It's a weird political era when the biggest battle in UK politics would appear to be between two men named Dominic.
Stand aside Boris. You are but a bit-part player in this.
Stand aside Jeremy as well. No one can be sure what your role might be, because you still aren't.
Instead bring on Dominic Cummings and Dominic Grieve.
One is a political adviser, but with credit given for engineering the victory of the Leave campaign, against all the odds, including his own.
The other is a Tory toff, who once held minor ministerial office. And yet it does appear that they are the principle actors in the single biggest issue of our moment, which is whether or not we leave the EU without a deal on 31 October.
The issue is, rather oddly given Leave's noted views on the issue, about expertise. I summarise, but the face off us between Cummings' expertise in off-piste politics that has a remarkable contempt for the rule of law implicit in it, and Grieve's legally trained mind set that is determined to uphold what he thinks to be the UK constitution.
The issues at stake could not be bigger. The disaster of No Deal is only the first of them. More important is whether or not parliament matters. And given that his has been the bedrock of our supposed democracy for centuries it is not unfair to call this a constitutional crisis.
Unsurprisingly I think parliament must prevail in this battle. I am not at all sure it will.
I do not think we can rely on Johnson, under the influence of Cummings, to play by any known rules.
I think we can rely on the Labour leadership to be tribal, which means there will be no guarantee that they will cooperate for a greater good when that is clearly required of them, solely in the short term.
And what might play out, how and when, is as yet unknown. It depends very largely on the wits of the two Dominics, I think.
But some things are known. They're worth noting.
Nothing will be the same again. One side will come out reinforced by this. Heaven help us if it is No. 10.
Politics will be different. Blue-on-blue in-fighting makes it very clear how far we have gone in the process of party loyalty failing. We will witness the same in Labour ranks.
The alienation of voters from Westminster will increase. Whichever side wins the other will be very angry.
Nationalism - and the quite rational desire to be done with this English problem - which is what it is - will grow in strength.
And real issues will continue to be ignored whilst this Tory manufactured crisis is dealt with. Effective government continues to be nigh on impossible.
In the midst of which I still strongly suspect we will leave the EU, quite possibly without a deal, because the wrong Dom holds most of the good cards as I read it.
The result, come what may, is that everything will change. I cannot guarantee for the better.
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Ha! I thought you were going to say Dominic Raab… 🙂
Mr Cummings has no respect or regard for the British constitution (whatever that is). Nor is it likely that he has any deep affection for the Union – for the inclusion of of those six counties of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, the land Mr Johnson’s role model Churchill dismissively referred to as ” the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”. It should be no surprise if these destroyer twins gambled on winning an election and getting an Tory no deal overall majority in the HoC, enabling them to dispense with the support of the DUP. It is possible to envisage a scenario in which a future Tory government led by Mr Johnson dispensed with the backstop problem by simply agreeing with the EU to leave Northern Ireland in the customs union, or even to take steps towards handing over that burdensome province to the Republic, by initiating referendum there in accordance with the requirements of GFA. Labour would assuredly be supportive of such a policy; where would Dominic Grieve and his small band of remainer Tories stand?
I’m still convinced he will go for an election. Assuming he doesn’t go for an election, I reckon one of three things happen:
i) We leave with no-deal in October
– if he pulls this off, then his Government, without a workable majority, will not be able to survive the ensuing chaos. They will be punished for it and he will be remembered as being the **** that caused the mess.
ii) We get an extension of sorts – the ERG and Brexit Party will crucify him surely?
iii) We get some form of a deal – see ii)
Whereas if he goes for an election and comes out of it with a workable majority, then he might at least have sufficient numbers to be able to deal with the immediate after effects of no-deal and then have a bit of a window before the next general election. Otherwise, he pulls the trigger on Brexit and then gets kicked out of office? Then how is he remembered?
enz0 says:
“I’m still convinced he will go for an election.”
Who ? Boris ?
Hmmmm…. if he’s got no option …yes.
Mike Ghirelli wrote: “It should be no surprise if these destroyer twins gambled on winning an election and getting an Tory no deal overall majority in the HoC, enabling them to dispense with the support of the DUP.”
