Tea, toast and marmalade. A warm Saturday morning in the garden. And time to reflect on a week.
A week when people in England began to realise just how bad the Covid wave about to hit them really is.
A week too when the UK's scientific and medical advisers still stood beside the prime minister when he was justifying what other scientists are describing as murderous policies.
A week when the prime minister gives his first speech for ten months and managed to announce some new football pitches. As if that will make up for his racism, or be the basis for ‘levelling up'.
A week when it became apparent that we have labour shortages because that's what happens when you combine Brexit and a policy of letting a pandemic rip through a population.
A week when, after all, it became clear that the economy is not a coiled spring writing to release its energy, bit is rather more a tamed animal, cowering in a corner, fearful of its fate.
But more important in the long term than all this, a week when floods in Germany and Belgium made clear that we have ignored climate change for much too long.
Despite which it was a week when we learned that the government has no plan for how local government fits into its plans for climate change.
And it was a week when the government refused to consider cutting VAT on green retrofits for UK houses.
A week, maybe. But a week that told us we have a racist, democidal government that is bereft of ideas and indifferent to the biggest threat we face.
I am pleased there is still tea, toast and marmalade. There have to be pleasures in life, even if there are almost none in our political, economic, equality and medical dimensions of being right now.
Take what comfort you can. The worst is yet to come.
Sorry, but it's true. The country chose Johnson. The harm will last a very long time.
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Enjoy your tea, toast and marmalade Richard. If these photo’s are a view of the future there may not be much more!
https://twitter.com/Indy_Quint/status/1416075854623485955
So much damage has been done in so many different areas. Economic, diplomatic, social and regional divisions, health, institutions, justice – the list goes on. Repairing the damage will take decades, not least because the destruction of trust is at the heart of much of the damage and that is hardest to rebuild.
When the Tories and the country decided to elect Johnson they chose someone who is demonstrably, provably, seriously dishonest but they wanted to believe the lies. It is small consolation but I can’t help thinking that the Tories will eventually be massively damaged by this. At some point people will realise that everything that is blamed on ‘others’ – Covid deaths, shortages, Northern Ireland etc – is 100% the fault of Johnson and his government.
If the floods in West Gremany, Belgium, Holland, and even some London basements are not a wake-up call for drastic counter climate change action then the ostrich-like blindness of government is the height of criminal negligence.
Can I just add to the bonfire of misery? Second reading of the Health & Care Bill passed this week – bye-bye publicly-owned health services. Even if the claims prove true that the quote often attributed to Bevan regarding the NHS was not his, the message of those words would seem to be entirely accurate.
Add to that Starmer and the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party apparently still refusing to offer any credible opposition except to their own party members while managing to lose yet another by-election (Tividale) to the Tories. I genuinely wonder if the Labour Party now is nothing more than an anachronistic leviathan unaware that its own demise is already underway.
I can only hope that as the Labour Party loses ever more political traction that even the most venal of the party’s neoliberal core will accept the need for a Progressive Alliance. I know Richard has mentioned this at least once before but regardless of where any of us individually sit along the so-called political spectrum we will achieve nothing other than more privatisation under further Tory governments until we have a such an alliance built around policies of full proportional representation and emergency action on climate change. I freely admit my hope stems more from increasing desperation than a comfortable reliance on demonstable facts.
We should decolonise the curriculum but we should never decolonise breakfast.
🙂
Interesting, isn’t it, how so much of British culture (with a small c) derives from the products of empire. Oranges and sugar to make marmalade; tea, perhaps a spoonful of sugar; maybe even a porcelain teapot or teacup. Not so much tobacco nowadays, but chocolate, bananas, … the list goes on.
More widely, so much of our fresh fruit and vegetables, raw materials and finished products, labour and capital, are imported.
All this will pass, but we may have to redevelop a taste for kippers and lamb’s kidneys. Or perhaps olives and dates if climate change continues.
