I was going to write about the importance of Marcus Rashord's work, and his success in overturning the government position on meals for vulnerable children over the summer, but then read Bew Wray's comment on Source Direct this morning and I really hope he will forgive me if I repost it and plug this newsletter from the CommonWeal think thank in exchange:
The thing about the Tories is that, in the end, their essential Tory-ness always shines through. They are and always will be the nasty party because they are made up of people who got in to politics to defend the interests of the rich and powerful. As Boris Johnson's Special Advisor Dominic Cummings once put it: "Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS." They are ruthless political operators who are often able to disguise or deflect from their essence at election time, but who they are never really changes, and so it never stays hidden for long.
Cummings realised that by aligning the Tory party with the Leave vote, he could re-assemble the Conservative electoral coalition along cross-class lines, breaking into parts of Labour's 'red wall' in the Midlands and the North. But it would be wrong to think that this success in the December General Election would be easily replicated from now on, election after election. The next General Election will not be a Brexit election in the way 2019 was. Johnson vowed to build the 'northern powerhouse' in wake of his election win because he knew that he would have to offer his newly won constituencies something more than Brexit in 2024 if he is to hold on to them. But Tories will be Tories - they cannot do anything other than protect their own amidst an economic crash of such gravity. After a decade of declining living standards in the 2010s, the 2020s look set to be something far worse. In that context, all the Tories would appear to have to offer is their old classic formula of divide and rule, but applied in a modern context.
It has been reported that Johnson's advisers are pushing hard for the Prime Minister to embrace the 'culture war', which would explain a lot of their recent moves. Why merge the Department of International Development into the Foreign Office unless you want to send a message that "look, we only care about poor folk here now not poor folk in other countries?" Cutting the foreign aid budget has always been a dog whistle to reactionary sentiment, so now Johnson is going one step further and cutting the whole department. And the appointment of Munira Mirza to head up a new government commission on racial inequalities also speaks to these priorities. Mirza, a long-time advisor to Johnson, does not believe there is such a thing as structural racism and has defended Johnson's Islamophobic barbs in the past.
It is rumoured to have been culture war politics which was driving the initial decision of No 10 to reject Man Utd footballer Marcus Rashford's call for free school meals in England over the summer holidays. As a rich, black footballer, the Tories may have seen a divide and rule opportunity, but it was clear Rashford was uniting people, backed up by his own personal story of growing up poor but lovingly supported by his mother who worked all hours of the day for poverty wages to try to put food on the table. Attempts by the likes of Katie Hopkins to stoke division fell flat. Johnson had U-turned by lunch-time.
There is something in the Rashford story which shows the difficulties the Tories are going to have in getting the country to blame each other for hardship, rather than the government. How can you blame the poor for poverty when unemployment had reached its lowest figure since the 1970s before the pandemic? In 2008 the Tories successfully displaced blame for the crisis onto public services, but who is the 'enemy within' this time? It can't and won't be public services again, since we have just spent months calling nurses and social carers heroes. And of course Britain will have Brexit'd by the year's end, so it can't be the European Union. While divisions rage online on all manner of culture war related issues, 'Twitter rows' remain niche territory, and not where elections are won or lost. Perhaps the rebellious Scots will be the enemy the Tories need, though Johnson has shown no signs of wanting to embrace such a fight yet.
The problem the Tories have is that the Britain of 2020 is their country; the nasty party has been winning for a decade, and this is the nasty outcome. Divide and rule politics will struggle to disguise that reality.
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:
Nice summary, thank you. Giving in to the summer holiday food vouchers was an easy thing to do – a bit like throwing bread to ducks.
What is clear is that this government has its own priorities and is free to push ahead regardless.
”Let them eat cake” & ”Off with their heads!” come to mind.
Lets hope it’s MMT — It will mean we’re really getting into the mainstream.
Katie Hopkins has publicly declared herself to be a Conservative Christian. Really? Even an old atheist like me could direct her to the parable of the good samaritan (Luke 10:30—37) or perhaps Luke 18:15—17. She really should read these passages and reflect. If even someone like me can see the moral and ethical truth in these texts then she needs to drop the claim of Christianity and stick with what is left – Conservative.
Conservative Christian? An oxymoron if ever I heard one and Katy Hopkins is proof personified.
I tend to agree
Desmond Tutu once said such people could not be reading the same Bible that he did
It’s evangelicals that have managed to put Trump into power.
