I said yesterday morning that I was not making forecasts for the day. And in the end Truss accepted the inevitable and resigned.
As Truss was my MP for a while I remember the fuss when she was appointed the local candidate. She was not much liked by many then. She proved as disastrous as felt likely at that time. I have no sorrow at her downfall.
Instead I see this mess as the inevitable consequence of forty years of neoliberalism hollowing out the state and its institutions in a deliberate attempt to undermine the democratic process to secure advances in the interests of a wealthy few in society.
That deliberate process now leaves democracy so undermined we cannot get rid of the rotten party that imposed a rotten prime minister and which sees no problem with giving us another rotten replacement who they think will have the right to govern for two years.
I do not believe that they have that right. At this juncture I do not think they have the right to govern at all. I also very much doubt that they can.
If Johnson is the new leader I think sufficient Tories will rebel to pass a vote of no confidence.
If Sunak or Mordaunt secured office I doubt either could persuade a majority of MPs to vote for their legislation. The Tory party is now too divided and factional for that to happen, with those factions openly defying and obviously loathing each other.
There is, then, no one who I think could command a majority in the House for the Tories now. The semblance that they are a party has gone. A party that has for four decades promoted the idea that self interest is paramount is now being destroyed by it. That is the only justice I can see in the situation that has developed. Everything else is too grim for much comfort to be found.
And then, when this hollowed out wreck of party collapses the fascists will be ready to pounce.
I take little comfort from what has happened.
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Meanwhile, according to a Monbiot article in Wednesday’s Guardian “the government is carefully criminalising every effective means of protest in England and Wales, leaving us with nothing but authorised processions conducted in near silence and letters to our MPs, which are universally ignored by both media and legislators.
The public order bill is the kind of legislation you might expect to see in Russia, Iran or Egypt. Illegal protest is defined by the bill as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. Given that the Police Act redefined “serious disruption” to include noise, this means, in effect, all meaningful protest.
For locking or glueing yourself to another protester, or to the railings or any other object, you can be sentenced to 51 weeks in prison – in other words, twice the maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting in the road, or obstructing fracking machinery, pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, airports or printing presses (Rupert says thanks) can get you a year. For digging a tunnel as part of a protest, you can be sent down for three years.
Even more sinister are the “serious disruption prevention orders” in the bill. Anyone who has taken part in a protest in England or Wales in the previous five years, whether or not they have been convicted of an offence, can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests. Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at … particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.
Who are the criminals here? Those seeking to prevent the vandalism of the living planet, or those facilitating it?”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/19/van-gogh-sunflowers-just-stop-oil-tactics
I agree with George
This Bill has passed all its stages in the Commons (https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3153) and its first stage in the Lords.
What proportion of our politicians understand the essence of the climate science: ‘economic growth’ is accelerating the climate catastrophe that will diminish our children’s opportunities until, very likely, the climate dominates their lives.
Protest is needed.
Are there enough Lords who care about this?
The Conservatives have been displaying a number of fascist tendencies over the last few years – to use some of Eco’s terminology: cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, action for action’s sake, disagreement as treason, fear of difference, appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with plots, enemies who are both strong and weak, permanent warfare, contempt for the weak, machismo, populism, newspeak.
You can see it particularly in the sloganeering, lies, and contempt for rules, of Johnson, and his acolytes fighting a culture war against “woke”.
I suspect Johnson is spent as a political force – too many see through his bombastic bluster and his habitual lies – but who might take his mantle? Farage? Braverman? Badenoch?
If the fascists do pounce, their likely extinction as a political force would be the only benefit from Labour’s fumbling of proportional representation.
Nothing to disagree with here except this needs noting:
‘And then, when this hollowed out wreck of party collapses the fascists will be ready to pounce.’
The bad news is that the Fascists are already here and have been for sometime Richard. The sort of politics (anti-politics?) the Tories have brought here has always been authoritarian and undemocratic because its about vested interests getting their own way with as few compromise as possible – I think a lot about the way unions have been treated tells us that, and the green movement too.
I say it with no sense of satisfaction or superiority. It just is.
I think that for the Tory Party now it is a case of damage limitation. There is a saying, live to fight another day. I fancy that certain factions within the Tory Party may decide to baton down the hatches. The ERG would die a death as a separate Party. They know it. I fancy they will keep their heads down. Now, I hope they don’t and that the in-fighting continues, but it’s just possible that with the risk of electoral wipe out they will not want to rock the boat whoever is elected. Let’s face it, there is no unity candidate for the Tories. They all represent factions now. The best that many Tory MP’s can do now is just shut the F-up and supp it up. Live to fight another day or risk the consequences. I reckon that is what the “grandees” are probably telling them.
I hope you are right in your analysis, but are the Tories really that dumb? If they are they deserve everything coming to them.
