I posted this thread on Twitter this morning as there is only really one story of relevance today, and that needs to be seen for what it really is:
Let's assume Johnson is going. We all know that he is. What then? That's the real question. And as it stands the answers are not looking good. A thread…..
The fact is that Johnson has to go not because he has failed but because the Tory party chose him knowing that he would fail. That was not just because of his personal failings. It was also about the policies he was promoting.
The Tories chose Johnson to deliver Brexit. It was always going to be a disaster.
They also chose Johnson to take on the state and diminish it, a policy seen through attacks on the NHS, BBC and other institutions, including those relating to law and order and defence, all of which are also in parlous states.
Underlying their support for Johnson was a desire to govern solely so that the power of the state could be used to extract value for their chosen elites at cost to society at large. Covid was just a gift that has kept giving as cover for this, but it was always policy.
I would argue that the continual attempts to divide society, over migration, the EU, the right to protest and vote and so much more are all party of the same policy. They are all deliberately designed to foster hatred in some and fear in others.
The aim is, to use the Tories' current favourite word, implicit. It is to fuel discontent to provide cover for their policy of dismantling the state as an effective agent for the delivery of services whilst ensuring that it can still deliver riches for a few, unchallenged.
Call it trickle up on a grand scale, if you like.
The whole Cabinet signed up to this policy. The right wing of the party are furious that the elements that promote division in society are not being delivered fast enough for their liking. The moderates have departed or been expelled. The Party is rotten to its core.
The failings seen are not in that case just about Johnson. He delivered as required. All that the Party regrets is that he was careless enough to have been found out to have been pursuing the dual agenda of us and them. That is why he must go.
But the agenda will not change. That is now deep in the modern Tory psyche. That it happens to look remarkably like fascism is of no consequence to those who think they might win from pursuing it. It was always thus, of course. That's how fascists win power.
So whoever replaces Johnson, as they surely will quite soon, makes no difference. Sunak, Truss, Mordaunt, Zaharia, or the outsiders Hunt and Tugendhat, do not change this. The far right will demand from them just what Johnson provided. The policy will stay the same.
There will still be Brexit hardlines, Covid denial, no real action on climate, an indifference to the needs of people and services and those employed to supply them. Law and order will only function when it suits their own purposes. And blind eyes will still be turned.
So let's not pretend that the end of Johnson is anything to celebrate. He is just another Tory leader to be treated as expendable when their usefulness in delivering the greater goal of crushing society and the checks and balances that sustain it is the real agenda.
In other words, Johnson is not the problem. He is being disposed of simply because he no longer meets the need of a Party desperate for power in pursuit of the wanton destruction of all that is good.
There will be a Tory in Number 10 after Johnson departs. In the short term they will revive the Party's credibility. They will use that power to do things to date unimaginable, like leaving us on our own in dealing with Covid.
Society they will say, implicitly, does not matter because, they will announce, we cannot afford public health. It is random chance if we die, suffer and are harmed as a result, they will imply. And anyway, they will imply, the fittest will survive, which is the goal.
And, what is more, only those who are the fittest should, they will imply, survive. For the Tories are, they will hint, the Party of the winners. And that is what the policy is about and who it is for. The rest can be ignored.
So do not celebrate, for there is worse to come, and they will do their utmost to make sure we cannot ever be rid of them. Gerrymandering and voter exclusion is but the start of that.
In that case worry if you are young, because you have no economic value, unless you were born with a silver spoon firmly in place.
Worry too if you aren't amongst the most well off, because wealth is a sign of virtue.
Worry most especially if you are sick or have disabilities and need assistance to manage either for you are a burden, as their denial of funding to the NHS will imply.
Worry too if you are old for unless you have wealth to pass you are a burden on society. Their policy on care proves that.
Worry too if you think differently, come from somewhere different, and think you have a right to celebrate either, because you are ‘the other' who must be vilified and abused.
Worry that all this kerfuffle about Johnson hides what is really happening, which is that the Tories are simply ensuring that their agenda can continue to be delivered uninterrupted without being spotted for what it really is.
Worry that there is more to come. And that the more to come will be at cost to you, your loved ones and all that you value unless, perchance, you choose to be an oppressor. And even they will live in fear, because that's how oppression is maintained.
And don't doubt that there is fear underpinning all this. You can see it written all over Johnson's face now. He realises how ruthless the machine with which he has engaged - the Tory Party - really is now. It is about to spit him out, unloved. That's what they do.
There is but one thing to do now, and that is to rid ourselves of this cancer within our society and all that it stands for.
