I posted this thread on Twitter this morning:
Yesterday I suggested that Sunak was likely to fail. The thread in question got read a lot. Perhaps that was because as the day went on it became increasingly apparent that Sunak's failure almost inevitable. A thread…
Sunak's speech as he arrived in Downing Street suggested austerity was coming. The instruction to not smile that he worked so hard to comply with was clearly meant to send out a signal of the severity of the measures he plans.
However, as I noted at the time, instead of achieving that goal it did instead send out the message of a man scared witless by the seriousness of the task facing him.
The appointment of ministers confirmed that suspicion. Of course, you could argue that appointing ministers who have failed many times before is an attempt to grasp at what little talent there is in the Tory party.
Alternatively, you could see it as the creation of a collection of comfort blankets, each intended for now to avoid the need for Sunak to make decisions and each also expendable if their actions might require it.
Sunak said he would win trust. He will not with this Cabinet, made up largely (77%) of men and privately educated (well over 50%) people. There was no attempt whatsoever to be representative.
Some of the particular appointments were astonishing. It is hard to ever think of Dominic Raab as anything but dim. How he gets to be deputy prime minister again is exceptionally hard to work out.
Hunt is there to signal austerity, and nothing else.
Dowden and Williamson are retreads given the scope to be right wing enforcers.
But why such enforcement is needed with the likes of Therese Coffey at environment is hard to work out.
The worst of an exceptionally poor bunch was, however, Braverman. If Sunak sought to give offence he succeeded. If he thought this was wise, he was universally condemned for failing to be so. The world was horrified.
Even Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times, a journalist with Tory bias if ever there was one, could not hide his disgust at the return of a minister known, he suggests, to serially leak government documents.
That, though, is not her main crime. That she is a racist, fascist, xenophobe is that crime. She brings the politics of hate to her post. She taints the whole government with it as a result.
By making her Home Secretary Sunak clearly indicates the direction of his government. It will be hard right. It will pursue dogma rather than policy.
It will be indifferent to the consequences, whether they be for migrants, the people of Northern Ireland, or those unable to afford food on the table or a roof over their heads.
This government exists to deliver division. Only by doing so does it think it has the slightest chance of re-election. As such any opportunity to promote hatred within our society will be both created and exploited by it to the full.
There are going to many victims of this government. Most of them will already be vulnerable. None will deserve the treatment that they get. And what all will need are politicians willing to stand up for them.
Words will not be enough, although they will matter. What will be needed are plans for action. Plans for the society we actually live in. Plans for migration. Plans for sustainability. And plans to deliver security for people.
Which means plans that guarantee decent roofs over heads, and food on tables. Plans that ensure people have the chance to partake in society. And plans for the education people really need, as well as plans for their care and old age.
All of which will require plans that do not pretend that the country is like a household and that its supposed national debt is actually its fundamentally important money supply, and plans that do not bow down to markets.
Plans, in other words that put people at the heart of everything.
That is the exact opposite of what the Tories are doing right now. To the Tories people are expendable fodder, to be used and then discarded, much as Sunak no doubt feels about his new ministerial team.
That is wrong: people, whoever they might be, are what politics has to be all about or it is merely an exercise in power-crazed abuse. We need politics for people now. Nothing less will do. But we will have to live with the abuse for the time being instead.
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Last night I watched ITV’s documentary ‘America: A War Within’.
As usual a key piece of reportage was put on far too late to be useful.
It was quite depressing to watch to be honest but also instructive. The revolutionary forces that Marx spoke of have actually come to pass in ‘God’s Country’ – but are now being funnelled towards a weird mixture of religious fundamentalist nationalism with a strong right wing streak. The revolution has been privatised and culturally appropriated by Uncle Sam.
I wonder what he’d make of that?
All I saw was a fascist polity playing with fire by stoking up such sentiments, my main worry being that these real people who have been hurt by American financial capitalism – who are a salty bunch armed to the teeth – essentially paramilitaries in my view – spoiling for war.
This war could be anything – civil war or cannon fodder for some other ideological war abroad (China?). It’s scary stuff it really is. And how much are the Tories copying the U.S. model?
And on the radio this morning – double standards again – Xi Jinping being criticised for a third term by the markets by wanting to stop young Chinese playing video games to make profit whereas the Tories being praised for bringing stability by the markets with yet another un-elected Government?!!
You could not make it up. How can people who are so wound up focus on what needs to be done with the environment and economic thinking?
As for Braverman – an interview with some one who used to run the UK Border Force this morning revealed that the UK apparently does not have any removal agreements with any other country except Rwanda!! Not even with the French.
I see Sunak as holding inflexible attitudes and positions though maybe for somewhat different reasons. Every time he has spoken, I have seen an inflexible mind at work, unrelenting, never wavering, undeviating from his preferred position, not because he can’t, which may have been to some extent a problem with Truss, but because he does not wish to. In some ways, Sunak seems to me to be fanatically neoliberal, significantly unable to think differently unless forced to. What those forces might be, I would not like to guess at this juncture.
