I recommend the Politico blog and its email briefing, which is free. In it this morning they ask how long the Tories can hold the line that they got everything right. As they put it:
Given this soaring death toll, how long can the government's line hold that it got the initial response right in February and March? From the outside, Britain is starting to be viewed as something of a basket case – albeit not on the scale of Trump's America. Here's the Sydney Morning Herald asking – in detail – “Where did Britain go wrong?” Here's CNNasking the same question over in the U.S. Here's the New Yorker concluding that a “curious mixture of superiority and fatalism” in the U.K. response led to missteps and catastrophe. Here's Canada's CBC News picking over the U.K.'s “slow response.” Here's a writer for the Anadolu Agency in Turkey castigating Britain as “unprepared.” Here's international agency Reuters concluding Britain left care home residents “neglected” and “exposed.” And so on.
Quite.
They can see it.
Sometime soon people here will.
And as the deaths and job losses continue to rise they are going to get very angry.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
“how long can the government’s line hold that it got the initial response right in February and March”, for as long as the Uk meeja groom UK citizens (or serfs). Example:
https://twitter.com/ARMilani_/status/1257780114009534472?s=20
You need to click on the DT picture & then you will understand how significant news is buired under “prof steps down after bonking babe” etc.
UK media are complicit in covering up the governments non-performance. The fatberg/Prime Monster continues to be portrayed as a “cheerful chappie” and Mr Doormat Handjob still treated with respect (despite PPE and tests), ditto Raaab C nesbit. Meanwhile as noted previously, the death toll will soon exceed total Uk civilian casualties in WW2. We are witnessing the result of close to 100 years of “grooming” of the population by the press and other media. The only question left to be answered is: exactly how many people need to die before Uk citizens grow a pair? All the data is out there – but it would seem most people (sheeple?) can’t even bothered to look.
& so to the “thought for the day” with respect to Uk citizens:
“a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals that do not have intelligence, such people are beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice & consent” William Cooper: “Behold a Pale Horse”
“UK media are complicit in covering up the governments non-performance.”
The British Government is governing virtually exclusively through the media. The PM is going to make his big announcement on Sunday, deliberately choosing the timing for exclusively (spurious) media, public communication reasons. Even the Speaker of the House of Commons has protested the announcement should be made to Parliament on Monday. This is our constitutional system that is being left to blow in the wind, hidden under the mask of the fallout from lockdown. It is all quite deliberate.
I have watched carefuly for weeks as C4 News, Newsnight, even GMS have informed us, day after day, time after time that a Conservative Minister is not available to speak when a major issue flares up. The Government only allows Zoom-style, choreographed interviews: staged media events to communicate with the public. They use their favoured press outlets to leak information, to set hares running or test opinion. It is wholly rigged to favour Government propaganda. It is a gross distortion and the Government requires the distortion because their management of the pandemic has been catastrophic.
We had a quiet insight into the feebleness of Johnson at PMQs, when Starmer gently roasted him on the spit; but in a masterly demonstration of quiet advocacy, still declined to destroy the hapless wreck of leadership with which he was confronted, or deliver the needful ‘coup de grâce’. The public face of Starmer’s gracious forbearance was the desire of the Official Opposition to support the Government and country in a crisis; but I suspect that Starmer, even now, is not sure that the British electorate is prepared to abandon the PM, the Conservatives or neoliberalism, even if it is all demonstrably a proven basket-case. It is the eletorate’s chosen basket-case, thank you.
As a Scot, an intuitive sense of this underlying reality provides a sound reason why the logic of Scotland finally giving up on the Union as a hopeless case, is hard to challenge.
Agree with all that
I keep thinking I need to move..
Well I’m waiting for this anger and this ugliness that you keep forecasting. I suppose I live in the sticks where not a lot happens and what does happen seems tinged with wry humour and patience. Most of the people I know have stopped watching the government propaganda slot because they realise the spokesmen are lying. I guess this is what they’ve always done, I.e. try to put a bold face on things. I can’t see them blaming the government any more than Londoners blamed them during the blitz for not having a night fighter of the calibre of the Spitfire or Hurricane as day fighters. It’s not the British way and blame will be found elsewhere. No doubt a lot of the deaths will have occurred because the NHS being a public body suffers poor management and needs to be totally privatised. This will all be assisted by the MSM and a national broadcaster that has failed totally in its task of political balance.
