I can remember when Conservatives were serious people, with experience of real life that they brought to the task of government. I am not saying that meant I liked them. But forty years ago they had opinions that had to be noticed.
This is no longer true. It could, of course, be said that Labour is in the same boat, except that is not quite true when its leader previously headed a major public body as a qualified professional person.
So what is it that had led to the most particular degradation of the Tories, and their decline into their current mess?
I suggest three things. One is the rise of the professional politician. We are all familiar with the person who left university, joined a think tank soon afterwards, then ended up in parliament, and not long after that became a minister.
The second is the increase in the influence of dark money think tanks that funded so many of these career trajectories towards parliament. We cannot be sure who funds the Tufton Street crowd, but if bums on seats both in parliament and now in the cabinet was their aim then they spent well, albeit at cost to us all.
Third, there is the rise of ideology. If Conservatives were about pragmatic perpetuation of a traditional approach to living that was ill-defined but commonly understood, then modern Tories are all about the promotion of Hayek, Rand and Friedman. Thatcher is undoubtedly to blame for that.
Where does that get us? To the point where people with little or no real world experience try to govern. They do so without consideration for rules, conventions, regulations or requirements because they believe that all of these restrict freedom, and are to be rejected.
They believe that the consequence of this rejection is benign because they have been schooled in a form of economics that says people have perfect knowledge of all that is happening in the world. What is more, they believe that people can instantly react using this perfect knowledge that they have by interpreting the price signals that the market sends.
So, Kwarteng believed he could deliver a mini-budget without the necessary appendages detailing how he might finance it because he thought the world could fill in that detail for themselves. They, he thought, should have realised that it necessarily meant growth and that this meant it was self funding by creating a new equilibrium within the economy where the expectation of that growth should have allayed all fears. His economics made him think that.
But his economics was wrong. People with real world experience know that everyone works with decidedly incomplete information. What is more, their powers of interpretation are decidedly limited. As a result they need data, interpretation, reassurance and indications of risk. Even then they might simply not agree.
Kwarteng did not have this most basic knowledge about his fellow human beings. Believing himself so clever that he fits the utterly false stereotype of the all knowing human that his economics has taught him exists, he thought others to be the same. That was not kind or generous of him. It was deeply delusional, dangerous and plain stupid.
Market reactions should have told him he was wrong. There is little or no evidence that he has heard. No wonder that even the Bank of England sought to place distance between itself and Kwarteng this week, seeking to make clear that they were the grown ups in the room.
Worryingly, and relatively speaking, Kwarteng might be the grown up in the cabinet. Look at the rest, from Truss onwards, for evidence of that. The naïveté, bordering on cruelty in the case of Braverman and others, is staggering, and is matched only by their incompetence and unsuitability for any public office, let alone the positions that they have.
What to do about this? Shapps had given them ten days, which runs to next weekend. Gove is clearly on manoeuvres. Labour has to attack when parliament sits again. But most of all, the exposure of all of this by the media is essential. The fourth estate has to hold these people to account and find them dangerously wanting if this disaster is to come to an end. There are thankful signs that some, at least, are willing to do that.
We need to be rid of the toxic Tories who threaten our well-being and seek to deliver fascism. Combined effort is required. But none will work in the short term without some Tories rediscovering that they need to bring some experience into their party and rid it if those with none of any value to society. I worry that our future is dependent on the chance that the likes of Gove and Shapps might do this. But we have to hope. There are not many short term alternatives.
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Thank you for articulating how things are. Last night I realised the anxiety I felt was solely due to this political nightmare and was thinking for my mental health I should leave Twitter & stop avidly watching news/politics. I’m an ordinary 65yo, recently retired, have a small but sufficient pension & own my home, so how the many people already burdened with financial worries are coping is hard to imagine. I’m no academic but I have compassion and care about others, especially of course for those closest to me. I’ve feared since before the Johnson era about the direction the UK was heading but was surrounded by peers who to my horror believed in him! It’s very sad that it’s taken these recent disasters for them to start to see the light. I hope and pray that those within the cabinet do something as you suggest. I tried to reassure my son-in-law last night that we’re not yet doomed and good people will rise and fight. But, it’s the pain and fear we might have to contend with to reach a solution that frightens me the most. It’s thanks to the many genuine people like yourself and others in the public sphere speaking out that give me hope in this dire situation. Ordinary people like me stand right beside you. Thank you.