Recent polls in Scotland have shown significant swings away from the Tories which, in a Westminster election are estimated at some 6 or 7 seats. Currently Scottish MPs comprise 35 SNP, 13 Tory, 7 Labour and 4 Lib-Dem, so an aggregate swing from Tory to non-Tory of 12 or 14 seats would change the parliamentary arithmetic by more than any failure to secure DUP support.
So sad to be looking on from Scotland as England becomes more of a foreign country rather than the region next door. Impossible to convey how mad it looks from up here. If only we had won the independence referendum in ’14, then English identity might have been addressed without this outbreak of Post Imperial Stress Disorder. With luck the answer to Richard’s question for us Scots is — not our business, we are off.
My 50p is still on not leaving the EU. I collect on “Hotel California” Brexit as well.
Dammit, I’ll be humming that all day now….
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…
I know…….
I just hope Labour can come out of it successfully with an ambitious offering to the poor and the youth.
Perhaps not in the next year but in the next five to ten, I suspect the millennials will start to kick the baby boomers out of political office. And policy should be forward thinking about that.
Us millennials have been screwed by the baby boomers on so many levels.
– We had to pay to study at university. The Boomers that were able to study got it free, plus grants. We now have big student debts.
– We face extortionate rents and house prices which have exploded, far outstripping wage increases. And it’s often Boomers benefiting from us paying for this rip off housing.
– We don’t have a prospect of a real retirement. What pensions will we live off? Many of us will probably work till we drop dead like our ancestors.
– We see the environment deteriorating and the Boomers pretending it’s all fine and blocking change.
– We’ve losing at least five to ten years of normal government energy on this Brexit mess (that said – less capacity for the Tories to drive through their evil agenda is perhaps the only silver lining)
– We’re set to lose the right to move and work freely in the EU, start relationships and build families across borders etc. And again, this was mostly due to Boomers voting for some mythical, rose-tinted, everything-was-great-then, distorted perception of history.
Last but not least, we Millennials can see where this is all heading if action is not taken:
– Exploding poverty and injustice fuelling resentment
– Brexit and other instances of rejecting peaceful international cooperation
– International trends towards authoritarian populism
– Nationalism
– Instability and fear
– Shortage of resources and climate chaos
This all points to inevitable societal collapses and war on the not-distant horizon. We understand that. We learnt enough about the causes of the second world war to see what happens when poverty, anger, evil and propaganda collide. We see the parallels. We largely opposed the war in Iraq. We were proven right in doing so, and we know that it was all sold on a pack of lives. We see the misery and chaos that it has unleashed as a result. Yet the Boomers and their parents, who should really be warning the rest of us to not forget the past, appear to have forgotten it themselves.
n.b. not all Baby Boomers are bad. But I think my point stands about inter-generational justice.
Labour must drop its resistance to progressive cooperation with other Parties and push for a shared platform of an ambitious program of development and reconstruction across the UK and its regions, whether Brexit happens or not. Labour knows it won’t win an election by itself. Hopefully McDonnell’s comments re. the SNP yesterday are the beginning of them starting to hand out an olive branch to the other Parties.
I liked ‘n.b. not all Baby Boomers are bad.’
But I have to agree with you, a hell of a lot are
And I have more faith in the generations to come, overall
I remember driving two labour party activists in 1967 and they were discussing the exit polls from one of the constituencies and one said to the other “who the hell does she think she is, that’s *our* seat!” Winnie Ewing eventually took that seat from labour.
I believe that the bulk of the support for self determination is from ex-labour voters like me and that drives what appears to be an utter hatred of the SNP. They consider Scotland to be theirs and the SNP had the gall to take it from them.
I just cannot see them offering an olive branch to them, after all Ed Milliband was given the opportunity and because it was rebuffed we got, and still have, the Tories.
It has always seemed to me that Labour would rather have a Tory government and all the destruction that has implied since Thatcher than co-operate with the SNP, or anyone else for that matter. It’s happening again. While some are calling for a Government of National Unity Labour are returning to their old tribalism – it’s Labour or nothing. But then their leader and those around him cannot bring themselves to say “we need to stay in the EU” – a Germany Plus Brexit – http://www.progressivepulse.org/brexit/a-germany-plus-brexit
The Labour party will always hate the SNP and have no wish to work with them. This is because they believe that in 1979 the SNP brought down the Labour government which issued in the Thatcher government. The reality was that the SNP forced a general election just a few months before it would have been a legal necessity. Those few months would not have made any difference. Coming after the winter of discontent, Labour would have lost anyway.