We must hope for politicians who can achieve that. They are what we need. Until we get them the worst is to come because the Tories are still in Number 10. Until they go the threat is very, very real.
And remember, they're only getting rid of Johnson to make things worse. That's the real story they will not tell. But that is what is happening.
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The Conservative Party used to be just that – conservative. Its aim was to preserve the privileged position its supporters held in Society. In recent times it has been hi-jacked by extremists… and you are right, Johnson’s departure (when it happens) will be because this extremist agenda will be better served by another leader…. and that is scary. They know the next election is lost and want to move quickly and as Randolph Churchill said “beware an old man in a hurry”.
Indeed
Hopefully Starmer continues to purge the hard left and makes Labour electable come 2024. Would be ideal if momentum followed Corbyn to form a new party. Clear daylight then. The centre ground who vote Tory will then shift to Labour .
@ Alan Pardew,
The course of action you suggest, not that Keir Starmer is in any need of suggestions, is likely to split the left vote even further and guarantee a Tory government for the foreseeable future.
As things stand at the momen,t we will see Jeremy Corbyn standing against the official Labour candidate in Islington North with the support of an army of Labour members both locally based and from further afield. The Tories will enjoy the spectacle of a very divided Labour party even without a split.
Keir Starmer needs to take Harold Wilson’s advice. If he wants to stay in the circus he needs to learn to ride two horses at the same time. Even if he thinks that Labour members are only good for delivering election leaflets, he should recognise that the election won’t be won without the contribution of enthusiastic foot soldiers.
It might be argued that there was a time when the Conservative party did stand for conserving things – institutions, the law, tradition and so on. Obstructing progress yes and a few other undesirable aspects but nothing like what we see now. A party that is apparently hell bent on destruction of those same things they might once have wanted to conserve and protect. Now it is only about extracting as much as they can for themselves and their mates whilst trashing the country and blaming the problems on ‘others’.
And that may yet be their downfall, that more moderate, centre-right conservatives will leave in disgust. No longer voting for them and possibly taking their votes elsewhere. However I don’t doubt that Johnson’s Conservatives, for that is what they are, now made in his image (and that of UKIP), will do more to divert attention and trash the country before they implode.
Sadly I totally agree with you Richard, it’s looking very horrible indeed. Don’t get sick, poor or weak.
The Conservative Party is still just that – conservative. Its aim is to preserve the privileged position its supporters hold in Society. So many subsidies to the rich and the old are out there I’m losing count. The double of an assetocracy and gerontocracy is what he have become. Kenneth Miller would be turning in his grave.
I think your holistic approach to politics is superbly done and absolutely pivotal at the present juncture. The progressive section of the English population is still too embroiled in local fire fighting, new laws on gerrymandering, franchise restrictions and new police powers, for example. Of course, all this needs to be campaigned against , but with the emphasis on the part played by each of these issues in the coordinated assault on democracy and civil society. These are not simply individual, nasty policies and your website broadens an understanding of that reality. This may assist the development of the sole, current hope for English politics, an anti-Tory alliance on a programme including proportional representation. The Starmer cabal will never agree to that, but there are plenty in the Labour Party who would.
‘Trickle up’ – I like it. How apt.
I thought that you were on Twitter first this morning. I can’t go on Twitter as I’m too busy really, so thanks for killing two birds with one stone so to speak and sharing.
Those Red Wall Tory MPs love their MP wage and expenses and no doubt want to keep their lifestyle. Johnson is a major threat to that.
And now he is going to cave into the anti-lockdown brigade and other horse trading to save his neck. We must all be exposed to more risk to save his position.
This Tory Government has reduced this country to a farce.
We are undone.
God help us if a new and deadlier variant of Covid makes an appearance.
The thread is going very well on Twitter – they like them!
@ Clive Parry
You say “[The Tories] know the next election is lost and want to move quickly”
Alas, I’m not as confident as you are that the Tories have already lost the next GE – certainly not against the main Opposition Party, Labour (led as it is by SKS, who for me is Sir Useless Woodentop, cleaving to, and surrounded by, supporters of what I call “flat-earther economics” – SKS has recently ruled out nationalisation of energy firms, so clearly hasn’t read, or if he has, dismisses Richard’s cogent argument for the measure, because he still thinks the earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around the earth, so pre-Copernican is the Labour Party’s grasp of economics)
Even a Progressive Alliance may fail to dislodge the toxic Tories, if their ID card requirement cuts out 2 million anti-Tory voters, allied to their gerrymandering in constituencies, and rigging the Electoral Roll to exclude students, who no longer have to be kept updated and informed by landlords, I believe.