Thank you
And go well
The other day a bloke on the train was trying to explain to me the concept of consumer surplus as he’d just thought of it. That in a more free society and with freeer markets both customers get something worth more to them than they paid and producers get more than they would have taken. For crying out loud, what has the world come to when you can’t sit on a Cross Country and be given iea econmics lectures.
The so-called “free market” is one of the most pernicious concepts ever devised.
Yes, of course, markets work when sellers have something they are willing to sell and buyers are willing to buy for a price, and both know exactly what it is and what it is worth. Typically the seller makes a profit (and might have been willing to sell for a bit less) and the buyer gets something they want (and might have been willing to pay a bit more for). This is a “just so” story.
But who builds the market place, and how do you both get yourselves and the product to it and home again. Who provides the heat and light? Who provides a means of exchange that the seller will accept, and how does the buyer get it. Who make sure that the product is as described, and provides mechanisms for redress if the buyer doesn’t pay or the product is not up to the standard promised. Who stops someone stealing the money from the seller or the product from the buyer as they go home.
“Caveat emptor” is all very well in a world of perfect information, with people making instant and perfect choices, with no unexpected consequences, and no need of infrastructure or the law or all the other elements of society that we take for granted. Without externalities, if you like.
It does not exist.
Correct
Fortunately we still have some trading standards officers who take up cases for people who have been conned. Unfortunately many trading standards are run by private companies working for the councils. Instead of getting in touch with trading standards directly, it now has to be done through Citizens Advice.
It’s possible the metaphorical grown-up in the room is the (roughly) under 35 generation who seem to be rejecting the Conservative party on a wholesale basis. This looks to be partly philosophical, younger people are inherently more ‘liberal’ it seems, and partly self interest; they are expected to find a growing number of older people through their tax contributions without having the opportunity to acquire personal wealth in the way their parents did. Perhaps this with bring the Tories to heel as they adapt to stay relevant or, more likely, they dogmatise themselves into such irrelevance that PR ironically becomes their only way of having any influence on government?
I know it’s stating the obvious, but if the country is relying on the likes of Shapps and Gove to rescue us, we’re probably doomed already…
I take any hope I can get where I can find it right now
I’m not relying on Gove or Shapps for anything – for reasons that are obvious from even a cursory inspection of their past behaviour. I’m hoping they get washed overboard with all the other terrible “money is the only metric and being rich is the only goal worth chasing” ideologues. Roll on a Labour and/or Lib Dem coalition that brings in PR and stops any extreme self interested party from snatching the reins of power without an election against.
The idea of the gifted amateur or in the present regime’s case the very ungifted amateur is indeed toxic to have in such positions of responsibility. Two examples from the EU – the German health minister is a qualified doctor, the French Prime Minister is a qualified civil engineer. I read somewhere that an anonymous government minister here has not appointed any advisers to their department as he/she is not interested in the policy area of ministry he/she has been appointed to and thinks he/she does not need “experts”!
To call anyone who votes Tory a “fascist” and anyone who voted for Brexit a “racist” says everything about your own intolerance to democracy
No, it does not. It says a great deal about my intolerance for fascists and racists whose goal it is to end democracy, which goal you obviously support
You know Goebbels said accuse your opponent of that which you do? You just did it
On the day I was born the skies above me were full of RAF planes fighting the Luftwaffe in a battle to save our freedoms. The Fascists were at the gate. At the age of 82 as I prepare to leave this world the Fascists are not just at the gate but actually inside the citadel. God knows what my late father would have thought.