Richard
You’re absolutely right about Suella Braverman. Last week she engineered her resignation from the sinking ship of the Truss government by deliberately breaching the Ministerial Code. Five days later she gets her job back from the new PM. Of course it was Boris Johnson who decided that whoever the Ministerial Code might apply to, it wasn’t him or any of the ministers in his government. Clearly, by handing back one of the great offices of state to someone who, by her own admission, broke that code last week, Sunak has shown he doesn’t think it applies to his government either. Never mind the absence of any sanction for breaking the code, what does it say about Sunak in reappointing someone who couldn’t even be honest about why she wanted to leave the post under Liz Truss?
i think you potentially underestimate what the general public think about all this.
Everyone i’ve spoken to in the ‘managerial’ classes thinks what Rishi is doing is correct – painful medicine that we must all go through to pay back the debt that was made due to covid/furlogh etc.
The BBC propaganda machine are already pumping out all the articles that millions will read
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63386350
Average joe will read that and agree with it, it sounds so sensible. If there’s one thing the british public love, it’s self inflicted punishment.
I work in finance, surrounded by accountants. When the government announced the energy scheme to help with the bills, their response on the morning team call was ‘well….the problem is it has to be paid back doesn’t it’.
you are dealing with 40+ years of Thatchers legacy of TINA, and “there is no government money only taxpayers money” and so on….it is part of the public consciousness. For thoes of us on higher than median wages, all of this is just about survivable, so we’ll put up with it. The people that are going to suffer don’t make the news, and middle england don’t really care about….so unless there’s civil disobedience, Sunak’s policies will be accepted as necessary and just.
Moreover, if we have a mild winter, some sort of diplomacy is struck with Putin, and energy prices do come down, Sunak will take credit for the reduction in inflation due to the policies he enacted. And people will believe him because it’s a nice simple narrative that makes so much sense from their perspective. He could easily use that to win the next election, even with Austerity. He’d have proved that it worked.
And that’s all because Labour wasted the last 3 years talking about fiscal rules and balancing the books…….they have absolutely no argument other than higher taxes, which no one likes to hear, even if higher taxes would only affect 1% of the population.
Things are lurching from bad to, somehow, even worse.
I hear you with regard to Sunak’s austerity and what it might do to our country – it will be grim. However, I must confess feeling a glimmer of goodwill towards a new Prime Minister who might bring a little competence, order and integrity to the post……
…. and then the reappointment of Suella Braverman. Simply appalling.
You spout so much hate and division and most of your tweets are personal attacks on public servants based solely on them having different political views to your own. The advocation of hate is the calling card of both the far left and the far right and you are as bad as any of them.
How is wanting food on the table of those who can’t have it because others deny it to them an expression of hate?
There is no longer any such class of people as ‘Public Servants.’ The public service ethos, along with anyone who seeks to uphold that ethos, having long ago been managed out of the system in favor of serving the private whims of a small minority of sociopaths.
These Private Servants have destroyed organizational coherence by atomizing every sub unit into competing stand alone silos producing sub-optimal outcomes rather than integrating and co-operating. Which is why nothing works properly any more and is so much more expensive than the period when we had a functional Public Service ethos with Public Servants committed to the greater good.
The results have been catastrophic. The economy is no longer productive in a way which even meets the stated criteria of Capitalism. The entire economy is a Ponzi scheme of fiat money which is not used productively to give a multiplier effect to investment but is instead totally geared to printing debt to keep unsustainable financial bubbles afloat to service the insatiable wants of a tiny minority rather than serving the needs of the majority. A majority who end up paying the debt over generations to feed the greed and selfish avarice of those who control clueless incompetent politicians of all Party’s who have no experience, expertise or knowledge of real life.
It would be far more productive, Jane, to deal with the facts and arguments presented instead of being a cheerleader for those who are deliberately destroying all semblance of a coherent society.
Just as I see it Ron. We are governed by a ‘legal’ criminal gang. They make the rules.
The need for austerity is not being challenged in the media. Last night on Newsnight, Victoria Darbyshire was asking the ‘gotcha’ question to the Labour MP in the studio. Given the need to reduce spending , will you put up taxes or cut spending? I think he fudged it.
I don’t under estimate the problems but the ‘massive black hole in the public finances’ is , according to Ben Chu , around £40 billion which is approximately 2% of a GDP of £2,200 billion. The average since 1970 is given as 3.5% according to a House of Commons. parliament. library research on the budget deficit. And the last time we had a surplus was about the year 2000.
Shouldn’t someone be saying that as real incomes are falling because of inflation and as people’s spending is business income, keeping down wage increases might not be useful? Like drive us into recession?