We are experiencing a slow motion Fascist coup, and what I call the refeudalisation of society, into a 1% of new Barons, with ALL the rights and NONE of the obligations (including the obligation to pay tax), and a 99% of new serfs, with ALL the obligations, and NONE of the rights, having to pay for everything that used to be free at the point of delivery.
As to the funding of neo-feudalism, the original feudalism rested on wealth from land, with Barons being granted the income of fee farms.
Landowners will still benefit from that, but modern wealth mainly derives from government revenue streams, which will be farmed out to the new Barons, as were the fee farms in the Middle Ages – the whole PPE, especially the VIP route, as well as the Track and Trace fiasco, shows that this is already in operation.
And to take small issue with Richard, this isn’t “trickle up”, but, as Michael Meacher said, it’s “cascade up”!!
I’ve long believed Thatcher’s unstated gameplan was the refeudalisation of society, which she knew would take at least a generation to achieve, but I think even she would have baulked at the crude brutality and criminality of the current bunch of shysters masquerading as Tories.
Quite simply, they are amoral asset-stripping Mafiosi, and no longer a political Party, and were it possible, should be disbanded, and barred from office and election, until either they have proved their reformation sufficient to be readmitted back into society, or else they have been replaced by the decent Conservatives we all know, or know of, who have also been shafted by these Mafiosi. Those decent people are still there, they just need a new Party to belong to.
As to those real Conservatives being shafted, the same is true of the whole 99%.
The bottom 2 quartiles = 1-25% and 26-50% know they’ve been ignored and shafted.
The next, third, quartile – the 51-75% have been progressively shafted since 2010 (look at the attack on pensioners, the raising of pensionable age, the removal of the free BBC licence to the over 75’s etc, and the threat to remove the Triple Lock, to focus on only one part of the third quartile).
But the real truth is that even the 4th quartile, the 76-99% are next in the sights of the Mafiosi – the very people who cheered on the Tories in their rampaging attacks on the other 3 quartiles, in the delusional belief that they, in the 4th quartile, were untouchable.
Here the Mafiosi need to tread carefully, for the French Revolution started in the middle to upper middle classes, then spread beyond to the other, lower, classes.
The pitchforks could be coming for them (see Nick Hanauer at https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/).
Final point – I resigned from the Labour Party after the 2001 GE, in protest at Blair’s pusillanimous and unconstitutional rejection (kicking into the long grass) of the Jenkins’ proposals on Electoral Reform – unconstitutional, because ONLY the electorate as a whole had the power to make that decision, not one man, even if PM, or one Party, even if in Government, and maybe not even Parliament on a free vote.
I came back when Brown took over, hoping he was more favourable to PR – a folorn hope, alas.
But it seems to me that, while globally, Blair’s involvement in the Iraq invasion was wrong, both morally and societally (given the casualties and destruction and instability resulting therefrom) domestically, his failure to go for PR was equally destructive, as I’m sure the years since Blair scraped back into power in 2005 (35% of a 63% turnout = 22% of the total electorate. That he got a 60-seat majority thereby is damning for those arguing for FPTP) would have been quite different. For a start, there would have been far more Green MP’s, and Farage wouldn’t have been able to use UKIP to finally a takeover of the Tory Party).
Blasted autocorrect.
In my last sentence “finally” SHOULD read “finagle”
Good to see Nick Hanauer get a mention. I’m a fan of his Pitchfork Economics podcast which I think would appeal to many of those here, if if it does have a US focus
Yes indeed. John Harris in the Guardian said much similar. Always thought partygate and getting rid of Johnson was a bit of a sideshow. The new regime will probably even more extreme.
As you say, the Party has been hollowed out and is basically UKIP and Tea party – dominated by brexit, covid and climate change ultras .
Extreme ‘libertarians’ who will happily sacrifice the lives of thousands or hundreds of thousands on the altar of the small state, everyone on their own, keeping the global City fraud centre untouched, rigging the rules to keep themselves in power, funded by corrupt Russian and global criminal money, maintaining fossil fuel profits, inhibiting global vaccine production etc etc etc.
Toxic nut cases like Baker, Halpen, Halfon, Walker etc., annointing Truss, Sunak ,Tugenhat, or Hunt as the next front person….. It makes one feel sullied and ashamed even having to look at such a grotesque process.
I suppose one hope is that the country may be beginning to understand the sheer economic and social destructiveness of their project, with all its incoherence and internal contradictions, which could well implode the next regime sooner than later.
But if the Mail and Telegraph have anything to do with it, the fight will be really nasty.