I did not see Richard calling everyone who voted Tory a fascist nor everyone who voted Brexit a racist and neither would I presume to say they were either. The fact that they have been gaslighted by the fascists and racists makes them as much a victim as the rest of us who recognise it!
You are right
I have said neither
But some who supported Brexit and some Tories are either one or both
I rather like the idea of the ‘Cursus Honorum’
In ancient Rome young men seeking to enter the Senate would go through a series of public offices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum
While I do not wish to fetter the discretion of the electorate neither would I wish to deprive Parliament of its next Mhairi Black MP I suggest the expectation that a candidate for Parliament should have some sort of ‘Real World’ experience before standing, including I suggest time spent as a Councillor would be a good start.
She worked in a chip shop whilst getting a first class degree
The combination worked for her
That would allow Johnson to be PM.
“They, he thought, should have realised that it necessarily meant growth and that this meant it was self funding by creating a new equilibrium within the economy where the expectation of that growth should have allayed all fears.”
‘Incomplete information’ may have been missed by Kwarteng, but the underlying, fundamental problem is the ‘equilibrium thesis’. Neoliberalism requires to believe equilibrium is the norm, rather than a special case; a protected, fragile species; that is hard to create, almost impossible to sustain, requiring the unlimited access to and use of public resources to shore-up, and even then – simply cannot be guaranteed.
Minsky demonstrated the factual failure of the equilibrium thesis long ago. Neoliberalism requires equlibrium, it is all it has; an explanatory theory that is demonstrably false. It is a terrible indictment of mainstream economics, as a credible discipline, that it still seeks to sustain it. Economics is simply undermining itself.
I have never believed in equilibrium
I do not think it ever achievable because given the nature of the human being we can always do better
Economics ignored that human capacity
It is not just the ‘human being’ that defeats equilibrium (indeed neoliberalism hangs on because it deceives itself that it can simply ‘manage’ human beings into believing in equilibrium as The Norm: because Hayek once ridiculously pulled it off, by writing, frankly one of the worst books ever written; ‘The Road to Serfdom’.
Disequilibrium, the real constant undertow, expresses the gravitational pull of real events, impinging in turn sharply on human purposes; under disequilibrium humans may drastically change their behaviour and modes of coping; by the presnece of a virus, or climate change (displayed sometimes by long term increases in flooding, exceptional storms – that in turn change human behaviour and their fears and expectations fundamentally); or promote sweeping population migration that itself creates a compounding or exponential human, political, disequilibrium chain-reaction throughout the world.
I do not believe in equilibrium either.
I think chaos theory and fractals is a better representation of reality to be honest as in the argument between nomothetic approaches (the application or identification of general laws or principles) and ideographic instances (the noting of more unique one-off stuff coming along).
I think that real life is a mixture of the two. This common mistake with equilibrium is as an objective that suggests that once achieved you can leave it be (this is a reductionist, simplifying stance seen in bad economics). Like monetarism for example.
There is a gap in policy making for example where the interaction between the nomothetic and the ideographic meet or clash. In short, there is truth or are truths; but these can also change.
What is needed when they do clash or are subject to change is intervention – even the ancient Chinese knew this. In the West, intervention in markets has been undermined and pushed out. This has got to stop. Yes, it’s difficult. But if it’s too difficult, get out of the way with your reductionist bullshit and we’ll find some people who can cope with it being difficult.
Laws in nature are made and broken – like gravity. But laws in man-made markets and situations are another matter. We can control what we create. The question is – are we willing to? And who for – qui bono?
MMT is one of those things that if it comes to pass it not a set it and forget it deal – it must not be used as a nomothetic. It must be defended and in a reactive way to changing conditions (that which is ideographic) and used holistically – for example with changes made to the tax system at the same time to control inflation.
In short, we’ve granted freedom to markets under false laws of effects for far too long and look where it has got us. Now a more informed interventionism is required – and as soon as possible please!
You might a blog scheduled for tomorrow morning
Great post but there’s some bad news Richard: They have delivered fascism already and have been since 2010 if not before.