Graham Hewitt says:
“It has always seemed to me that Labour would rather have a Tory government ……..”
Shouldn’t there have been a full stop there, Graham 🙂
In Willie John’s post on the topic of “Everything Has Changed” at 10:43am on August 8, he wrote:
“I believe that the bulk of the support for self determination is from ex-labour voters like me and that drives what appears to be an utter hatred of the SNP. They consider Scotland to be theirs and the SNP had the gall to take it from them”
It’s not just Scottish ex-labour voters who hold ownership views about Scotland; it’s also the view of all the main Westminster parties and large swathes of the British Establishment. Am I alone in thinking it ludicrously absurd that Scotland has to apply to the UK PM for permission in order for the people of Scotland to hold an internal dialogue and vote on their and their nation’s preferred future? This smacks of colonial overlordship rather than an open democracy.
Scotland is one of Europe’s oldest nations and was recognised a nation state as early 843, pre-dating the merger of various English sub-states into the nation state of England. For all but 312 of its 1176 years’ existence to date, Scotland was an independent state, so, over its long history, independent statehood has been the norm for Scotland. It became a party to the Union with England in 1707 largely for mercantile reasons. It contrast to England it had no national debt then, but its aristocracy and merchant classes, who alone had the right to vote in the Scottish Parliament in what then passed for normal governance, had been personally impoverished by the failed Darien venture and sought to restore their fortunes through a union with England which would facilitate new trading opportunities.
The ordinary people of Scotland had no say in this and were, to put it mildly, strongly against the Union, so a resistance to it has been present ever since in folk memory. During the subsequent 312 years, Westminster parliamentary arithmetic has restricted Scotland’s ability to protect its own interests and this has kept that folk memory alive. It’s not based on hatred of the English per se, but rather a deep-rooted distrust of de facto English governance which has, over 312 years, acted frequently against Scotland’s interests.
Ken
Scotland has as much right to determine its own future as Ireland
That belief motivates my interest in this issue although I am not Scottish
Richard
I am a bit too old to be a millennial like Benz0, but there is certainly something to be said for the post-war generations that are either currently in power or recently retired, having lived through an age of prosperity and relative peace – which for many meant free healthcare, free education, relatively good employment, relatively cheap housing and low cost of living, good pensions – and educated to believe in British – or more specifically English – exceptionalism and “the Empire”. Yet they seem unwilling to listen to their children and grandchildren. Or indeed their parents, who lived through one or two world wars.
The reality of climate change is just starting to kick in, and it is all going to get irreversibly worse sooner than we think. Meanwhile our politicians divert their efforts into self-defeating isolationist sideshows like Brexit, when we all need to be pulling together to deal with the real challenges.
Things are always going to change, but at the moment is hard to see how they will change for the better.
I think we should be very careful with generalisations. It has allowed the triumphalism of Trump in the USA. As one of those baby boomers I voted to remain. I saw, post our joining the EU in 1973, obviously judged in retrospect, a better world but sadly not for long. The Thatcher era, not an EU impost I contend, which led to the emasculation of collective bargaining, the loss of manufacturing and the glorification of the financial sector which were never a benefit to most of us.
The emasculation of collective bargaining has led to wages as a share of national output decline.
The loss of manufacturing, especially in the raw materials sector and our increasing reliance on food imports, has led to currently having a serious trade current account deficit, a situation far more serious than a government ‘deficit’, especially with the falling pound.
The deregulation of the financial sector which has led to the explosion in house prices as banks have been able to lend money for house purchase irrespective of deposits held as would be the case with Building Societies, as they had no licence from the Bank of England to issue money whereas the banks do.
We now see the results , a ‘vote for Brexit’ from a misguided opinion that the economic ills we have today are the result of our membership of that union when, in truth, is the consequence of our own government’s decisions.
David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander were not baby boomers, but divide and rule serves none of us.