Agree with all of the above. It does create a sense of almost hopelessness in dealing with the evil that is being perpetrated by this government and the hard-right financial interests driving it.
One crumb of comfort is the House of Lords rejection of many of the anti-democratic clauses in the Police bill last night such as criminalizing protest and preventing previous protesters from exercising their rights.
quite – I never thought I’d be so thankful for the Lords. Excellent work by the greens in bringing labour round!
To sum up Andrew Dickie in a way, it seems the modern Right will always steal a march on the Left or progressives because quite simply they know what they want and make it happen. They’re quite aggressive and have few scruples when presented with an opportunity. In a way its admirable – they go for it.
As much as we can look at New Labour’s time in office with fondness and horror (Iraq, Ecclestone etc.,) NL were still too timid really in dealing with the faulty under arching fundamentals of our state. They did not take their opportunities like the Tories did.
As long as this timidity (lack of courageousness) exists in alternatives to Tory fascism, there’s not much hope in my view.
And that’s a shame because what the modern Tories truly lack is restraint – they go too far with market fundamentalism and state retrenchment like the zealots they are and then have to go too far again in their efforts to spend vast amounts of money covering up what they are really doing.
This lack of restraint is potentially they’re undoing. If it can be exploited. The question is, how? And by whom?
The history of pre-WW2 Europe shows that, in the face of the growth of fascism, the centre and soft left chose not to oppose or fight the threat because they believed that the fascists were a more preferable option than the real left. In Germany, the SDP thought that Hitler’s government would soon collapse, when in fact the first thing he did was ban the opposition parties, and in Spain, in the face of Franco’s advance, the government thought it best not to arm the workers, who tended to beat the fascists back when the clashed.
Food for thought, I think.
[…] By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics. He is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Tax Research UK […]
There were three striking features at PMQs today; and none of them were Davis’s theatrical denouncement (Cromwell used it to eject the Long Parliament; and Amery echoed, against Chamberlain; but it does probably dispose of Johnson in the Chamberlain bin, rather than the Churchillian Pantheon he craves).
The most striking feature was Johnson throwing off the mask of contrition to assert a more aggressive, adimissive and more plausible pose; the second was the floor being crossed by a Red Wall MP, Christian Wakeford (some media reports alleged that he snapped after being bullied by Whips); the mask of contrition was nowhere to be seen when the PM said the Conservatives would win back Bury south at the next election. The third, was a small, but i thought telling insight when Ian Blackford questioned the PM; challenging Johnson to resign: the PM stole a glance at his watch. Perhaps he was already bored with the litany of protests from MPs with angry constituents, some of whom had suffered greatly through lockdowns for the common good. Every picture tells a story.
adimissive? Dismissive.
Don’t worry Mr Warren – we no wot you mene – we all do it!
How about a movement / party that can deliver PR for starters, that alone would practically finish both parties off , in their current form
And then some investigative journalism that calls out the Tory wreckers and in partricular those dark forces they represent , be nice to know who is going to send me and mine to hell in a handcart
I quite liked Corbyn , along with many others his 2 General polling figures , make for interesting reading
The Dark forces did swing into action with venom , suspect they were more than a little nervous and frit of him
I don’t like twitter. But you use it to create a new art form, somewhere between poetry and political commentary. Reminds me of Bertold Brecht. Congratulations!
And good things come out of it, such as “trickle up”.
PS I tried to find sth by Brecht that fits the occasion. Not sure I hit the best one, but the following does express the contempt of the rulers for the people. From a different time and place, but the same basic sentiment.
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
I am flattered
I worry about what Johnson might do if the situation in Ukraine kicks off. He is very likely to use it as a political tool to bolster his position in both the Party and the Country rather than making any serious attempt at statesmanship, which isn’t his forte anyway
Agreed
My fear too. The wretch, and his equally wretched party, will wrap themselves in the flag. As always, a war is a very useful diversion for politicians in trouble.
(Not that I have any time for Putin, and think that the West needs to stick together and stand up to him. He is a vicious, clever, dangerous thug bent on destabilisng us via disinformation (worked well in the US and UK) who wants to restore the Russia’s sphere of influence, by any means possible).
How apposite that it was another Johnson, the great Doctor, who coined my favourite description of patriotism; ‘Patriotism sir, is the last refuge of the scoudrel’
So true – one of the most insightful quotes. Along with ‘love of money’. Both reflected in Johnson’s government.
Whether its Putin or Trump/mini-Trump, Saudi and Iran, they are all at it. Usually via proxies who are the ones that really suffer. Ukraine, Yemen, Syria…