Christian leaders need to take a long hard look at their followers and make it a whole lot clearer what is and what is not christian behaviour.
It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. I find Tory politicians such as May or Drunken Smith who profess their Christianity whilst practicing the opposite to be particularly nauseating.
It’s why they get so upset when a Sentanu or Williams occasionally calls them out – they should do it more often.
Quite so
Jesus was surely a radical, a danger to the status quo of his time. Where are the radical, dangerous, Christian leaders today?
Hidden from view
Agree with all you say. I’m afraid that over the years ahead the nasty party will be doing everything to justify its sobriquet. The right wing libertarians who now control Johnson’s coterie are no better symbolised than by Munira Mirza (and her husband Dougie Smith – https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-hands-number-10-21683722) whose bizarre career has morphed from young communist to Policy Exchange via Claire Fox, the Koch Bros funded Spiked magazine and the Brexit Party (https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/spiked-red-brown-networks-munira-mirza-to-set-up-government-race-inequality-commission).
They are engaged in a culture war which will have a very destructive & divisive effect on the nation. Divide & rule.
To add further to the morning’s despair, the Mirror’s Assistant Editor Jason Beattie wrote this in his daily newsletter: “At some point the Government will have to endure the pain which comes with having to say no. Unlike in 2010 there genuinely is no money left. Yet Johnson and Rishi Sunak have yet to confront this cold reality, not least because they are now having to defend seats where the poverty the Tories ignored for so long is raw and real. (https://email.trinitymirror-news.co.uk/wJQNossQlems95mTuFUynCYvfxJbk68ZNGaM2XMF7CF/WebView.aspx)
I give up 🙁
I have written to Jason Beattie, who I happen to know
I will report if I get a response
That’s a fortuitous coincidence. Look forward to his reply should one be forthcoming.
Let’s say ‘we’re in discussion’
Old Age Pensions?
It looks like it
Sort of off-topic but Andrew Sentance appears to be trying to redeem himself!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/17/covid-19-britain-intensive-care-economy-public-health
Maybe future dialogue possible!
Discussions are scheduled
I’ll say no more
But an economist who is worried about the economics of masks right now is really missing the point
We have an economy blown apart and masks won’t solve that
Although they might leave the NHS alone, there is the rest of the public sector to consider whom I think are vulnerable, as well as the agency QUANGOs. The Tories would say that it was unfair for public sector workers not to lose their jobs just like the private sector.
There is supposedly £12 billion set aside for new homes after 2021 with a new Affordable Housing Programme through Homes England but we’ve heard nothing of it thus far. This could be a casualty. The elderly? Well, even though so many have died from criminally bad Covid polices, would this group stick to their voting profile and vote Tory if their pensions were raided? Hmm…………….?
Europe will continue to get kicked week in and week out. The Tories have a long time to find someone else to kick and I think it will be the public with tax rises and service cuts (it’s our fault after all that Covid has spread).
What worries more though is if/when the Tories get voted out, what replaces them? Another Right wing party (albeit more moderate – the Labour Party)?
No thanks.
While it may be depressing to vote a Labour party into power what real alternative do we have? Okay, vote green or vote liberal democrat but you tilt at windmills with no impact. A gentle plod recognising that attitudes will never change overnight, when their is a general realisation that we have been told lies about Covid, austerity and the poverty that occurs in the populace, will there ever be change.
Until we come up with a better electoral system which reflects voter intentions and aspirations it is manifestly unfair to blame the current democratic deficit on labour.
I read somewhere that America exists from one 6pm news cycle to the next. And George Orwell was well aware that what is eternal can change from one day to the next, as we also witness in the eternal British values that politicians are keen to point out (without ever saying quite what they are). The point being that in some ways, what’s gone before, even what’s just happened or even what it currently happening, does not seem to matter. The tories can and will attack whoever they will whenever they wish, with no regard to past or present.
They know as Orwell did, as well as the MSM do, that memory is short and the truth is malleable. In 2008, even as economies across the world were in meltdown, the tories were spinning a yarn about how Labour had left the cupboard bare, which the Labour party willingly accepted. And how long has neoliberalism held as the truth, not only of the economy, but of human beings as individual, self-interested, self-maximising economic units?
It’s well-understood in psychological theory (as it is elsewhere, including Marxism) that people can believe and live out profound untruths and these are really difficult to shift. So my guess is that the tories don’t care how inconsistent they appear to others, because to themselves their ideology is always coherent, which is: what do I need to say and do right now that will be of benefit to me?