And some of us like it, by all accounts. Some, but enough.
And I still have to point to this over-arching perverse idea that the market reaction is based on nothing more than the malign and totally untrue fears that the sovereign currency producing British Government will ‘run out of money’.
So here we are, beating up Kwarteng when the adverse market reaction is based on absolute bollocks?! And there’s been more consternation about what the tossers in the markets think than what ordinary people are going to endure.
What times eh? What times?! You couldn’t make it up.
It’s time to rip it up and start again. It is time to resurrect Citizen Clem.
I was also led to believe that the Tory’s were a party for business and that would lead to business like approach to management and especially decisions, strategy, customer feedback, etc.
Imagine if an senior employee went into a stakeholder meeting requesting that the company completely change direction at a huge cost and impact on both stakeholders and customers without a proper cost analysis or justification or even support but just as an idea ? He’d laughed at, kicked out and possibly sacked !
You are completely correct – the majority of politicians have no real world experience either in industry or use if public services, so how can they possibly understand or have empathy with the real world ?
As the book says the best leader you can have is someone who doesn’t want the power but has the knowledge, skills and experience to use the power properly
It would be really nice to agree with you, but having actually spent my career in business, including some of it at a ‘senior level’ and some close to it; thus, from direct experience, and from the comfort of retrospect, I can dispense with the rose-tinted spectacles of the ‘official opinion’. I have seen too many daft decisions throgh my buiness life, made and carried, in all kinds of situations. The rosy glow of the efficiency of business is, I’m afraid another illusion. I note that to make your case, you refer to a ‘stakeholder meeting’; a convenently amorphous and ambiguous setting for your adventurous hypothesis.
My experience of many corporate managers was they were really rubbish
If they weren’t a great many would not have needed saving from themselves by me, which I was happy to do for a suitable fee
This sounds glib, but is sincere; it’s the lying that has enabled the fascism, and it’s Brexit that has made lying emblematic of membership of the tribe.
Brexit will disappear with a Labour victory.
There is zero – if it were possible, less than zero – sign that Labour in power will make Brexit disappear.
I’m rather afraid your line on that is indanger of starting another ‘lie’.
Mr Wood,
“Brexit will disappear with a Labour victory.”
If that happens it will a farcical, unintended consequence of what Labour clealry think they are doing. It was Bexit above everything that turned Scottish independence into a real and present danger to the Union. I have no special axe to grind for the SNP, outside my long held view that the Union offers nowhere good to go for the Scottish people. Brexit was an economic, and critically a demographic catastrophe for Scotland.
In spite of Labour’s predicament in Scotland (one MP, and not even sufficent electoral success to be the official Opposition in Holyrood; a broken credibility-bust, scarcely active membership-shorn third or fourth political force – they have virtually nobody they can rely on, prepared to campaign on the doorstep save by highly selected exception).
The Westminster Labour Party has decided the SNP is far more “The Enemy” of Labour than the Conservatives. It has blatantly abandoned the Scottish people by combining this overwrought hostility,with a promise to treat the SNP as the enemy, while guaranteeing it will not revisit Brexit.
Like the Scottish Conservatives, Scottish Labour has a thin membrane of younger ambitious, sharp suited, neoliberal gophers in pursuit of a political career; but an electoral base that consists largely of bitter, elderly, failed, gloomily ill-informed, inarticulate campaigners whose own past remembrance of political success floated mindlessly on pork-barrel politics, majorities they could weigh (relying on the generational transfer of loyalty they did nothing to earn); and the energy and memorable talents of committed generations of political fighters for the deprived an unprivileged; that are now best remembered for being long gone and long dead.
Good luck with that.
well said.
Beautifully put!
It’s more than the fault of poor economics (the art of explaining tomorrow why yesterday’s predictions haven’t come true today)… this latest crop of Tories are a dangerous mix of populism, laziness and ideology.