The Guardian today is arguing that two economists, Gerard Lyons (banking) and Julian Jessop (IEA), advised Liz Truss at Chevening that markets could crash her plocy if not carefully executed. Larry Elliott, Economics Editor writes: “It suggested the best policy option for the UK was to have higher interest rates from the Bank of England to curb inflation and tax cuts and spending increases from the Treasury to mitigate recession risks.”
Higher interests are proposed, which will suppress economic activity, while simultaneously public spending increases will stimulate economic activity, and counter recession. Forget the attempts of the economists to distance themselves from the Truss-Kwarteng policy execution disaster, but remember this is a “”growth, growth, growth” strategy. Could someone explain to me in what way committing scarce resources on policies designed inevitably to create directly opposite and contradictory financial pressures on the economy simultaneously, is a persuasive, wise use of scarce resources? Even more perplexing is trying to understand how such an inherently self-cancelling, endogenous operation will stimulate growth (I threw in ‘endogenous’ because economists throw the word around all the time, invariably to no insightful or useful effect whatsoever) .
The policy was crap from the outset
From both the bank and Truss
Completely agree with you, Richard.
Agreed, and you don’t need to have any grasp of economics to see it. To explicitly give extra to the very rich while the majory struggle with debt and rising costs is political insanity.
Who is going to be the fascist dictator? We don’t have a history of that extreme in the UK. Although there is always a portion of the population inclined that way there is also a lot of resistance.
I saw an article in the Guardian about a financial scam that was brought in after Thatcher was ousted. I have never seen any mention of it until this article.
After just 44 days Truss will get for life £155K. This nice little earner has been enjoyed by all prime ministers since then. For some reason May has only got around £57K per year.
Truss as Foreign minister spent over £2 million on travel in just 2 months, around £456K on one trip to the USA. This is the same woman who ignored Civil Service advice not to spend £3K on a meal for 2 people.
I cannot understand why very few point the finger at Tony the Liar and Gordon Gecko who could have set in motion a peaceful social revolution in 97 as the Dutch did in the 1960s with the Provisional Government of the Netherlands – the Provos, I had a friend who was a leading member.
With an overwhelming majority – introduced pure PR / destroyed the BTL scum / introduced real rent controls / mandatory high quality maintenance programmes for all property / capital gains tax on all property transactions / banned upward only commercial rent contracts / introduced high quality apprenticeship schemes / closed down all tax havens, most of which are Crown Colonies.
The only way the Nasty party and the uber rich could have stopped this was by a coup d’etat and as a member of the EU this would have been impossible. Two excellent documentaries on Al Jazeera have shown how rotten and anti real social change the Labour party is.
The shadows of the 1930s are deepening and not only in the not United Kingdom.
The figure is £115k. It is not salary. It is expenses, and they must be incurred
There is no excuse for Lyons or Jessop saying what they did. They are not the only ones trying to save face. I can see them having to lie low for a bit.
I agree that there was no logical or best way for a mixture of higher interest rates, lower taxes and higher spending to work because it all falls into the trap of tax and spend anyway – the artificial mode of controlling courageous Governments that says if a government does not tax it will run out of money. Essentially the government was brought down by its own lie it’s been telling the British public for too long (there is no such thing as government money). Bizarre!
And all the interest hikes do is reward rentiers based on (I suppose) faulty trickle-down theory – as if they had created a virtuous circle of some kind. But it would be the markets trickling down apparently – at cost and also maybe helping to boost inflation and creating bubbles via credit? How the hell was that supposed work?
I think that we can agree that what was needed was real fiat money from the government targeted at particular parts of the economy, plus taxes aimed at higher income brackets and carbon producers to try to tackle inflation (plus say a lowering of VAT).
However, even now, the lie about tax and spend still dominates, even though Truss has gone. That’s all that I can think of at the moment – what has actually changed for the best? We are still caught in a Thatcherite straitjacket, whatever short term satisfaction we might have.
The country faces a seminal moment. An incoming government will face chaos on a scale not seen since WW2. Commentators are saying an incoming Labour Government will have to be cautious and improve things a little at a time. Sounds reasonable . The flaw in the theory is while working people are suffering there will be a tornado of criticism from the hard right media. They will blame Labour for everything that goes wrong. Spreading lies and disinformation . The public will fall for it and back will come the Tories. If Labour don’t implement fundemental change right from the start they will fail as New Labour failed. The leadership must study the 1945 Labour Manifesto. The policies the Attlee Government implemented can be adapted for this awful nightmare . The 2017 Labour Manifesto is well worth revisiting. I have no faith in the Starmer leadership. Everyone in the Party who expresses socialist opinions is in danger of expulsion. Yet the only path to recovery that is permanent is socialism.