t mince words either: “Even if her policies were hard-headed, socialism is bad – you work for your living and you deserve to keep what you’ve earned.”
Rather than mock the Spice Girls, remind yourself that you can’t judge a book by its cover – and that simple conservative ideas can readily defy demography and professions.
On Blair, Ginger was having none of his charm: “His hair’s all right, but we don’t agree with his tax policies.”
“As for (John) Major,” Posh said, “he’s a boring pillock … but the good thing … is that because he has not got any personality, he’s not hiding behind some smooth facade. He can’t rely on his looks, can he?”
Which brings me to another seamless segue I never thought I’d have a chance to enjoy. I swore I would never, ever watch The Beckhams. And then I did while on a month’s holiday in Canada last month. I thought both the Beckhams rather dull and boring, even if David is very, very good-looking. I was wrong. The Netflix series is brilliant television. The Beckhams are funny, resilient, adorable – and did I mention resilient? The only disappointment was that Victoria didn’t give us a Posh political update.
One can imagine what the older Posh might have said about the new batch of 21st-century political charmers, men with good hair like Justin Trudeau. But it was not to be.
Just as the Spice Girls were not swayed by the charismatic Blair, I learned during my month in Canada, even young voters are growing tired of the man once dubbed the young global poster boy for progressive politics.
Trudeau is in trouble, facing an election next year and even copping it from the left-wing media. Writer Stephen Marche, for example, wrote in the Globe and Mail that a “a new reality” is coming: “ ‘Left-wing’ will soon mean ‘old-fashioned’.” Marche reported on polling that showed the strongest support for Trudeau’s Liberal Party now is among boomers. Marche referenced a poll as early as last August that found “nearly 40 per cent of millennial Canadians and 35 per cent of Gen Z Canadians plan to vote for the Conservative Party”.
And, as Marche said, “the youthful right-turn is happening around the world too and it’s often not towards rational centrism but to radical populism.”
There is a difference between right-wing populists such as Donald Trump that Valance is drawn to and conservative principles the Spice Girls admired. Populists tend to have as their main aim tearing something down – usually the establishment – whereas a conservative is more focused on defending a set of tried and tested ideas.
Last year, British Conservative MP Dan Hannan marvelled at how Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre was transforming the demographics of the Canadian party.
Membership has more than tripled. And, Hannan says, “even more impressive than the numbers is the age profile. Until this year, a Conservative event in Canada felt similar to one in the UK. Now, Poilievre’s rallies are filled with 20-somethings.”
Numbers continue to track up for the Tories. So why are young Canadians turning away from so-called progressive politics? Marche says the “answer must lie, at least partly, in the sheer divisiveness of its discourse”. The war in Gaza has become the latest flashpoint of how the left in the West is blowing itself up with grievance-obsessed identity politics. The irony of left-wing zealots supporting Hamas – when they would be first against the wall to be shot by these terrorists – is surely not lost on younger voters.
There is no reason to think it’s any different in Australia where a cynicism with divisive woke politics will not have missed the young. You don’t have to be over 40 to realise that those on the left trying to tear down freedom and equality are as dangerously nihilistic as when they’re trying to tear up basic economics about debt. Both endeavours, if allowed to continue, will hurt the young more than the old.
So, the next time you come across a young woman showing her midriff and wearing fluffy slides, don’t for a second think she has been hoodwinked by “progressive” causes. Anyone who underestimates the wisdom of the young is the fool.
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