Truss’s speech at conference was not so much a dog whistle but a klaxon to right wing dreamers. She outlined all of the people who must now be considered enemies (the “anti-growth coalition), which seemed to be comprised of almost everyone not currently in the cabinet. She was incredibly vague about her conditions for success (what does “growth” mean anyway? I’d rather increase happiness than wealth, for example… so there are many interpretations).
What was really telling for me was that she proclaimed herself to be the first PM who went to a state comprehensive. As Andrew Marr pointed out, this is simply not true… Theresa May went to a state school. The danger here is that Liz Truss has convinced herself that her statements ARE true for no reason other than she WANTS them to be true. No research, no 2nd pair of eyes, no peer review (my word, that sounds frighteningly like “regulation”, doesn’t it?)… just a proclamation made by her of how things stand as she sees them which makes those things The Truth.
It’s utterly terrifying. No hyperbole… it is terrifying.
My belief is that Hayek was a relativist. But believed that within a culture there could be absolute truths. And he believed that society should be allowed, without government inference, to change. He claims to be a social Darwinist.
My problem with Hayek is that his message isn’t coherent, and the reader can pretty much take any meaning they like from it. Hayek denounces Kant, Rousseau, Bentham as constructivist and their ideas are based on rationality and too much government intervention. Then claims to support a different view, the view of Rawls; but on closure inspection Rawls claims his work to be based on the work of Kant, Bentham and Rousseau.
Hayek claims that people are irrational, but somehow as a collective we are rational when it comes to markets, but not when it comes to democratic public choice.
Hayek’s work is probably the best ever written in defense of the free market. For someone who is even the slightly bit skeptical, the arguments are underwhelming. All policy makers should ignore Hayek, he offers nothing of value.
Rawls was right
Hayek was wrong
That’s a bit of a bold summary, bit I can go with it, seeing I think myself a bit of a Rawlsian
No No No!
The best defence of the free market was written by Adam Smith. It’s just that those claiming to keep his spirit alive are selective about what he says and misrepresent him. History has not been kind to him. You have to read him for yourself.
Free markets as described by Adam Smith are markets where bad actors can cause problems and Smith recognised that this could happen in any part of the micro or macro economy – in the labour side or the capital side as well. So he saw sense in some sort of regulation or vigilance (intervention).
Freedom needs to be protected, and for it to be classed as freedom – enjoyed widely in society. That’s what is ignored by Hayek, Friedman etc., whofelt that it should only be enjoyed by a minority.
Hayek – supposedly moved by fascism in Germany – actually advocated fascism as the answer. He was just too stupid to realise it – probably also because he relied on rich patronage to get his twisted ideas taken up.
But this was also the same man who never ever considered apparently the human trait of altruism. That’s how stupid he was.
Hayek’s contribution therefore was the introduction of reduction-ism in economics – an over-simplification of complexity which has led to Neo-liberal capacity to ‘create its own reality’ and ignore real world feedback loops.
My advice if you are looking for free market/liberal advocacy is to look at the work of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850).
Unlike the numpty that was von Hayek, Bastiat was no reductionist (he advocated for example the long term study of economic decisions) and he asks some probing questions about economic management and freedom which are still useful today – problems that need be solved and not forgotten.
Bastiat’s theorising was high quality stuff in my opinion even if I don’t always agree with him – his challenges are also more honest than Hayek, Friedman and any number of the idiots who formed the basis of the Chicago school.
I somehow doubt the Fourth Estate is going to ride to the rescue – I think they’re as much part of the problem as the other three factors you mention – Thatcher knew what she was doing when she destroyed media diversity.
Have you seen any of late?
Richard, enlighten me please. Which parts of our mostly right wing media who’ve slavishly supported the wretched tory party in all it’s disastrous policies for years are finally turning on the lunatics we now have in power?
I ask because I have no intention of buying any of the right wing propaganda rags that masquerade as the 4th estate and seem to me at least to be letting the tories get away with behaviour that if a non tory government was in power they’d be screaming from the rooftops about.
I know you’re busy, but I could do with some cheering up!