At this time I really miss the pub because it is there that you hear the right wing views of the working class. Boris was a hero of those people before the election so I now imagine that being a covid-19 survivor he will now be approaching godhead. These things worry me because I really don’t see any serious opposition to this government either in politics or in the media. The last election totally destroyed any belief I had of the intelligence of the electorate. While I don’t want to see this anger and ugliness it would be rather reassuring the people of this country hadn’t been quietly dosed with valium in the water supply.
Who is ‘we’? It’s been manifestly obvious to me since day one and everyone else here (mostly).
And Cummings will come into his own, the more people get angry.
He and his paymasters will serve up a banquet of stool pigeons to take the blame.
All aided of course by a Labour party too polite to stick the boot in of course (with the exception of one or two).
If I were on the news I’d just be telling people one thing: that the Tory party want to kill you. It is as simple as that for me. It needs to be said.
The media are also crap well. Every time I see Jeremy Hunt interviewed advising the Government on what they should do and then not being reminded that he had hollowed out the NHS’ capacity to deal with it, I could scream.
The end of Britain – off we go into the night, very politely of course. Yes – no matter what, we must always be polite – even when we are being left to die.
Huh…………………
I was told of UK report on Greek TV:
“UK now has the highest death toll in Europe, and second highest globally. Can the UK government point to mitigating factors? Given UK were the last to be hit and have every infrastructure advantage, I’m not sure government can point to anything that doesn’t point back at it.”
The British working class is uber conservative, has always gone down the road of least resistance. It has only taken direct strike action on pitifully few occasions, no matter what the media say. The French would have taken more direct action and stopped the government. It’s happened numerous times since Thatcher emasculated our unions. nb Blair didn’t repeal those anti union laws.
Does the left have the political will and determination to rally round a leadership with a clear programme for a Green New Deal, living wage, fair taxation etc? Doesn’t look like Starmer and his team. They’re too busy purging more socialists from the party. So even if the Tories somehow lose power, the red tories will continue with neoliberal monetary policy.
At least us Scots have the chance to escape this madness, but we have our neolib battle to fight too.
Yes – the working class are a problem in this country. Ignorance is rife. Anger – like a swollen abscess waiting to be pricked -resides.
But what of the much vaunted English middle class?
I’ll tell you what I have seen as a working class lad who managed to get into University and into a middle class career path:
I have seen the middle class in this country begin to shrink.
But for those still extant, I see a class whose buying power in the markets is key to their security or their feeling that they are secure (even if that buying power is through credit). This gives them a false and rather individualistic view that everything is OK. You could call it ‘the exceptionalism of the English middle class’.
The second thing I have seen is how the middle class have become more interested in how they spend their money and on what. The middle class are more likely these days to read Which? magazine or guide books on the best European wines in order to guide their purchases and investments than they are a good book about fiscal policy or denouncing Neo-liberalism. Nice middle class folk like Will Hutton don’t think that neo-liberalism even exists! It is as if they have become de-intellectualised by shopping.
The middle class gather at parties and in back gardens and luxuriate in their own version of ignorance called ‘received wisdom’. Too many are more interested in brands, spending decisions and the certainty that everything will be OK because they …well…..are middle class and ‘different’ or ‘better’.
The other thing the middle class are is as the receptacle for good old fashioned British hypocrisy – they buy the Guardian and tut at tax evasion whilst fiddling tax returns and whisking their fortunes offshore and don’t think there is anything wrong with it at all.
What has happened? Well, I’m afraid markets have found new ways in which the middle class can be ahead by using consumerism – I mean forget all about serving the country – that has been nullified. It is all about serving oneself now – self realisation through the market by what one buys, not from what one does (but of course, what one does must pay top whack). And all those privatisations needed good(?) middle class folk to manage them and reward themselves highly eh?
There are exceptions of course – the very effective Mr Murphy is I’m sure a damn sight more middle class than I will ever be and his contribution – as well as others – is admirable and speaks for itself.
But in truth I dislike neither the British working class and the middle class. I sit on a fence between the two and my balls constantly hurt.
What I do is pity both because they have been abused and manipulated into passivity and divided by their differences in spending power.
It’s disgusting.