“The country chose Johnson”. No. England and Wales chose Johnson. Indeed, not even England and Wales. The Conservative Party chose Johnson as their prospective Prime Minister, and 42% of the people of this country who voted agreed with that choice, and so chose Johnson as Prime Minister. Most of us did not choose Johnson as Prime Minister. Most of the people I know or have spoken to over the last 16 months – and they include a wide variety of people, native born, immigrant, white, black and other ethnic minority, upper class, working class, middle class, male and female, lefty, liberal, or old style decent conservative – neither voted for Johnson, nor admire, support, believe in him, nor think of him as anything other than a lying, egotisticaql bloviating toerag. It was a creaking, ancient, lumbering, pre-modern constitution and voting system that enabled this man to become Prime Minister. Thge country did not choose him.
Yes, that is correct. It is our useless FPTP two party winner takes all, loser get stuffed Westminster system that put this pack of wretches in power with a majority of 80. Very few people I know have any time for Johnson. Quite a few who voted Tory in 2019 only did so to keep Corbyn out. Fairly or unfairly, they voted for what they thought was the lesser of two evils.
This is what FPTP, and Labout tribalism give you. Its all too easy for the right to win in this binary choice environment, given that they control most of the media/propaganda machine. A few hundered votes here and there in a number of marginal constituencies is enough. While I’m effectively disenfranchised living in a safe Tory seat.And what’s Labour doing now? Continuing its internal civil war; Starmer is expelling more of the hard left, while they in their turn would rather the Tories had won Batley and Spen so they could increase their attacks on Starmer. Brilliant.
Richard,
Everyone of your blogs is a criticism of someone in authority and how what are doing is wrong.
Yet, you seem oblivio8s to the fact that you are in the minority of nearly every issue.
If you really had the courage of your convictions and were convinced that people actually thought the same as you, you’d put you money where your mouth is abs stand for election.
You won’t though, because that would actually require you to expose yourself and your opinions to public scrutiny, rather than just censor the dissenters on this blog.
Dear ‘Disinterested Making A Spectacle of Yourself’
All you are comparing Richard to is ignorance. That’s all.
Even those who are angry with the Tories remain ignorant of much that is discussed here. They want change but could not describe what they want because they are fed on a diet of the usual bullshit like tax and spend, TINA etc. The behave like dogs chasing their own tails.
The other issue that marks you out as particularly stupid and ill informed is in your admonishment of Richard for not going into politics.
How many politicians actually believe in anything anymore? Most politicians these days are empty vessels of PR programmed by special advisors who have undergone the usual programming at some dodgy institute somewhere that sups up the Neoliberal canon and whose funding is usually opaque.
They are just a front for the real power in this country – the monied rich who don’t need to go to parliament – they just buy policies and politicians that favour them by donating to those who will listen. Not hard to do when you’re flashing your cash. And that is how democracy is fucked.
Your manifest stupidity is in your rather naive and quaint outlook that British politics is other than what I described. All you have to do is put yourself up for election eh?
Yeah……….right.
Richard’s world is world of ideas that politicians could use. He has every right and every reason to stay where he is. He has been close before and he will get the opportunity again. Sooner or later his time will come. And it won’t matter that he might not be here to see it. What matters is that he said what needed to be said and called out the bad at all instead of remaining silent.
And do you know why?
Because he is right. Many of the ideas that dominate contemporary political economy are just plain wrong. Like you.
Thanks
Richard,
Everyone of your blogs is a criticism of someone in authority and how what they are doing is wrong.
Yet, you seem oblivious to the fact that you are in the minority of nearly every issue.
If you really had the courage of your convictions and were convinced that people actually thought the same as you, you’d put you money where your mouth is and stand for election.
You won’t though, because that would actually require you to expose yourself and your opinions to public scrutiny, rather than just censor the dissenters on this blog.
You very clearly do not read this blog, in which a great deal of the attention is given to policy creation
That is the role I am interested in
But you did not bother to notice that. I wonder why?
policy creation for who??
The OECD at one time – country-by-country reporting
The Green New Deal has gone round the world and I was a co-creator
Have you heard of tax justice? I co-created that too
What have you done?
If trying to get things right makes Richard in the minority on nearly every issue then that just makes it more important that he publicises his views.
If you really are a “disinterested spectator” why bother to read the blog and why comment. Your actions belie your title.
The trolls feign indifference
‘Disinterested’, presumably not uninterested.
Disinterested implies impartiality. It is clearly not that.