I thank you for being generous enough to concede that not all of us babyboomers are ‘bad’. I suspect that many of us, who benefitted from the expansion of higher education in the late ’60s, and the liberal outlook that this encouraged, would agree with many Millennials on what current priorities should be for politics and society, and tend to cast our votes accordingly. I should add that free further education and the other benefits you mention, were not something that we selfishly gave ourselves at the expense of future generations, they were the result of decisions made before we were of voting age. Also, the hugely expanded educational and other opportunities Millennials have now, and which have been available for the young for a couple of decades plus are huge compared to what was available to the majority of so-called Baby Boomers. In fact,
the limited educational opps of the past could account for the conservative/Conservative outlook of those BBs many of us hold responsible for the present dire situation – Brexit, housing, education etc etc. So my personal plea is that we all drop the lazy attribution of all ills to a specific age group. Older people in general suffer enough discrimination without adding this.
A telling point Glynis. The correlation between age and Brexit voting is frequently pointed out. Less often the correlation between education level and Brexit.
Perhaps the significant factor is that far fewer older people had tertiary education and it’s the education that determines their attitudes rather than their age alone. Add to that, tertiary education usually means that people get to live somewhere different, and that exposure is as important as the education.
Please, baby boomers are not to blame for all this. Neo-liberals are, of whatever age.
Yes indeed – I agree fully.
To use the baby-boomer and millennial labels is to move into dangerous territory – the language of divide and conquer and focus group politics.
Avoid.
A wee history reminder/lesson for Andrew and Benz0 – I’ve had this conversation quite a few times before with millennials who seem to think that life was milk and honey in the 60/70s. Though some of my more feeble minded contemporaries (I’m 69) really do think life was better in the 1950s…bring back whooping cough, diphtheria and polio I say…
The 60s was the age of potential nuclear armageddon – MAD. Every bit as bad as climate change and a lot more immediate. We could also talk about Vietnam, Paris 1968, apartheid… (I sometimes wish climate change was more immediate so people would take it seriously. I certainly do)
Yes university was free – but only 5% (roughly) got to go compared to 50% today. There is a tough question about how to pay for a 10x increase, with I think some consensus that the loans scheme is the wrong answer. As or possibly more important is how to provide better education and training to the 50% who do not get that privilege.
As for housing, trying buying a place when interest rates are 16% – I’ll make it easy – multiply your repayments by 3-4 times. And a 20 year maximum mortgage. I still have the original paperwork with my then salary, which I shared with my kids. They stopped complaining after that. We still can’t work out how we did it. Oh and inflation got to 20%.
Then have a closer look at the 70s – multiple recessions and way higher unemployment. Oil price hike, IMF loan to UK. And then we got Thatcher…
That does not mean I do not get very p***d off with Brexit/Tory voting contemporaries and sadly I’ve lost a few friends whose true colours have been revealed of late. The more general and serious point is that simplistic divisions that attribute all the problems to one group do not help in identifying the real, root causes. So North/South, old/young, immigrants/‘natives’. They just add to the divisiveness that has been generated, which Farage and the populists are only too keen to amplify.
So let’s concentrate on real issues such as the loss of social housing, job insecurity and underemployment, education and skills for the whole population, lack of investment by both public and private sectors, rebuilding public services, tackling poverty wherever it is – be it N, E, W … or London (which has poverty rates amongst the worst and the highest inequality).
Rant over – I’ll go back to arguing with other old gits!
I’m not for a minute suggesting that things were great in the past; I’m criticising that mentality as being one of the causes of Brexit (albeit less sigificant than inequality, despair and disillusionment)
As the first person in my family to attend university, I also am aware of the struggle that working class folk have endured over recent decades. My parents were born in poor families, they went to bad schools where working class kids were written off irrespective of their actual level of intelligence or talents. They didn’t get encouragement to achieve more.
It’s with that in mind that I criticise what has taken/is taking place… Improvements in standard of living for ordinary folk have seen, imo a big reversal in many respects over the past 20-30 years. We’re going back in time to the era of Charles Dickens I feel where poverty, opportunity and social justice are concerned. It stinks.
I’m not laying all of this at the door of baby boomers. That would be over simplistic generalisation. Instead it is the economic and social choices that have been made that are to blame.
But there remains a serious issue around inequality on regional, class, generational, race lines that needs addressing. Kicking baby boomers out of politics will not achieve anything, I guess my concern is more about policy being decided by the small constituency of typically wealthy elderly conservative voters who get to choose the Tory leader!!
