I was on LBC last night, talking to Rachel Johnson, the sister of the former PM.
I did not sit on the fence:
'The Bank of England is so incompetent, I can't put it any more kindly than that.'
'...at the moment it is entirely outside of democratic accountability and that's pretty scary.'
Professor @RichardJMurphy tells @RachelSJohnson the BoE should not remain independent. pic.twitter.com/GrS065uiTz
— LBC (@LBC) June 25, 2023
What was interesting was how Rachel Johnson lapped all this criticism of the Tories up. It is very clear that as far as she is concerned anything that now shows Sunak in a poor light is good with her.
I am not complaining: she let me get my point across and agreed my suggestion that it was time for both Andrew Bailey to go and for Bank of England independence to come to an end.
However, what she revealed about the Tories was also worrying. If they carry on like this they will be a hopeless opposition to a hopeless Labour government that already seems intent on doing the very worst it can for the people of this country. That is not encouraging. Has the two party system now reached its nadir?
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Yes
If we are going to be candid, the electorate has made some spectacularly bad choices, and remains an unconvincing beacon of hope. The only viable cure for that is PR, and the end of FPTP; simply because it undermines the hegemony of Party in Parliament, and obliges the uncompromising to compromise.
It isn’t going to happen.
But,
Its interesting to see what happened over the weekend in Russia, an Oligarch dominated society coming under stress, perhaps instead of Wagner Group we might have West Country Farmers, Residents of Ely, Mortgage payers from Swindon etc heading up the M4 with the proverbial pitchforks.
As ai keep on saying though the biggest threat to the UK is its managerial and political class
I remember the lorry drivers and tanker drivers etc blockading the oil refineries and motorways. That produced a public reaction (panic!) which got an immediate response out of Blair. Compare and contrast with the public reaction to the doctors and nurses and other public servants taking action to get an entirely justifiable better pay deal. A few weeks of action by independents in the haulage industry and they got what they wanted. Months of action by the doctors and nurses and others, and they never will. It’s not just the managerial and political (and media) classes which are at fault here.
The two-party system reached its nadir a long time ago like the neo-liberal economics it lapped up did.
It’s zombie politics and economics these days.
In politics these days we are gripped by orthodoxy based on lies and now added to the mix is fear. All we are going to see for the next ten or plus years is varying degrees of badness and hopelessness in government.
But ordinary people will just keep trying to keep keeping on, no matter what.
As for Johnson’s sister – nice work if you can get it eh?
Has the two party system reached its nadir?
It would be comforting to think so, but my guess is that it can still get worse. And probably will.
Democracy is very difficult: it requires the wisdom of crowds and that is a lot to ask of a population which is not appropriately informed and mostly, it seems, not very interested.
When offered a PR electoral system it was rejected by an electorate bamboozled by a media campaign. Would a repeat referendum produce a different result now? I’m not convinced it would. Even if it were to be on offer the chance to break the two party system would likely be rejected again so I conclude it has a way to go to reach its nadir.
I think the referendum on an alternative voting sysytem was lost as much by people’s anger at Clegg for enabling the Tories, than by media bamboozlement.
Well very obviously a declining and corrupt country like the UK needs new ideas which this blog does its very best to provide. Likewise ditching FPTP will achieve the same goal. It will inevitably happen because for human beings to flourish en masse they constantly have to balance their morality – taking care of only self or taking care of others too. In particular given our high level of transactions with each other through money there will continue to be new ideas about how the use of that money can best be managed on an individual, national and global scale.
Surely time for the facade of BofE independence to come to an end? If the govt wanted the BofE to change course then they could decide and enforce it so we must assume that they secretly approve. It’s high time that supposed independence was exposed for the theatre it is.
“Has the two party system now reached its nadir?”
You make a category error by assuming there are “two political parties” that have some discernable differences. In terms of economics, which impacts all UK subjects all of the time, there is no difference. Lisa Nasty (vile-Liebore) showed that the other day supporting the BoE rate rise. The differences are nuances, much of the vile-Liebore front bench could be swapped with vile-tory & there would be little change in policy, certainly in the case of economics, Brexit, Law’n Order (lock em all up), Unions (ban strikes), zero-carbon (fig leaf) etc etc. NHS? the vile Wes Streeting will follow identical policies if/when in power to the vile-tories. Sell it all off. Look at the blog on the NHS & the 1st post – the main diff with Liebore is they will pretend they care, they will pretend they don’t support privatisation, they … pretend, the tory-pretend party..
Animal farm – last page – no diff between the humans and the pigs, no diff, vile-tories and vile-Liebore. A vote for Liebore is a vote for the UK continuity party of tor-bore. UK serfs you have been groomed over 40odd years.
Point taken
And it is one I am increasingly making
When one considers the “quality ” (quote marks used advisedly) of the clowns making up the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet, each led by some inefficient whelk stall operative promoted WAY beyond their ability in a hyper Peter Principle demonstration, the question has got to be what do we, the people, have to do to get back the sort of real quality sitting on both sides of the House, and in both Cabinets, real and Shadow, in 1945?
That Parliament was made up of those who had been through a terrible war, which produced a sober awareness in everyone, and also tested the mettle of everyone, so that the quality of those who made it to Parliament was assured by the quality of those who didn’t.
I’m not asking for a rerun of WW2; I AM asking for a rerun of the process. For everyone played their part in producing the post-WW2 settlement, and that’s what’s needed now.
Inga Marie Horwood talks about the lorry drivers and tanker drivers taking effective action.
It’s time we the people did the same – emulated les gilets jaunes of France – and got out onto the streets daily with metaphorical pitchforks, in Poll Tax Riot numbers, forcing the police to arrest so many people as they enforce the preposterous Fascist laws the current Fascist clowns have created – you can be arrested for walking slowly in a threatening manner that MIGHT upset someone, ffs??!! How have we allowed that to happen? – that the Courts clog up, and police stations run out of cells, so they have to emulate Pinochet, and hold people in football stadiums. Bring the whole farce grinding to a halt.
As to candidate selection, Party members of ALL Parties need to ignore the malign clowns managing the selection process – I mean Starmer and his goons wouldn’t even let Emma Dent Coad (who captured Kensington & Chelsea for Labour for the first time in history!!) on the long list, replacing her with some dim Starmer clone, as chosen by the appalling Luke Akehurst!! – and start choosing their own candidates = real local worthies (like Jamie Driscoll).
This country need a bottom-up revolution, to sweep away the totally useless, where not malign, top-doen establishment that has TOTALLY and UTTERLY failed on both sides of the aisle – ALL, to a greater or lesser extent.”failing Graylings”!!
I agree 100% with what you say.
Please remind me what happened last time a lareg number of UK serfs/peasants chose themselves a party leader.
His face did not fit, the meeja were against him, almost to a man/woman, having decided that they did not like him.
Thus I agree there needs to be a large-scale bottom up revolt – where party diktat is ignored and serfs/peasants make their own decisions on who to vote for.
The discussions I have in my own group – there is some modest support for Liebore (= they are better than the vile-tories).
I would argue that they are worse, they will dash people’s hopes and the election after next will see some sort of fascist party emerge on the basis that there is no diff between vile-Liebore and vile-tory.
100 or so seats with independents should do it – in terms of the balance of power. Vile-tories are dead-meat, but Liebore is very vulnerable given they offer zero in the way of alternatives in terms of policy.