Disinterest does not imply impartiality. It is possible to develop an intricate philosophical analysis of the distinction (cf. Henberg, Brandt etc.), but disinterest generally implies a lack of a stake in the outcome, or even of indifference; the classical statement of impartiality was given by Adam Smith in the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’, and implies the presence of a nuanced and sensitive moral semsibility.
The public consumed what they were given in terms of information about Corbyn and Johnson and then chose Johnson.
They were misled in an age of mis- leading-ship (agnotology) and there you go.
I was there. You were there Richard. We saw it happen.
I still say that you cannot blame the voter. You can blame the Tories and their rich backers. You can blame the Labour Party and the complete gutless horlicks they have made of being in opposition.
What we are seeing I would argue is a failure of politics – not people. As for the rest I agree – it can only get worse.
But no one really voted to make their lives worse. People want hope so Boris gives them “levelling up”. And then does nothing. Sooner or later something has to give on the rampant lying.
As I try and enjoy another milestone. Without cake. Not do any work but can’t avoid. A beautiful hot day and cloudless sky of the last weekend of ‘freedom’ , cancelled Monday as it must. The narrative is underway with the Health Secretary, still not officially resigned from his commercial posts before his re-appointment to government, declaring himself covideded ! What better excuse to flip flop again. As the British public are yet again treated to a Charlie Brown pratfall.
Will they always remain total Charlie’s? Hell yes.
Don’t think Johnson – he is the clown puppet cipher, the frontman with the faux Churchillian rhetoric.
Think ERG now morphed into CRG – the power behind the throne, the praetorian guard of the predatory plutocrats ever purging the party of its wets, its non true believers. Sucking the lifeblood out of our liberalism and our internationalism while nurturing the over-financialised casino capitalism that is now our economy.
Brexit was their apogee, unshackling the tax free enterprise orbiter from the mother ship of European egalitarianism.
Now with only token opposition they are our governors. – gaolers even.
Karl Marx will be watching but he was only ever a theorist.
“The country chose Johnson”. No it didn’t, that implies that the UK government is democratically elected in free and fair elections, where votes matter. The evidence simpy doesn’t support this assertion.
You are right – my mistake
“the UK government is democratically elected in free and fair election”
Oh Jesus which neoliberal conspiracy theory is it now?
Being a Scot, who has just returned from a couple of weeks in England visiting family, I feel, more than ever, that Scotland must leave this Union. My relatives, all professional people, now mostly retired, whom I once thought of as reasonable people, now seem to have morphed into clones of L.B.J. Without exception, they are solidly behind the Tories, and Johnson, whom they seem to regard as some sort of messiah. While of course this is a very small sample, if it is replicated across England, then it seems that as long as we remain in an increasingly dysfunctional union, we will suffer the consequences.
Blimey Alex, what type of professionals were they? Professional criminals? Conmen? Public relations aka Liars?
professional tax minimisers – the single appeal of the Conservative Party to top and middle englanders
For interest’s sake may I draw peoples attention to this;
https://www.thenewliberals.net.au/policies/
These guys are not UK based. A relatively new Australian political party. Their leader is a human rights lawyer who’s background consists of fighting government deportations for refugees, primarily against Dutton’s fascist regime.
In Australia the conservatives call themselves ‘The Liberal Party. An oxymoron if there ever was one.
This party hopes to reclaim the name, even going to court over it. They currently are only standing candidates against Liberal seats. Their hope is to gain the balance of power and form a progressive alliance with the Greens, Independents and Labor.
Just look at the policies. They favour MMT, a rational climate policy, free education and healthcare, a compassionate refugee policy, support for the arts and so on.
I am not saying they can lay a golden egg but if people genuinely care enough I feel a progressive UK party with similar aims could be a beacon of light.
A party that wants proportional representstion, that is genuinely not racist or misogynist, that understands international cooperation, comprehends climate risk and implements sensible tax policies to build a better society. Surely anyone who doesn’t want that is a tiny minority.
They have Steeve Keen advising them on economic policy.
People like Richard play a vital role by being apolitical. But it doesn’t stop a rational political entity from taking that advice and affecting policy.
It just needs the genuine will of the people to form a block that wrests back control from the ideologues and fascists. PRUK if you will.