Policy needs to consider the needs of ordinary and vulnerable folk before it does that of the wealthy.
Thanks for the history lesson. Rather than recapitulating a Yorkshireman sketch on which decades were the worst to be born in and live through, I’ll just say, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
If you are thinking of climate change Andrew Id agree. Lethal when combined with a climate change denying far right.
I try not to rant too often for fear of the Yorkshiremen parallel! Speaking as someone brought up near Carlisle… but I do keep getting reminded of how short people’s memories are or of how little of our history they know. Most recently an LSE Economics Masters, who had been giving me the millennial pitch but who could not get her head around the idea that inflation in the UK might have been 20%+ and interest rates 15%+. Having the nay experienced decades of low rates. Or that house prices might have been much lower but then you might only have been earning £1,000-1,500 a year. If you were lucky! Might also be a reflection of today’s economics education.
Oh, for the lost golden age of innocence…….
……..when we thought Non Doms were a problem 🙂
Hear hear Robin (& others).
I’m 77 (so a pre-boomer!), but also benefitted from free University education with grant, health care, a secure University job and a decent pension, along with peace in Europe, for all of which I will ever be grateful. The sadness is that the younger generation have been and are being deprived of much of what I had. But I don’t see that as my fault. I certainly never voted for it and, having now lived in France for 35 years, was not allowed to vote in the referendum (which irked me greatly & still does), but had I been able to I would sure not have voted for Brexit. Like Robin, I have been shocked to discover that some of my well educated contempories did vote for Brexit.
@ anrigaut : What part of the centralisation of subsidies to landowners turns you on the most?
@Dominic Colon,
I have not the faintest idea why you are asking me this . I am not a landowner and know absolutely nothing on the subject.
But for the avoidance of any doubt, I moved to France because I met and married a Frenchman. It brought me no financial advantage and I I pay all my taxes in full in France.
The key bit which caught my eye was
“and Grieve’s legally trained mind set that is determined to uphold what he thinks to be the UK constitution”
Surely this is the main problem, the constitution seems to be made up as we go along and can mean anything to anybody. Like the Queen is above politics and yet she isn’t, or she is the richest person in the world or she isn’t, depending on who is trying to measure such things.
Watching this Brexit crisis is very depressing but I suspect good will come out of it in the end for the nation, not, unfortunately for many thousands of normal citizens.
Many MPs were too cowardly, waiting for someone else to put their head above the parapet and stop Brexit for them, although they knew how damaging Brexit would be . Now I fear they may have left it too late.
gill says:
“Many MPs were too cowardly, waiting for someone else to put their head above the parapet and stop Brexit for them,…..”
Hmmmm……… Interesting thought. It describes David Cameron, who expected the electorate to save the day at the referendum and make the ‘right’ decision for him. Since then the ‘Will of the People’ meme has absolved MPs of both main parties from any responsibility attaching to them.
Most backbenchers most of the time rely on following the Party line from their respective cabinets, cabinets seem to rely on their unelected ‘advisors’ (aka think tanks and lobbyists, at least in part) and for the past four decades it has been all too easy to pin the blame for everything bad onto membership of the EU………. well that’s the media narrative; I don’t suppose it feels quite like that for the MPs in office (barring the most cynical specimens).
Trouble is….we voted for this….in a referendum and for the governments who brought us to this over four decades. ‘We’ have allowed ‘Them’ to get away with it. If Brexit shows us nothing else it shows that our society is currently divided, polarised even, in every social class (income stratum?) aswell as between the classes.
Richard expresses a tentative faith in an up-coming generation. Andrew suggests ‘we ain’t seen nothing yet’ and I’m inclined to agree that it will have to get much worse before there is the imperative for a critical mass of the electorate to wise-up and accept the responsibility that is implicit in ‘democracy’. I think we’ll know it is beginning to happen when we see a re-engagement in democratic process at the most local level. I see the faintest ‘green shoots’ in my own locality as what were once Local Government responsibilities we took for granted are being undertaken by scratch volunteer groups.
An upcoming generation will have to accommodate this. One way or another by espousing volunteerism as the norm, or by deciding to do it through reinventing a responsive local government with the resources to deliver.
It won’t happen top-down. The ‘top’ is comfortable with the way things are.