Thinking more about the anger and ugliness, yes, you’re right but it’s more likely to be the government’s anger and ugliness that we witness. We can already see the direction of travel with today’s reaction by Hancock to Ferguson’s breach of lockdown. When all the reckoning is done it will be the public and the NHS that caused this problem while the government behaved impeccably. The media will have it’s own hall of fame and it’ll be full of government ministers. I surprise myself, I’m getting more cynical by the hour.
@ Rod White
“I can’t see them blaming the government any more than Londoners blamed them during the blitz for not having a night fighter of the calibre of the Spitfire or Hurricane as day fighters.”
There is some validity in what you say in that populations tend not to rock the boat in a crisis. However, once the immediate threat is over, they are not necessarily so compliant. In 1945 the country turned its back on the ‘figurehead of victory’ and elected a Labour Government with a 146 seat majority – albeit the WW2 administration was a wartime coalition, but led by the Conservatives.
Because of their loyal MSM support, I still believe the Tories will successfully con(vince) a sufficient number that they’ve handled the compounding socio-economic crisis better than a Labour government would have, and hence retain power in 2024. But the longer term must surely be very uncertain, with much depending on Starmer’s performance & potential popular appeal. Plus, of course, events.
Despite manipulation, public opinion can be notoriously fickle – for better and for worse!
and now Theresa May is asking why there isn’t a more international response – perhaps it is because people like her, who knew better, decided to continue with an isolationist island mentality.
Just waiting for VE day celebrations and the government to remind us how plucky Britain single handedly defeated the Nazis in 1945 and how in the same way with true British grit and determination and united behind the greatest PM since Churchill we will defeat the virus !
I am dreading the whole thing
I can’t even I am not here
As the UK marks (and celebrates?) VE day,
in view of the UK’s Covid performance, German schadenfreude wouldn’t surprise.
Esp as Germany opens up its economy this week
Indeed. Nobody came out of WWII smelling of roses. On the UK side of course if it had not been for the Soviets WWII might well have ended in a stalemate ceasefire. We have never owned up to the 1943 Bengal Famine (over a million in India died after Churchill ordered the food shipped to the UK), nor faced up to Bomber Harris massacring German civilians. Around 30,000 in Dresden only 10 weeks from the end of the war, but e.g. several more thousands in early March 1945 when my wife’s home town of Mainz was burnt to the ground just 2 weeks before the US Army arrived. I read ‘The Arms of Krupp’ by William Manchester and that included that the most modern and largest steel works in Essen was never bombed once, while the workers’ housing estates were flattened. It also noted that the best month for German arms manufacturing was November 1944, for example I think 2000 tanks in the month. So the bombing did not achieve the aim of stopping production and nor did it lead to civilians wanting to surrender. Goebbels actually undertook his pet project of making a full length film in colour of a battle between a Prussian town and Napoleon in January 1945. He took 10,000 troops out of the army for the month to get them kitted out in 18th c uniforms and be extras. Bizarre but true – you can still watch the film too as it survived.
The recent Dunkirk film, while quite good, entirely glossed over the incompetence that caused it and led to the loss of what in today’s terms would have been billions of pounds of equipment. Nor did it mention the decision to sacrifice the Scottish Highland Division to divert the Germans. The entire regiment was captured. I think it was General Wolfe in Canada (siege of Quebec) who said the highlanders were useful in the army and if they were killed it was no great loss.
Unfortunately we (London) are going to treat it as a Brit Nat orgy of bombastic militarism with imperial overtones. What it should be is a sombre remembrance of the losses and destruction all round. For example my wife’s grandfather who was the 46 year old sawmill manager in Landsberg (today Poland) who was rounded up by the Red Army (along with all German men between 17 and 50) and shipped off to Siberia. He is believed to have died of typhoid in 1947. Somebody who lived to tell and got back to Germany last saw him being carted off to the sick tent on a stretcher and that was all that was ever known. The Red Cross is only this year winding up their tracing service for WWII missing people.
Tim
I am with you
My grandfather who gave me my name was a WW2 casualty – serving on a cruise escort for Arctic convoys
I see nothing to celebrate or party about
I do see a reason for reflection
Richard
‘The recent Dunkirk film, while quite good’.
Sorry – I have to disagree – it is very bad. Did you not see the bit where the troops get home on a train that just happens to be a circa 1970’s British Rail Mark 1 coach, that would not have been built until at least the mid fifties?!!! Ouch! Very bad. And too many slo-mo shots of men drowning. Mind you it soaks up time. I know many who think the same.
