We are living under a corrupt government. Since it would seem that every UK newspaper now thinks so, I think we can take that as being a fact.
Despite that, Labour has, if it looks at the right poll, a 1% lead in the opinion polls. Instinctively that would seem to be profoundly wrong. So there has to be an explanation.
There are. Just two will do. One is populism, which is the Brexit narrative. I have already suggested that I think this might fail when it becomes apparent that Johnson did not have an 'oven-ready deal', but I am aware that by no means everyone agrees.
Then there is something else, and that is that some people are doing very nicely out of Brexit. Those people who are dining well are not working for a living. This chart is from the Resolution Foundation:
As is very apparent, working for a living is becoming less rewarding, with fewer prospects of change and much greater risk of volatility associated with it now. Those who have to labour to survive have not done well since 2008. Austerity has been very harsh on them. Nothing looks like changing.
But that, of course, is not the whole population. Some own wealth. I stress, some. The latest wealth data from the Office for National Statistics is old, relating only to 2018, but shows this distribution:
As we all known, wealth is heavily distorted in its distribution and the top decile enjoy a massive bias in their favour.
This is also true of change river time. This is change from 2008 to 2018:
After allowing for inflation, during the decade when incomes stagnated the wealthy did very well indeed.
This continued during Covid. This is also Resolution Foundation data ion increases in wealth during the Covid period:
Those already wealthy did very nicely from the quantitative easing inspired booms of the Covid era.
None of this is by chance. Look at the breakdown of wealth, from the ONS:
Property wealth is subsidised by homes being capital gains tax free, and low capital gains tax rates on any other property.
Financial wealth is also boosted by ISAs and capital gains tax.
Pension wealth is boosted by £55 billion of pension tax relief a year: welfare for the well off is very popular.
The wealthy are wealthy in other words because the government is doing all it can to make them so.
What is happening then? Some people are being kept happy by Brexit populism despite their worsening economic condition. Others are being bought off questioning because of their improving economic condition. The result is a perfect storm. The government secures support for corruption. And democracy fades away, as it is.
What to do about this? Start talking about it for a start. But then there must be an appreciation that this has to change. Electorally though that will be hard. The Tories have sewn the country up so that corruption might continue. No wonder we are in trouble.
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I suspect some of it is due to a sneaking admiration a lot of people have for Johnson etc – that if given the chance a lot of people would do what he does and they see him getting away with it, so rather than disapprove they actually think that if they could do so they would do the same. They actually really believe that it is “nice work if you can get it”
I was on a march on Saturday for Climate change. The chant from the young people behind me was “one solution – Revolution”. We have been driven to selfishness and profiting at the expense of someone else right back to the Thatcher era. It seems to have worsened through the covid crisis and I detect even more selfish behaviour. Despite a death rate of 200 daily last week, people are continuing to act like it is over and only care if it is someone in their own immediate family. This is driven by our corrupt and out of touch government with their enablers our newspaper magnets. If we don’t come together now as a species then our existence is finite and this era of humans on planet earth will be over. We head into a perfect storm of our own making – covid, war, climate crisis – despite all our intelligence we can not see what is going on – I hope for the young to take over as the elders have been corrupted and can no longer be trusted to act for their children.
Regretfully agree with every word. We are in a dark place. Despite the exposure of the corruption and sleaze nothing will happen in our soi disant democratic institutions. They have learned to block every avenue of opposition and I suspect they have knobbled the Opposition. You will be familiar with the term kettling from your protest and I think that’s what has happened to us, we have been kettled.
Agree with all the above. The greed of the rich to get even richer seems to be the name of the game. All the talk of “we are all in this together” from politicians is just a fig leaf for their failure of crisis management, whether it is climate , health or foreign policy. They try to put blame on individuals when they are responsible. Look at the mass starvation that is now starting in Afghanistan and for years in Yemen yet the government turns a blind eye and cuts the foreign aid budget and thinks no one will notice.
On the question of Johnson, I think he is tolerated because he does not pretend to be anything else but what he is.
I could call him lots of names but to me he is the ‘Terry Thomas’ of politics: Johnson is a classic English ‘cad’ – and we and he knows he is – just like the audience used to accept the character that Thomas portrayed but sort of liked him anyway. We knew Terry Thomas was usually dodgy but he was dodgy in a loveable sort of predictable way and we would expect him to let us down because he was imperfect – like us.
What mattered was that people knew Thomas was a cad as much as they know Boris is one too. What they don’t like is when someone pretends to be something they are not and deceives people. Because that’s what too many other politicians seem to be into at the moment and in the past.
To me its a typically English phenomenon, but also born out of the fact that the way in which we measure and assess politicians has been changed by the poor behaviour of both Left and Right. We now expect so little of politicians that it is actually dangerous to our own self well-being as we look for more superficial means to assess whether we will vote them (good looking, nice teeth, suntan blah, blah).
This is how the democracy we had – built on progressive policies – is dying.
As for the rest of your post, a brilliantly perceptive summary as per usual about what is bloody well going on.
With you in spirit, Pilgrim, but would suggest that he does pretend to be that which he is not, and his go-to position is deceit. I think many do perceive this but when, as James O’Brien has pointed out often, our national broadcaster won’t allow it’s journo’s to refer to the fact that it’s would be PM is a renowned liar…during an election…because to do so ‘would undermine trust’ then we’ve stepped/been dragged into Kafka.
Anyway…can I offer alternatives to Terry Thomas? On one (his own) view Johnson is Flashman or, better still, Flashheart -on whom he surely models himself?! – but both of those still possess a glamour. Really he’s just Bunter…Bunter as World King.
I fear that Johnson is much darker than any of the examples you give. He shows an utterly callous disregard for others, be they his family, colleagues or the wider population. All are disposable. Utter loyalty is demanded right up to the point that the individual is disposable. Dissenters and critics are ruthlessly discarded and pushed into the wilderness. Death rates from Covid are not a concern, or the struggles of NHS workers trying to cope. All that matters is the consolidation and retention of power.
As a number of observers have commented, the joke is not funny any more. The question is when Johnson’s backers will decide that he needs to be replaced. He is after all only the front man.
I think we are dealing with someone outside the normal
I have to agree that he may be a rather darker, nastier version of Bunter but (with thanks to Wiki!) ‘…a highly obnoxious anti-hero…obtuse, lazy, racist, deceitful, slothful, self-important and conceited…combined with cheery optimism, comically transparent untruthfulness, and inept attempts to conceal his antics’. I rest my case!
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