The FT has noted this morning in an article on Conservative Party infighting that:
A party so badly riven could struggle to govern the country in its remaining four years in office.
That misses the point as much as Michael Portillo did recently when saying the Conservatives had no clue why they had wanted power.
They didn't: power itself was enough. Governing was never the issue and never has been for the most successful electoral machine in democratic history. The aim has always been threefold.
First to stop others getting power.
Second to preserve the wealth of Tory donors be preventing those who might attack it from getting power.
Third, to hide the continuing accumulation of that wealth from view.
Everything else is a side show. After all, at its very core Conservative belief is that government and so governing is a bad thing.
And because that is the case the Conservatives are the one party where such rifts might, possibly, be resolved.
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Well maybe it IS still Governing even if its’s Governing FOR wealth extraction and rentier rapine-that still requires Government and on oppressive one at that.
1) Keeping the housing bubble going
2) Selling off public assets in a firesale.
3) keeping the unemployed in fear
4) Keeping myths about ‘there’s no money’ going
5) Crushing surveillance and harassment of the ill/vulnerable
All this takes a lot of Government!
Not a lot of government, just a corrupt one – big or small.
I was shocked (but not surprised) at the content of Craig Murray’s statement to the Met Police during their investigation into UK state involvement into torture and rendition.
I’m afraid this is just another very worrying example of how low our political class has stooped to pander to the whims of greater wealth and power elsewhere (in this case the US)
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/06/metropolitan-police-evidence-torture-extraordinary-rendition/
Just occasionally, in the “pass the parcel” game that constitutes the reality of what passes for political analysis, someone manages to be the person who, when the music stops, gets to rip off the last wrapper and find what the parcel actually contains.
The above comment strikes me as just that, the real “goodie” in the parcel, rather than the wrappings that usually form the subject matter of political analysis – a truly shocking realisation that we are being scammed by a Party uninterested in governing (not even in ruling!), but only in power as a means to enrichment for their class.
Suddenly, every piece of evidence falls into place, so that even disasters such as IDS’s Universal Credit, and Osborne’s “omnishambles” budget and Tax Credit fiasco make sense – they are part of the conjuror’s patter to distract attention from the torrent of asset-stripping occurring on a daily basis.
In the words of the prophetess in “Up Pompeii”: ” Woe, woe, and triple woe!”
I’d like to add some perspective to this. Camoron has been warbling on about the need to enforce minimum wages etc – ditto the Commons committe that pulled the Sports Direct owner in for … a pat on the head?
This article in the Guardian today nails it: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jun/10/court-finds-uk-gangmaster-liable-for-modern-slavery-victims-kent-chicken-catching-eggs
Key point (with respect to the article & modern slavery): Noble Foods..UK’s largest egg company…….firm & its chairman, Peter Dean, major donors to the Tories..company helicopter loaned to Camoron, for election campaigning.
Tories have zero interest in preventing the events described in the article – which is why local gov’ is responsible for enforcing minimum wage but denied the means (by the Tories) to do so. It suits the Tory party & it suits donor such as Dean.
The Tory party regard you, me, everybody commenting on this site & most citizens as scum – they always have taken this view & they always will.
Wow Richard ! Absolutely spot on – on each and every count ! I would like some of what you have had for breakfast.
Croissant left over from some I bought yesterday
At 4.30
Its obvious the Tory leadership will have plenty on the Agenda, they just don’t want to court controversy until the referendum is over? There very wealthy donors? Yes they do have those, but funny how labour has historically never managed to but has more managed to have a go at the modestly well off. Both parties are full of Mad Bad and just corruption. As with whack a mole, there allways seem to be the phantom rich person for Labout to ‘tackle’ with tories there is always poor to ‘lift out of poverty’ and somehow increases on there watch.
A knock on impact of all this I think is the impact on british democracy. What is a bit worrying for me is not so much that people want to leave the EU, but the arguments that people are making – i mean members of the public rather than politicians are making seem to be divorced from reality. One example: ‘Lets leave the EU because the Eurozone is doing badly economically and we don’t want to be tied to them.’
For me the correlation is: Tories do/say anything to remain in power, then this has the knock on effect in cultivating an electorate that can’t distinguish good and bad arguments, which is pretty worrying.
‘ultivating an electorate that can’t distinguish good and bad arguments, which is pretty worrying.’
The Tories are, in a sense, governing the discourse, the group think and the doublespeak from”doing the right hing” onto “skivers and strivers”. This has been worked out by spin doctors very carefully and ‘managers of consent.’ The dumbing-down of the populace has happened over the last 30 years or so by a diet of crap TV/Media and the reduction of attention spans to nano seconds of sound bite/ quasi subliminal advertising.
There will be an ‘awakening’ from the sleeping sickness and people will be very angry that the piss has been taken out of them for nearly 4 decades.
On the other hand, I may be wrong and the sleeping sickness just goes on and on until a war breaks out.
Do I hear the sound of people noticing, at last?
Or is it the sound of people abandoning the comfort of excuses and “It couldn’t possibly be true”?
The one area where you’re wrong is th Conservative attitude to government: the ‘government’ they hate is anything that stops the powerful from doing as they please.
But Government, to grasp the levers of a nation state, is a powerful tool and they wield it with a will, effectively and skilfully, to further their agenda.