Other than that, I agree with everything else you have said. The tragedy is that WWII ended up not being the last war. So the question is, what did we learn?
The railway bits were dire……deeply annoying
They could have got it right
Indeed, I visited Mainz 3 years ago and was horrified to learn how the RAF bombed the city just before the end of the war – quite needlessly.
Mark I were the 1950’s. The IC 125s were Mark III, and the East Coast electrication in the late 1980s were Mark IV. I don’t have a big model railway for nothing! Also the Dunkirk film omitted that the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company rescued 25% of the troops at a substantial loss of its ships and employees. I grew up in the IoM and was born there and spar with Richard about it from time to time. I don’t believe traditional Manx methodism has much truck with tax dodgers but neither do we trust perfidious Albion. Experience says you end up like Scotland where I live now.
I was speaking to a friend from Iowa yesterday. That’s in the heart of Trumpland, one of only 2 states to elect Trump if you discount those states with a majority of “none of the above” non-voters.
She was fully aware of how pathetic the Brits have been during the pandemic, even compared to the Poisoner in Chief. I posed the question of whether blaming China and laughing at the Brits was smokescreen for the US’ own failings, but no, that was obvious to them too.
For a party that is so focused on the economy, the UK Tory govt has, with its handling of the health crisis, messed up the economy to the max.
Although may well lead to
– more privatisations of what should be public services (eg Serco getting the tracing contract)
and
– undoubtedly more monopolies as small firms go under and only the big survive.
So that much will be to Tory plan…
I agree with you Linda – the Tories love disaster capitalism and there they are offering fat contracts to Shirk-Co and the like and apparently sending routine NHS cases to private hospitals.
I wonder what has happened to the stock market valuations of our private health firms – have they gone up?
I don’t agree about Germans doing schadenfreude however. Germans I have spoken to just think that since BREXIT we Brits are just crazy. It’s mixture of bemusement and sadness i have come across – not pleasure.
And Germany has enough problems of its own that will have ERG member happy – now that is schadenfreude.
The prosecution of the war by the Allies has come under a lot of scrutiny and I think it reveals the complexity of the times. But also unfair on those who were confronted with dealing with it.
From what I have read, the Allied command was quite sure that they wanted to reduce the casualty rate seen in WW1 in order to keep the non-fighting public supporting the war.
So the air war became more and more important as it was seen as the way of reducing the grind down of ground forces. They even used the large high level bombers to bomb at close range with devastating effect to deal with stubborn resistance. This was done reluctantly in some cases, especially after D-Day working through France and Italy.
We have to remember though what those allied war leaders (civil and military) were dealing with.
The first crime the Nazis (and the Japanese) did (after first getting the population to pour adulation on Hitler and the Emperor) to their people was to brutalise them – turn them into haters of Jews, homosexuals, communists, the Chinese, Australians, the Allies – whatever. The German and Japanese people became war-like, some sort of pseudo-spartan martial society existed where the individual body politic was given over to the State for military means. The whole of these societies was mobilised for conflict on the basis of self defence by striking the first blow (the same principle we now use in the West to go into places like Iraq and why the U.S. would love to go to war with Iran).
One of the WWII theatres that gets neglected is that of the battle for Italy – it came second to D-Day in terms of public opinion and men and materiel. You might try to read Denis Healey’s account of the campaign – he was a beach master at Salerno I think.
The Italian campaign was a meat grinder for the Allies; Germans resistance (especially after Italy surrendered) was extremely effective and Allied casualties were very high. The level of resistance made the Allies even more wary when committing ground forces for the push from the Normandy beach heads (it turned out however that the German’s defence of France was by no means at all as effective as Italy because they thought the Allies would land further North on the European mainland coast but the Allies were not to know that at the time).
So the Allies used air power as the hammer blow where ever they could. Let us also meditate on what was happening as the Allies got deeper into Germany: even children and old men – radicalised by Nazism – were pressed into service. Resistance – often futile – still created casualties and had to be subdued.
