As I noted in The National yesterday:
Liz Truss's speech at the Institute of Government was a soaring success in three ways. It showed us just how out of touch with reality she is. It demonstrated how crazy the Tories are, because they voted her as their leader. And it showed that any similar coup will be deeply dangerous for the people of this country.
Truss revealed her deep love of a form of economics that is built on the assumption that we are all automatons living on an infinite planet where global warming cannot happen.
I continued:
And she simultaneously revealed her contempt for the only thing she really knows anything about, which is government and what it can do for people, albeit in the right hands.
The detail of anything else is almost irrelevant. She hates us, democracy, government and anything government can do, and believes that anything that cannot be bought or sold has no value.
Truss must live a miserable, hateful existence. But at least we have been saved from it.
What I did not note there, as I was already over a word limit, was that we have only been saved for now.
We may still get Truss's favourites like Mark Littlewood in the House of Lords. And bizarrely, the BBC asked Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs to comment on the speech yesterday. This madness is not entirely going away in other words. We were just saved from it in government, for now. Her insane proposals, based on climate change denial amongst other things, will still be heard. Vigilance is still required.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
How could anyone now deny that the Green New Deal is the answer?
I sent these reflections (below) to my groups of comrades (we hold a weekly teleconf on Sunday for one hour – have done since 2016). Given that Truss & Co are the offspring of Thatcher who swallowed Hayek hook, line & sinker, perhaps they are relevant.
“What strikes me about the libtards (neo-liberal retards) is that Adam Smith and Hayek are treated as pick n mix super markets, the libtards take what they want and disregard what they dislike. They use Smith and Hayek to give an intellectual gloss to greed, money & power. Moving back to Hayek – and quoting (which illustrates the pick n mix nature of the libtards):
“There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing”
So on the one hand Hayek is used as cover to demolish state institutions – on the other – his writing on the role of the state in the provision of important services is………ignored.
Perhaps Hayek was unhappy that he was not asked to help with the Beveridge report, and jealous of its success he came out with The Road to Smurfdom. In any case, Smurfdom spawned inttelectual pygmies like Truss and fan-boy orgs for the rich like the IEA.
The problem is Mike is that even von Hayek is being abused by pure greed.
And let’s not forget that the Randian view – that to pursue your own interests is perfectly logical and morally justifiable – also perverts the situation.
Yes, we can afford a decent level of minimum health and care, it’s just that even von Hayek – the man who ignored altruism no less – did not see that these public goods used to deliver this minimum would be trashed and then used to earn income/as cash cows by the rich to invest all the spare money they have not been taxed on by a State he was deeply cynical about.
Did von Hayek ignore this in his radical vigor or was he just stupid?
Truth? Like all reactionaries – he was both. And don’t forget that all he did was typically neo-liberal – it was wrong for a state to be authoritarian but – in his twisted liberal world – it was OK for individuals to be authoritarian apparently – especially if they were rich and funded the Mont Pelerin society.
That’s what neo-liberals do – move things around from the many to the few – money, qealth, services, power. It’s their MO – and always on the back of that they are doing it for ‘us’ – society. Pure bollocks.
I tire of these idiots.
Oh for an epiphany.
Sod reactionaries – we need ‘Thinkinaries’ like never before.
The use of Adam Smith’s name by one of these groups of Tufton conmen would have him spinning in his grave as well. Another case of picking and choosing to very carefully disregard the bits of his work you don’t like and it has proved very successful thanks to our inept/corrupt media.
It’s political agonism at work again – the accommodation of extreme ideas enabling them to be put forward as viable options – any extreme idea as long as it is not socialism of course!!!!
I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s how I see it.
I find it extraordinary how she has the neck to return to the public stage following her complete humiliation. She still has a voice because she has followers.It is a measure of the size of the challenge to repudiate the madness.The PM who was beaten by a lettuce will benefit ,as I understand it, from a £115k per year allowance for life as the reward for 45 days of catastrophic policy implementation which we are still paying for.
