Rishi Sunak: "It's 2024 and the camel's nose is under the tent."
Rishi Sunak: "It's 2024 and the camel's nose is under the tent."
With his 'small boats' schtick sunk and his 'I'm the change candidate' lanyard binned, Rishi Sunak returned to work this week with a classic conservative trope. Things will only get worse.
Some time ago I wrote about a trio of reactionary tropes invoked by conservatives since the French Revolution to argue against political and social progress.
The tropes are:
Perversity: “people who want a better world are well meaning, but naive, things are best left to providence.”
Jeopardy: “we can’t give people social support, because that will make people lazy, and that puts their freedom at risk.”
Futility: “you can’t buck the market, there is no human agency.”
With a UK general election possibly just a few months away the early sings are that the Conservative Party is dusting off a classic trope:
The jeopardy trope takes many forms, but here’s a few I would urge that you listen out for (It took me just a few moments to collect these examples from conservatives on Twitter):
It’s a comfy, glue-like values space for conservatives that will help unite their political-media eco-system. But the jeopardy trope is also a huge gamble for a movement that’s been in power for 13 years. It invites scrutiny of the government’s track record. It forces people to wonder: would things really be worse if we had some other people in charge?
Who knows, if the inflation numbers continue to come down, employment accelerates and people start to “feel” better about the country, then imploring them to “stick with the programme” might work. But I doubt it.
The Conservatives have tried almost everything and all of it has backfired. The concocted “small boats narrative” merely raised the salience of the government’s own incompetence (though this debate should be about much more than which party is the most efficient at turning desperate women and kids away). The bonfire of net zero commitments and scrapping of HS2 played well with a weird part of the Conservative echo-chamber, but these about turns pale into insignificance for a public that is poorer, less healthy and less secure than in a generation.
So be on the look for the jeopardy trope in 2024. Once you think about it, you’ll find it everywhere. I suppose that’s the mark of a true trope!
Read on for a few more examples of how the trope has been deployed in the past:
“Votes for women? They’ll be wearing the trousers next…”
This 1895 cartoon makes a slippery-slope argument of how weddings would look in 2001 if women got the right to vote.
Domino theory
A domino effect is the cumulative effect produced when one event sets off a series of similar[1] or related events, a form of chain reaction. The term is an analogy to a falling row of dominoes. It typically refers to a linked sequence of events where the time between successive events is relatively short. The term can be used literally (about a series of actual collisions) or metaphorically (about causal linkages within systems such as global finance or politics).
The paradox of the heap, like a frog in boiling water
The sorites paradox (/soʊˈraɪtiːz/;[1] sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that results from vague predicates.[2] A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are removed individually. With the assumption that removing a single grain does not cause a heap to become a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times that only one grain remains: is it still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?[3]
It’s the Camel’s Nose Under The Tent