Also consider what was happening in the Pacific – here in Europe there is a lot of ignorance about the nature of the fighting there. The Japanese Bushido code had brutalised the Japanese fighting man who thought nothing it seems of flying a fighter plane into an aircraft carrier or walking into a hail of bullets with a sword. The West was not used to such extreme behaviour. And it got worse the closer the Allies got to Japan – read the accounts of Tarawa, Pellillu, Iwo Jima (books like ‘A Helmet for My Pillow’ or ‘With the Old Breed’).
What I’m saying is that I think it is all too easy sometimes to look back and feel bad about what we did because we (here now) were not there dealing with this. My late Father was sent to Lincolnshire as a child to be safe as Nottingham got bombed.
He remembered the bombers going out and coming back in (the infamous day raids). He and others used to wave to them as they flew over. Many a time when they came back, there were gaps in the formations – many of them. Some bombers had holes in their wings; some had smoke coming out of an engine or two and one day he saw a bomber with smoke coming from it peel away and try to land only to see a fireball and smoke in the far distance (he did not see any parachutes). The men in those bombers became carriers of our national guilt; their courage and sacrifice was not even acknowledged until I think the late 1990’s and I was there in London when it was. It choked me up to be honest and I’m no nationalist or warmonger.
The Allies knew that they were dealing with a radicalised population in Germany and Japan and also that they were dealing with leaderships that were uncompromising and obdurate to the point of self-annihilation.
We know the war record of the Germans and the Japanese of that period. We know what happened in Russia under the Einsatzgruppen and the monster Heydrich and what the Japanese did in Nanking; we’ve seen the German extermination camps and the state of our men who were in Japanese POW camps.
At the time, it must have felt to the Allies that they were dealing with societies that negated humanity and that the only way to deal with them was to match that negation with a counter negation ( I think that the Russians accepted this more than us – they had got used to the concept of total war before us – they had no choice). This essentially is what war is: the negation and counter negation of humanity.
Before we look back with guilt and spend time beating ourselves up, I would recommend we just put more effort into making sure that this sort of thing never happens again. We should be concentrating instead on snuffing out the causal elements of such martial, populist societies.
This is a fault in Liberalism itself – rather than taking the causal elements on, it would rather rake over the behaviour of those who had to deal with it, failing to deal yet again decisively with the cause. I refuse to be shackled by such weak argument. Liberalisms also fails deal with the duality of human existence – our ability to create and destroy.
There is however one area of the WWII period that I will agree was not dealt with decently – and that was what happened to the German people after hostilities ended . There are very few accounts of this disgraceful period in Europe’s history but they should be looked at.
One account I would recommend to you all when not engrossed in economic, tax, green, MMT and accounting issues is ‘Orderly & Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War’ (2013) by R. M. Douglas. This account of what happened to Nazi Germany’s women, children and elderly in Europe in the war’s aftermath is truly shocking even though it is a sober and well researched account.
It also has the best explanation of the condition of the German people I have read (and maybe of the Japanese people who were to be victims of two atomic bombs).
Douglas says that the German people were both ‘aggressor and victim’ of the Nazi party – their own Government – and I think that is the salient and fair point. The lesson here is for all voters as well as politicians to remember, especially as populism, nationalism and fascism make an unwelcome return.
And this is where Richard’s ‘courageous state’ model, MMT (or direct fiscal funding), UBI/JG models come into play to deal with the underlying concerns that fuel the populist fires.
As long as there are ‘unsatisfied demands’ in our societies (where, as suggested we take populist concerns seriously as Ernesto Laclau suggests in dealing with them) that are not met by these new ideas, and by a modern Liberalism that still cannot reconcile the State with the individual (who is the individual being considered – the corporation or the voter?), the potential to go back to a pre-WWII state is here NOW and likely to remain and maybe get worse.
That is what we need to be concerned with going forward. Preventing war. Because when we go to war, it’s too late. What will happen, will happen. And we know what happens. And God help us.
Thanks
Read it all
Although I almost invariably do anyway
I’m sorry Richard.
I am admittedly thick when it comes to the detail of tax law and practice, shite at algebra and equations and reading graphs. But I understands principles and how they integrate with each other (or not).
Although limited in some respects, I tend to see things in a very joined up way. And I’m sure that I am not imagining it either. We/you have some great ideas – the answers are there.
Progressives have to wrestle the issues that get people so mad from the Fascists, acknowledge them in some way and deal with them and take back the future in doing so.
🙂
I read it all and totally agree with you. Something is going wrong or we should change our policies.