Newsnight also interviewed a former top civil servant who insisted that if we were to break out of low productivity and growth, we needed to spend more. Simon Wren -Lewis often says that most economists wanted this after the banking crisis but politicians and journalists didn’t discuss this as they were sold on the ‘national budget is the same as the household budget”. In short they didn’t understand.
It just seems to me that not only are main political parties stuck in an intellectual ghetto but so are much of the media.
It’s not just that the need for austerity is not being challenged by the media, it is being actively promoted. Yesterday Shaun Ley on the BBC interviewed Jeevan Sandhur of the New Economics Foundation who argued, as did the civil servant you referred to, that in order to improve growth and productivity, and to protect the poorest in society, that we need to spend more. As soon as the interview was finished, Ley reverted to the narrative of the necessity for spending cuts and how we need to tighten our belt even further. There wasn’t even an inkling that anything that Sandhur said had penetrated the collective journalistic skull of the BBC. Similarly, this morning Nick Robinson, in an interview with a Tory politician, without being prompted, referred to the government’s top priority being the necessity of spending cuts.
The BBC is doing its job of broadcasting government propaganda while playacting at being journalists.
Quite! The appointments of Suella Braverman and Gavin Williamson suggest very strongly that Sunak’s attention is more on factional Conservative party politics than doing the best for the country. And that approach hasn’t ended well the last few times.
(I will concede that Dominic Raab, while a lightweight, might represent the level of talent and experience available).
When asked whether his failure to serve in the armed forces contradicted his duty as a citizen, Chester Burnett/Howlin’ Wolf replied “I ain’t no citizen, I’m a subject”. I know that feeling. These tories have scant regard for democracy, possess no compassion, are strangers to truth. Twelve years of austerity and, for them, it is still not enough.
According to Mervyn King (BBC Kuensberg) the wealthy do not “possess sufficient money” to fix the economy so taxing the poor is the answer. Such a palpably disingenuous statement as Fig 3 in the ONS Household Total Wealth report shows.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2018tomarch2020
True
One of the dangers of the idea that governments need to “find the money” to do anything is that it makes statements like Mervyn King’s seem relevant to the question of fixing the economy. I say “relevant” because there are good reasons to tax the wealthy regardless of how much money such taxes raise.
It seems to me that if you use the social institution of money, you tacitly agree to follow the rules of its use, which includes paying taxes. Anyone who does not want to do this can go away and play with Bitcoin.
What hope have we got when the Financial Education Planning Frameworks available to teachers include for children to, “know the different taxes I must pay now and in the future and some of the ways this money is used by government through public spending.” And the HMRC website “About Us” page says, “ we collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services”. A letter of complaint is on its way. I’m sure there are plenty more examples others have come across.
Some of your readership may appreciate my son’s latest topical poetic offering at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0k_polebuo
Thank you
… and on 1 November effective legal protest will be outlawed.
Braverman’s Police Bill will go through the Lords – supported by the words of Kier Starmer (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/24/keir-starmer-backs-stiff-sentences-for-climate-protesters-who-block-roads). Perhaps he was aiming to keep the press barons happy.
Hardly anyone will notice until after the event.
See Twitter @GeorgeMonbiot Oct 19 “How many of you know what Cruella Braverman’s Public Order Bill contains?”
Agreed
Deeply troubling
I see that the infighting has started. Independent –
“Sir Jake, who was chair when Liz Truss sacked Ms Braverman last week, said that she was responsible for a “really serious breach” relating to confidential government discussions of cybersecurity.
He challenged Mr Sunak’s claim that the home secretary had confessed to breaking the code, telling Talk TV that “the evidence was put to her and she accepted the evidence, rather than the other way around”.”
Sadly, all the focus will be on this and not the cruel Rwanda policy.
“The worst of an exceptionally poor bunch was, however, Braverman. If Sunak sought to give offence he succeeded. If he thought this was wise, he was universally condemned for failing to be so. The world was horrified.
Even Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times, a journalist with Tory bias if ever there was one, could not hide his disgust at the return of a minister known, he suggests, to serially leak government documents.”
Zahawi has been interviewed on Sky about the Braverman appointment. He has been sent out to deflect, misdirect attention and obfuscate. Even that reached the bottom rung of the ladder, when he attempted to present her as an example of redemption. Redemption. St.Paul’s redemption was found in the road to Damascus, and the transformation of his whole life and its purpose. A secular, moral rather than religious redemption similarly entails a fundamental change in the life of a person.
Braverman spent less than a week out of office. Where is the redemption? Redemption is deeply personal, it is life changing or it is not redemption; and it is certainly not a job description. What has changed; what redeems the failures that drove Braverman from office that not just redeems her, but allows her to return, not noticeably changed, or repentant with immediate effect (and how could that be tested?).
Mr Zahawi presented himself in a cloak of earnest piety; but he cheapened the word ‘redemption’, in pursuit of the cynical word-play of a type of politics that is sinking into a corruption of language, that is lethally destructive of the spirit of a usable democratic politics. Politics cannot take much more of this slick humbug.