Depressing….
Compelling David – yes – I can see that the ideology can be internalised to such a degree that it just keeps them going.
Having a look at the news tonight, the new Tory bogie men in our society could be teachers or their unions.
And it could be us based on the fact that the Tories think that Covid is ‘stuff and nonsense’ and we are all scared too much and dominated by fear (apparently). That is what one Troy MP said tonight.
Well of course we’re scared – because we can’t get fucking tested easily – can we!!!!!!?
“It’s well-understood in psychological theory ….. that people can believe and live out profound untruths”
The problem is economists generally, and neoliberal economists universally prefer to rely on crude statistics and ropy econometrics, but have no serious interest in or understanding of psychology; at least since Adam Smith.
A very small glimmer of optimism.
I was on an LSE webinar today with Esther Duflo and Abhiit Bannerjee, authors of Poor Economics, and Good Economics For Hard Times. Both books that challenge prevailing economic theories and models, by looking at people’s lived reality. For those who have not read them, highly recommended.
I asked them about how far they thought we had progressed in shifting the prevailing beliefs and hegemony. Duflo came back with a great response – ‘well we got a Nobel prize for our work’! More seriously, she suggested that it was still a problem at basic 101 level, as taught at schools and maybe undergrad levels. However, she felt that as you got through to post grad and research levels, there was a lot more innovative and challenging thinking. There was also a hint of credit to the Post Crash Economics team. Another book that is essential reading
No more!!!!!
But noted ….
Good Economics is an easy read – builds on Poor Economics so can skip that.
Post Crash is a cracker in taking apart how economics is taught and the narrowness of the syllabus
Hi,
Conservative and Christian is not an oxymoron, and it’s deeply offensive to say such a thing.
How could someone who is more right leaning in their views and not always agree with your views be deemed non-Christian.??
Regards,
Robin
Robin
As a person who has explored faith throughout my life and is a Quaker I’ll say very simply that I cannot see any way of reconciling Christian faith with a conservative viewpoint.
Jesus was a revolutionary dedicated to equality and overturning financial abuse. If you can find another reading, good luck.
Any other interpretation looks like a human construct to me. They abound in religion. I strongly suspect most is of that nature.
Right on Brother Murphy, right on!
Hi Richard,
I’m sorry, but that is just fundamentally not true. And just because you don’t reconcile it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Your statement is incredibly arrogant as YOU are saying that someone who is a Conservative, even with a small ‘c’, cannot possibly be Christian and so millions of people who faithfully follow God and worship him are not Christian.
You are also concentrating on earthly things. Jesus was the Son if God whose primary purpose was to reconcile us to God. He was more interested in spiritual matters than earthly matters.
In fact many things he said cut right to the heart and were divisive.
Robin
Of course I am not denying the importance of the spiritual dimension to life to a Christian. I am aware of that. But without doing a full on analysis of why you’re wrong let’s just look at the Lord’s Prayer, properly translated:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
One mention of heaven. And a quite explicit emphasis on earth and an appeal to end poverty and financial oppression.
This is what Jesus said.
Conservative Christianity is irreconcilable with that in my opinion.
Are you really sure you’re following the man you call Christ? I Know this is controversial, but I am not sure you are.
To Robin I would just say that it unchristian to promulgate policies that lead to the inequalities in society. Yes, individual responsibility is important but government determines the framework in which we operate. 120,000 excess deaths have been related to the austerity policies of this government, twice that of the Covid pandemic. We ended up with a recovery from the 2008 crash, where we returned to just about long term economic trends, which was the longest for over 200 years precisely because of an unnecessary austerity programme that has ripped the heart out of this country by reducing its capacity to provide for its citizens and reducing those people the ability to provide for themselves. This is not Christian.
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your response.
I do follow Christ, and he is my saviour.
And yes I am conservative in views, and that is as a result of my true faith in Jesus Christ. And absolute nothing to do with the Tory Party.
And your interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer is incorrect. It starts with Heaven, so the whole concept is spiritual. And so with regard to ‘debts’, it’s using an earthly concept for a spiritual matter. And it is all about our sin not financial oppression on earth. And what is it saying about sin? It is saying every sin you have ever committed has put you in debt to God. You have violated His will. You have rebelled against Him. And all of that has caused you to incur a debt with God, a debt that will be paid, that must be paid. If we accept Jesus Christ as Lord and our saviour and so receive forgiveness for our debts, in turn we should forgive others for their sins against us.