We’re seeing it on both sides of The Pond–chaotic, populist leaders who now refuse to play by the rules that got them elected.
It’s very scary. Manipulating rules has always been with us, but leaders who just ignore the rules and do whatever they damn well please, now that they’re ‘in’? That’s not a good development.
Unfortunately, if a majority of people vote for chaos, that’s what they’re likely to get. Our next General Election, whenever it comes, will probably be the most important one of our lifetime. We screw up again, we’ve had it.
The Labour Party needs to get its act together now–if not yesterday. And Scotland needs independence.
Richard Brown is getting warm. We have no written Constitution because the powers-that-be need to be able to use it or ignore it as they please. The EU referendum may have been initiated by Cameron but its conception and fulfilment would have been been way above his pay grade. The focus on two main players leaves out most important one out – the Queen. The notion that she has no powers is a myth. It was created to protect the monarchy, which is essential to preserve the status quo protect the powers-that-be. The Queen is known to support Brexit because it returns full sovereignty to Britain. Any attempt to thwart it on the basis of ‘violating the Constitution’ will therefore receive short shrift from her. How? By advising of the primacy of the ‘Constitutional’ need to ‘support the democratic will of the people’. It’s all so predictable. If I’m wrong the will of Parliament as the highest authority will prevail. Let’s hope I’m wrong!
I do not think we know what the Queen thinks
Sorry, I should have said that we know what the Queen thinks in this instance because Michael Gove heard her reveal it and couldn’t resist passing it on to support Brexit. But the belief that the Queen, as head of the powers behind the monarchy, is not a player is wishful thinking – and certainly what those powers want us to believe, for the reasons I gave.
You believe Gove?
@Benz0
“Us millennials have been screwed by the baby boomers on so many levels.”
I can’t let this go unqualified, sorry.
This is falling into the DailyMail-Sun-Torygraph trap of divide and rule.
Baby boomers (I’m one, born in 58) are as varied as Millenials.
These boxes you bought from whoever invented them so they could screw you better should be scrapped. People don’t fit in them. Not Babyboomers, not Millennials.
A minority of Babyboomers who made it to free university voted against your interests, most are on your side.
A majority of Babyboomers who didn’t get a degree voted against your interests, most are unaware of the damage they’re causing.
Education is the main dividing factor, not age.
Also, If you’d like to find out about the Trente Glorieuses, you’ll see that nothing was given freely, but all was fought for, and it was no picnic. Strikes, demonstrations, May 68, governments falling…
In the late seventies we were on the streets on a weekly basis, and it was rough. No Health&Safety checks on riot police practices I assure you.
There is nothing stopping this generation from fighting for more social rights, social justice, social gains. I wouldn’t advise our methods though, there are others, more peaceful and efficient, these days.
If we managed to do that with successive right-wing governments in France, surely this can also be done elsewhere.
Nothing was given. All was fought for.
I don’t know your age, but I can tell you that your parents and grand-parents are very likely to be on your side, not against you.
Those who mess up with your future aren’t those you think.
Just shake that magic money forest.
58
A good vintage
To build on your points Marie, from talking to academics and from observation, for ‘those who came of age and started work in the late 90’s/2000s, during the Labour government, things were pretty good. Public services improved significantly from Thatcher/Tory days, unemployment was low, university opportunities grew hugely. Apart from the Iraq war there was not a lot to protest about and dare I say it, a relatively politically disinterested cohort resulted. Its certainly true for my own children and their wider network of friends who mostly fall into that group, and lecturers and profs at universities I know have confirmed it. Encouragingly they suggest that a much more politically active generation has been emerging in recent years, as they see the more hostile world that faces them. Be interested to hear others’ perceptions
On a different front, I’d argue that consumerism is also far more of problem now than say in the 60/70s. Without getting into debates about avocado toasts or caramel lattes, peer pressures and expectations are much higher now, egged on by advertising and available debt. This means that a proportionally higher disposable income is needed to fund those increased expectations. I don’t have data on relative disposable income (any offers?), but we do know that unhappiness is as much about relative poverty as actual poverty.
Not an easy problem to tackle but climate change is or should be driving us to much lower levels of consumption than today’s unsustainable levels. It should go without saying that those further up the heap have far higher obligations than those at the bottom who are probably entitled to a bit more ‘consumption’ than they can afford now