Sky
Channel 4
Some, even on the BBC
The FT
Guardian
The commentary is overwhelmingly intended to expose the government
And I may be in The Mirror again tomorrow and was in The National this week
I’ve seen the tone has changed a little, which has to be welcomed, but I think they’d be mostly satisfied with a return to quiet fascism in place of the bonkers variety we have at the moment – after all, the MSM has spent 12 years enabling them.
I have to disagree
The Conservatives. have done themselves no favours by replacing a clown with a naive ideologue, making it look like Cameron and May were almost acceptable in comparison.
Certainly, the rot was well set in with the election of Thacher in 1979 who luckily shot herself in the foot with the poll tax. Her replacement by Major was a relief but even he was tainted by the Hayeck/Rand tendency with the disastrous privatisation of British Rail. Cameron came along in 2010 pretending he was a one-nation green/progressive but came a cropper with Osborne’s disastrous austerity cuts and fell flat on his face with the tragic Brexit referendum and trashing any green measures such as cutting the feed-in tariffs for solar panel electricity generation and complete failure with puny insulation schemes. May could not escape the Brexit shambles and with Farage in the wings waiting to pounce with extreme right-wing racism the Tories felt they had to emulate him, hence Patel and Braverman.
” real life experience ” i understand where you are coming from but dont these cabinet ministers
etc, ever talk to a constituent. read a book. go to the theatre. watch a film. settle down to a bit of telly gawping ?
are they really so, well, properly ” uneducated ” in the real meaning of the word?
where have they been all their adult lives ?
Tufton Street
Yes Richard – a cabinet of fools – but dangerous fools who believe that by uttering something, immediately makes it true.
It’s happened before – a horse was consul in ancient Rome (maybe).
Whether it’s Gove or not, don’t see how they can survive without u-turning on almost everything. They seem to have set themselves on a course that has no feasible solution. Drastic spending cuts and wage and benefits cuts are imperative – but wont be tolerated now that people have cottoned on to what’s going on.
The bonfire of the vanities in the ‘investment zones’ will be resisted and wont work anyway.
They are already collapsing re EU and the NI protocol.
Obviously, they will continue to do massive damage (including thousands of unnecessary deaths – already in excess for months) while they hurtle to destruction.
“…. modern Tories are all about the promotion of Hayek, Rand and Friedman. Thatcher is undoubtedly to blame for that.”
A small, but I believe significant, correction to that in my view, Richard. It wasn’t all down to Thatcher herself.
Thatcher was the first Conservative PM not to have spent some time before coming into office, either working with or in control of the CRD (Conservative Research Deartment) and in what has proved a chilling forerunner of the world that ‘think-tanks’ have made, instead was succoured and in many ways shaped by the CPS (Centre for Policy Studies) the Keith Joseph resourced body. Indeed, the Thatcher years saw a struggle within the Tory party HQ itself between the old CRD staff and the CPS aligned new people – even to the extent of an internally feared purging of parts of the party’s past records. (Some of the records of the pre WWI unionist SRG – Social Reform Group, alumni included both Baldwin and Chamberlain – were happily rescued later by a historical researcher.)
The moral? Beware of the geeks bearing gifts – and even more of those who pay for them.
Daniel Sedman -Jones’s “Masters of the Universe” shows the influence of think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic in promoting neo-liberalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEHJlvbdQIk
and Paul Hoggett on the psychological effects of neo-liberalism. The first five minutes gives the essence about the problem of toxicity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q82Og7kT7t8
Andrew Broadbent said:
“Drastic spending cuts and wage and benefits cuts are imperative” imperative for what?
As the historian David Edgerton has pointed out the Toryism that we have suffered for the last fifty years (Heath onwards) is fundamentally reliant on the Big Lie that Britain is in decline and can only be saved by their latest self-serving snake oil.
That in 1979, as Edgerton evidenced, Britain was at the wealthiest, the most equal and the most self-sufficient it had ever been, is the glaring truth that the lying Declinist Tories have always been desperate to try and bury.