Robin
Wrong
Read Jesus’ first-ever public sermon Luke 4:19
He came to announce Jubillee – the redemption of real cash debts
Respectfully, stop making up what is not there and start reading what is
The man was an economic revolutionary
And don’t object to me calling him a man: that was the whole point
Debate over
Hi Richard,
I never said he was not a man. He was fully human but also fully God.
Luke 4:19 is quoting Isaiah 61:2 and again it is pointing to liberation. It is using the concept of Jubilee from Leviticus where all slaves were freed, all debts were cancelled every 50 years.
The Bible is all pointing to Jesus Christ, and in this context of Jesus’ speech in Luke,
he is painting the way of what he has come to do and is forgiveness of our sins and restoration of our relationship with God the Father, through the death and resurrection of his death. It is providing us with a metaphoric picture of the sinner in the desperate condition of his need.
So respectfully to you Richard, I’m not misreading.
You may be very good at your commentary on financial matters with regard to how our economy works and the various challenges and issues with it, but in this particular instance your are not right and are the one taking things out of context to support and wrongly criticise people.
If Jesus Christ was only here to be an economic revolutionary, as you so call it, then we are all doomed, including myself, as in the second part of that verse in Isaiah it prophesied a day of vengeance is coming…..
Robin
Indeed it is…for the wealthy
Read The Magnificat
You can’t win this one: you’re wrong
Robin
It seems to me that too many Christians rely on the concept of forgiveness. It is as though some of us decide to be as mean and uncharitable as we like in the belief that it will all be OK because – hey – we will be forgiven in the afterlife right? Really?
So what you have is this Christian rhubarb that we can accept living in the now on earth as shitty as possible because everlasting life after death makes up for it somehow and Heaven will be better. Really?
I think that this a poor deal to be honest. We are making a mess of an apparently God given gift (the Earth) and on top of that think it is OK that millions of those supposedly loved by God go to sleep hungry every night and all we have to do is tell God on an individual we believe in him and ask him for forgiveness even though our Conservative views think there is nothing wrong with this. Really? We are born to suffer?
Suffering from an affliction or personal disaster is one thing – but dying of hunger; being hungry; not able to heat your house; letting someone make a profit out of your illness; stealing someone’s wages by making him/her redundant even though you are already rich; picking on people who look different to us and treating them badly; using people as slaves; polluting rivers and poisoning people to make money like du Pont did in America making Teflon or selling powerful opioids you know are addictive to people who need pain relief (again, I could go on).
Is this how God wanted his creation (man) to treat each other?
I talk about these concepts with Christians all of the time.
They tell me that Christ died for our (my) sins. To which I say – no – he died because he advocated for the poor and against the rich and upset those in power at the time so they disposed of him and made an example of him to dissuade others to stand up for the weak. (As Richard said – he was the first progressive – ahead of his time).
BTW – You still get flayed alive and crucified these days for sticking up for your rights and the rights of others but in the West we use lack of money to do it instead.
Not only that, I think it wrong that someone else should die for my sins – especially when I have not asked them personally to do this – nor would I expect them to. My sins are mine and belong to me and I am responsible for them – no one else. And I owe those I have sinned against an apology to them – not to God or Christ – who I believe from what I have read would rather see me apologise and also atone for my sins to those I have sinned against in the here and now. And it is not about debt Robin. It is about justice and putting what you did wrong, right. Atonement for the here and now for your fellow man or being or the planet. It’s not about toddling off to heaven leaving pain, suffering and destruction behind unacknowledged and unresolved.
This Christian mythology just lets us off the hook in my view – makes us less responsible for our actions so that we have God worshipping war criminals like George Bush and Tony Blair and SS Einstatsgruppen murdering civilians with ‘In God we Trust’ engraved on their belts as they did so in World War II. The list could go on. But make no mistake – this idea of forgiveness is key weakness in Christianity and is an enabler of all sort of shenanigans and moral twists and turns. It makes it too easy to be bad.
The other blind spot of Christianity is money (Christians are in good company here as many economist don’t understand money either, along with too many politicians).
OK – as an atheist I’ll accept for now that God made the Earth, the air we breath and the oceans etc. But make no mistake: Money is a man made concept and the way it is distributed is by man – not God – he made the Earth in seven days and had enough on his plate.