It looks brutal and chaotic and inept when viewed through the distorting lenses of the middle class, but all the things you criticise are the effects of policy successes that the middle class insist on calling failures, as if reality consisted of suburbanite opinions of ‘how things ought to be’.
And that is where we are today, and for the next four years of government by the few, for the few.
As for the economy, or policy, or Brexit, we have long since passed the tipping point where all the gains of economic growth pass to the few: all measurements of economic growth today conceal a deepening recession for the many and accelerating upward transfers to the few. Worse, the imbalances of power have become so deep that any economic ‘shock’ will be a ‘shock doctrine’ opportunity to accelerate the process.
By their own agenda and their values, the Conservatives today are the most successful government that Britain ever had.
Cameron as Gorbachev and Johnson as Yeltsin. That political and economic process worked a real treat for the working class of the Soviet Union.
And that’s far from a “worse-case” scenario.
I would agree Nile -what the Tories have accomplished in the last five years is truly immense..At the beginning I thought the garbage they spouted was ultra-transparent, then realised with progressive horror that the double-speak was being swallowed like hot cakes and we are where we are.
today I rediscovered this interview by Brian Walden of a leading light in the Conservative party filmed in 1992,
it seems so fresh and to the point it could have been filmed yesterday,
I closed my eyes and listened to it and could credibly believe I was listening to Boris,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDa505kpXO0
I think it both educational for younger voters unfamiliar with the Nasty Party playbook and also prescient and nostalgic for Richards generation who I think also deserve some light relief in these dark times!
Richard
Your summary above of the Conservative Party might well be one of your unintentionally finest.
You have described their very raison d’être in a nutshell.
The penny will drop for many who read it.
Unintentional?
That took three minutes of careful crafting
And many years of thinking
It is worth mentioning, it would seem foolish to overlook, that the population of this country is highly like;y tp vote exit, i.e to vote for destitution & a form of modern slavery. We, on the left, have catastrophically failed to delineate an alternative message.
If it wasn’t so disastrous I would laugh that the white working class will get exactly what they voted for – misery, poverty & serfdom
“His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see”
This comment hit my Monday morning wake up button, for all the wrong reasons!
Are you really suggesting eriugenus that a post-Brexit Labour party (or any other form of left of centre political party) could not win an election in the UK ever again?
In which case we may as well all throw in our towels, hang up our boots and move to somewhere much less desirable to live.
It is quite clear that there are a very large number of people on the left of politics that are not in favour of continued EU membership, some in the Labour party leadership no doubt but feel it more appropriate to toe the party line.
I have become increasingly disillusioned by both the Remain and Leave campaigns, because neither have a clear consensus on how we might Reform either the EU or UK political and economic systems. Business as usual seems to be the only message in town, with a lot of fear and hope thrown in try to appeal to people’s emotions.
And so I am for a Reform agenda, whether the public choose to vote Remain or Leave is of little or no consequence without a clear and visionary agenda for a better social system in future.
And infact, the closer it gets to the vote my inclinations are now moving towards Leave as a much more viable option for real Reform in this country.
If that means we have to take battle once again with the right wing of the Tory party, then so be it – let the fight begin as we have the moral high ground and voting numbers of financially repressed individuals to overpower them if only the Labour party or another left of centre party could find its voice to support its true supporters once again.
I have much more hope and belief that a true left of centre party in the UK can regain political control and implement the necessary financial, economic and political reformation that is required in this country without the limitations currently placed upon it by an EU that has clearly been captured by the corporate and financial systems of neo-liberalism.
I am becoming so tired of politics being caught up in this centre ground morass of fake ideology and non-existent beliefs. It’s about time people stood up for what they really believed in and stopped playing party politics, in my view.
That’s it, my Monday morning rant is off my chest now!
This blog is both incisive and inordinately depressing…
But I’ve just encountered an alarmingly – it seems to me, for the Tories – intelligent 29 yr old (yes, she told me) social worker who has a young son for whom she works hard, but says it would be easier not to, as all her wages go on nursery. But she wants to impart the work ethic.
She’s got little time or opportunity to understand the economics but she is well aware of the:
“Third, to hide the continuing accumulation of that wealth from view.”
Perhaps she offers us some hope.
She is also fed up with the six different employers she’s had over 7 or 8 years whilst still doing the same job – all as a result of neolib salami slicing and privatisation.
Perhaps a small reason to be hopeful.
There is a way to resolve the, perfectly reasonable, concerns that a lot of people have. Its not voting Brexit. Its enforcing the NMW & dissuading, by all means necessary including direct action, employers from seeking to put employees on ‘false’ self-employment contracts.
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”
It doesn’t matter anyhow how bad the Tories are since the UK will vote Remain and then UKIP will be doing doing in England what the SNP did in Scotland – annihilating Labour in their heartlands. UKIP’s second policy is privatizing the NHS.
Yes the first Tory objective of gaining power to prevent others doing so chimes with a long held metaphorical image in my head of a George Osborne in a signal box sat squat in front of a bank of unused levers while a runaway train can be seen in the distance hurtling towards the buffers.
A lot of what passes for rightwing comment on social media boils down to gloating about the fact the disposessed are being prevented from pulling those levers in order to get help and support.
Sickens me.
Works for me
But I worked a lot of signal boxes around East Anglia in my time
It’s a bit ironic, when want too sell your home, you’re first advised do it up, but when your government wants to sell your assets, it first runs them down.
Good points – makes total sense to me.