More people than ever before had decent secure jobs that allowed them to live more independent lives, afford better housing, enjoy better health care and even have social lives.
When people criticise, correctly, all those pensioners that were conned into voting for Brexit they need to remember that in the 1970s, despite all the declinist Tory propaganda, the reality for ordinary people was that the quality of their lives was much higher
Indeed it was.
My father was a toolmaker who bought and paid for his first house by 1970. Just after he bought his second home, he was made redundant when asset strippers used the ‘power of the market’ to purchase his firm and liquidate the assets.
From that point onwards, we struggled as a family.
“Sky
Channel 4
Some, even on the BBC
The FT
Guardian
The commentary is overwhelmingly intended to expose the government
And I may be in The Mirror again tomorrow and was in The National this week”
Thanks for the prompt reply Richard. It’s some cheer to see Sky the above list, though I fear I didn’t express myself very well, what I meant was have the right wing rags that support Truss and her idiots finally started putting the boot in as they should, or are they still parroting twaddle to support her that Goebbels would have appreciated?
I have been a reader of the Guardian for nearly sixty years and if it is to be considered a trenchant critic of the Tory party I can only say I am very surprised.
In 1979 John Cole, the Guardians political editor, resigned because the newspaper supported Margaret Thatcher in the General Election.
In 2010 instead of supporting a Labour/Lib Dem coalition it supported a Cameron/Osborne Austerity, Tory led government.
In 2019 it played a key role in monstering Jeremy Corbyn and we all know what has happened since.
At best they are naive,
The BBC has always been the mouthpiece of the British Establishment.
George Orwell said so when he worked there in the 1940s and its bizarre coverage of the death of Elizabeth 2nd, showing no interest in reporting how people in the UK were really reacting demonstrated that they still are, despite all the mendacious far-right claims to the contrary.
As for the rest I would commend the Daily Star.
Its frontpage yesterday showing Truss and Kwarteng driving Noddy’s car with the byline, “Yesterday Truss and Kwarteng U-turned on their moronic plan to make the rich even richer.” did more to communicate the reality than any other outlet of the mainstream media.
The silence in the mainstream media – Guardian included – on the subject of last week’s Al-Jazeera documentaries on the Labour party says it all.
Also, in addition to the above comments on Hayek, apparently Thatcher, in response to the Cabinet member’s question “What do you believe?” took a volume of “The Constitution of Liberty” out of her bag and banged it down on the Cabinet table, saying “This is what we believe.”
Hayek made his money writing door stoppers. That’s all they are ultimately good for.
Marvellous article in the Scotsman today by Joyce McMillan –
“Liz Truss’s ‘bitter-tasting’ economic medicine is right-wing sado-monetarism that UK should refuse to swallow”
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/liz-trusss-bitter-tasting-economic-medicine-is-right-wing-sado-monetarism-that-uk-should-refuse-to-swallow-joyce-mcmillan-3870634
Joyce is a respected *theatre critic*! Our First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is very keen on the arts, so I can only hope she reads this.
There may be a paywall, so here are two key extracts –
“Some of us, though, are old enough to remember John Major intoning back in 1989 that “if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working”; and Margaret Thatcher’s own withering rhetoric about the need to shrink the state certainly encouraged British voters to feel, during her premiership, that they were enjoying the smack of firm government. It’s a line of argument, of course, that still has an enduring appeal to some sections of the British public, who at the slightest hint of declining living standards or failing services, will immediately invoke the blitz spirit, often declaring that bit of hardship will do us good; and it meshes perfectly with the myth that the national finances are just like a big household budget, where we’ve all been “overspending” on luxuries such as decent disability benefits, and now need to “tighten our belts”.
“There is no magic money tree”, politicians like Theresa May declare; only to be exposed as fibbers and fantasists, the very next time the government finds some magic money to fund a new war that it considers important.”
“In the second place, the idea that punitive economic policies will ultimately do the economy good, by freeing up the private money of the wealthy, is increasingly rejected by almost every significant economic authority on the planet.