It would be nice if man distributed money along the lines of the words of Jesus (God’s son). Only man can solve the problem of money and if he allowed himself to be guided by Jesus, the world would be nicer place – we might have heaven on earth rather than waiting to be dead to see it instead (the worst case of deferred benefits I have seen in any deal all my life).
I’ll finish with these words for all Conservative Christians out there attributed I believe to Jesus in Matthew I think about life in heaven:
“The last shall be first and first last”.
All ‘conservative Christians’ should meditate on this and let it guide what you do in life in my opinion.
Thanks
By the way I am with the one time Bishop of Durham on atheism, which he said was his much preferred option to evangelical Christianity
Robin, it is impossible to be both Christian and conservative.
Firstly, Christ was against the conservatives of his time. He was against the Essenes, the Sadducees priests, the Roman Empire, and of course famously got in brawls with bankers (moneylenders). The Romans themselves reserved the punishment of crucifixion for political dissidents.
Over the centuries Christianity then got co-opted by the Roman Empire, the Paulians, various monarchs and the Catholic Church and so on, until it essentially itself became conservative, and a far cry from the figure of Christ himself.
Meanwhile, Conservatives defend a regime of capitalism and property rights which is inherently exclusionary and which hinged on the violent theft of land and the forced expulsion – even genocide – of indigenous peoples and the poor from said land. Often these violent acts were done in the name of or with the help of the Church.
Capitalism then sets up a system revolving around debt based currency, issued at interest, which is itself immoral, perpetuates violence and poverty, and at odds with all the Abrahamic religions, which were against usuary. Under such a system, as all debts outpaced aggregate money in circulation, you get a situation similar to the monopoly boardgame, in which all wealth tends to creates debt and poverty elsewhere, especially when growth slows. This is why roughly 80 percent of the planet lives on less than 10 dollars a day, 45 percent lives on less than 1.25 a day, why all estimates show even the best growth rates keeping them their for centuries, and why ecological economists show us that these growth rates are ecologically suicidal anyway.
And so conservatism – this regime of property, money and capitalism – is against everything Christ loved: nature, the poor, the majority, the masses and human decency.
A different Robin here. For a radical and fitting relook at the meaning of Jesus I recommend the above Robin read the book, ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’, by James Cone. Jesus was from a class of people despised on race grounds and his death was tantamount to a public lynching. His life and message defied the ruling order who promptly lynched him, publicly, to strike fear into a rebellious underclass. Nothing’s changed there, then.
Jesus was no law-and-order, flag-waving, lift-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps small or large ‘C’ conservative, but rather a radical. And, by the way, Jews of Jesus time did not understand themselves in the dualistic terms we modern Europeans inherited from the Greeks with their dualistic separation into body and spirit, so it would be a mistake to read any of his teachings in that way. Jews thought in terms of the whole person, so any references to saving have to do with the physical as well as the spiritual.
Furthermore, Jesus message was not about ‘saving’ for an afterlife a list of people who can intellectually assent to a list of doctrinal formulas and statements (what modern, evangelical Christianity refers to as ‘believing in Jesus’), it was and is about bring all of creation back into unity and harmony with its creator by showing us how to live, love each other and accept that we are loved. It was about radical transformation, of individuals, but also of communities and of society at large.
This love Jesus lived, preached and demonstrated is not something he teaches us to conserve, or dole out sparingly to those who look or think like us, or who prove themselves duly just or deserving. Jesus instructed his followers to be bold, reckless and generous with love, looking out for caring for and lifting up the lowliest and weakest and even most undeserving among us and is society.
He also, in his faithfulness to his message despite opposition and in the face of and through death, teaches us to be uncompromising and true to this love, because ultimately, if enough of us commit to it, it can change the world, for nothing can stop it – which is what the story of resurrection illustrates.
Like Richard, and Pilgrim, I’m struggling to see anything in that life and story that conforms to a conservative world view. I may be wrong and you may have a very different idea of what you mean by conservative. I hope we can at least agree that all of life and indeed all of creation is precious and worth conserving. That might be an interpretation of conservative I could even buy into.
In so far as I have any dealings with Christianity its Anglicanism, however there seems to be a lot of interesting Catholic thought, notably ‘Distributism’ and of course the ban against Usury remaining until the 19th Century.
Anyone here qualified to say anything about it?
Catholic social teaching is actually pretty good on economics…
There are other concerns….