The FCA has reported on the de-banking of politicians former, in which Nigel Farage played a leading part. In classical currently fashionable PR response, Farage has already dismissed the report as a “whitewash” by the regulator.
Farage wants a regulator to regulate! Clearly he is a Lefty quasi-socialist; not a real Right wing politician like Liz Truss: talks big, and out of a job, but not a weakling who thinks we need regulation in things like banking, or building regulation, or presumably the police, or any of the old EU laws that regulated anything at all. Outflanked by Truss, who after all was herself a failure; and therefore in hard-core Trussism failure is Leftism, so in turn this must of course make Truss little more than a Lefty softy.
Truss and Farage are probably now left of Labour …..
Yesterday, just like Farage, Liz Truss the failed PM, was handed a BBC megaphone to blast the British public with her unadulterated drivel for the entirety of an hour-long morning news broadcast, as if there was no other relevant news to tell. In stark contrast, despite being our current PM, Sunak’s speeches are not broadcast in their entirety, nor are Starmer’s. However, Truss’s diatribe was followed all the way through into questions; well that was, until one questioner appeared ready to contradict her delusional world view. Truss’s disgraceful lack of contrition and tin-eared regurgitation of her discredited policies was expounded upon on Politics Live with the toxic support of Jessop.
I commented on this yesterday in a post as the most worrying thing about yesterday’s broadcast was the apparent promotion by the BBC, as if this rubbish was an important contribution to mainstream thinking. Farage got the BBC to pump his divisive message to the populous; is Liz Truss and her far-right followers hoping to ram home their toxic policy agenda, normalized by the BBC. We need to nip this in the bud by having a significant number of us write to the BBC to complain about allowing a failed PM to dominate an entire hour of news broadcasting. This was not balanced broadcast coverage. The BBC, a public asset, has increasingly been diverted further and further to the right and this was the most egregious abuse yet. We cannot allow the BBC to dope the public again, so get writing.
Interesting idea
If anyone does a draft might they share it?
And the email address to submit it to?
Remember; Channel 4 is also a public service broadcaster; not Chartered, but franchised to access revenues independent of government, rather than dependent on what is effectively a specially diverted tax – whether you ever watch/listen to the BBC or not.
There is nothing Holy about the privileges The BBC exploits.
Frankly, The BBC should have lost its Charter, with Saville (and, do not forget two other contemporary examples of failure). Read the Dame Janet Smith report on Saville if you wish to understand the gross level of failure. I no longer believe any of our institutions learn anything at all from any report ever written about failure. The principle of government? Publish and forget.
There is no excuse, no moral justification for its survival possible. If that must stand, then I submit nothing can be bad enough to lose a Charter. Yet is goes on….. which is now a moral indictment of all of us.
I have to disagree John
You are espousing anarchy
I do not understand the commitment to an institution that has failed so badly on such a fundamental issue of values. You assume that no BBC, no public broadcaster. No, that is not the case. Clear out the failure, and all the distorted cultural clutter, and inflated sense of self-importance (quite nauseating) – and start all over again. Do it better. More independent of government; because it isn’t. The BBC, for me encapsulates the intellectual paralysis and inertia of Britain.
Do you recommend the BBC as the national public service broadcaster for an independent Scotland?
Take a good, hard look at the BBC. Has it transformed itself after the Dame Janet Smith Report? What evidence could you advance for such a transformation? Indeed, how would you know such a transformation has been implemented – and works?
I do not see it.
You don’t see the change
But what I know is that we would be much poorer without the BBC
And I acknowledge that all organisations fail, sometimes
This was no routine failure. This was existential; or rather, it should have been. If I understand your case: “You don’t see the change”; I should simply take the BBC’s transformation at face value, for granted. I can’t do that.
We will just have to disagree.
Friends have to sometimes