In particular, many experts are concerned that applying strict “sound money” principles to economies shattered by the pandemic – in Britain’s case also by Brexit, and in many cases still trapped in stagnation since the financial crisis of 2008-09 – will actually prove ruinous, plunging us into deep recession.”
Recommended read – Isabel Hardman, Why we get the wrong politicians. https://www.waterstones.com/book/why-we-get-the-wrong-politicians/isabel-hardman/9781838958473.
My personal view, to qualify to stand for parliament, a candidate would have to sleep rough for a month in winter, and spend a month in prison. Hoping that this would help them consider the effects of their actions.
The courts don’t always help -IMHO
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/07/challenge-to-governments-lateral-flow-test-contracts-rejected-by-high-court
Agreed
This one is very bizarre: the reasons for the decision may not be disclosed
It is striking that the status of the GLP in bringing the case seems to be a factor. The GLP did not have (or presumably represent) an “interest” in the case. Interest here presumably means a direct, material (monetisable?) interest in the outcome. This is potentially an instructive insight into the way such issues have come over time to be managed in a modern, neoliberal society with particular philosophical and legal roots; redolent of John Locke’s post-feudal privatisation of natural rights, to establish their principles in the independent ownership of private property (I oversimplify for the sake of brevity!). In parenthesis, in Scotland, Lord Stair, Locke’s contemporary, combined broadly similar philosophical intuitions, with single-minded, monumental legal heft.
I think its quite easy to sort this out really using quotas stipulating various backgrounds that politicians need to have worked in (seen as expertise) at any one time. Parliament needs to set up a broader background for its members.
You could have representatives in the shape of former:
bankers
medical practitioners
manual labourers/skilled labourers
lawyers/barristers
business people
public sector
unions.
There will be others but what we need is real world experience as close to ‘normal’ or ordinary as possible.
Just an idea.
Quota are always hard…
OK – let’s scrap the quota argument and look at how you’d assemble a good team to achieve something then.
You’d want most of your bases covered in terms of activities and specialisations and you go out and try to get those.
We know that increasingly politics is full of too many of the same sort – you mention them above.
Upon reflection though, there is nothing here that cannot be sorted by proportional representation either!!
Entities like unions also need to be brought back into Government.
I think the easiest way to persuade people that PR works would be to get rid of the house of lords, but have an upper house based on PR. Prem Sikka wants that, and hopes he’s done enough good for people to vote him in.
Many years ago I played with the idea of turning the House of Lords into a Second Chamber that was appointed ex-officio; from the great institutions that actually ‘call the shots’ in society; including footsie top 20; major universities, the major banks and peraps even the Hedge Funds, the major universities, the largest charities, the medical colleges, even the CAs (?), the biggest Trade Unions, and so on. This would be recalibrated every few years – by statute – as some rose to prominence, others sank from grace or significance. The proposition was – to ensure the reality of power was both represented in the public politics, in public – and accountable, in public. My idea actually had some intuitive roots in the unicameral Scottish Parliament (The Three Estates).
The problem is twofold; first the specific membership of the Second Chamber will be hotly contested over its legitimacy. Second, inviting (or even obliging) ‘real political power’ to take a seat does not mean that it will vote, still less either speak or answer for anything; in anything but Delphic, PR screened, lawyer-proofed riddles.
Power seeks the darkness, because …. power corrupts: period. It remains hidden, like the portrait of Dorian Gray.
A third problem of the idea is that it will look for a common denominator to determine the nature of power in society, on a quantifiable and instantly, unchallengable common basis. The only common denominator that lends itself to actual use? Money. The largets charities? Those that attract most money. Simple.
The decision will monetise the process. Why? Because power is most easily assembled, controlled and manipulated through money. Monetisation provides the mechanism, and determinines the outcome.
https://twitter.com/jemmaforte/status/1578072174568652809?s=48&t=BoYmQLytF_t6MX8TL8SADg
These are the comments of a Tory friend of mine – perhaps now that even he has finally seen the light , possibly there is hope .