As the Guardian reports this morning:
Thailand's election body has said it will seek the dissolution of a pro-reform party that won the most votes in last year's election, saying there is evidence the party “undermines the democratic system with the king as the head of state”.
I can just imagine Michael Gove rubbing his hands in glee at the idea of doing something similar here. After all, voting anything but Tory has to be wrong by undermining the democratic system, doesn't it?
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Off topic, but since I missed it, I wondered if others may have done so too….
I refer to Isabella Weber’s ‘Seller’s Inflation Theory’; see, “taking aim at Seller’s Inflation” here (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sellers-inflation-diagnosis-accepted-but-old-interest-rate-policies-remain-by-isabella-m-weber-2023-07?mc_cid=d3961f7527&mc_eid=7655e08a3c#:~:text=This%20“sellers'%20inflation”%20happens,an%20increase%20in%20total%20profits.). See also New Economy Brief, ‘Greedflation in the US and UK’. The US economy has done quite well with recovery (unlike Britain, which is about as bad as it could be); but even there, nobody is interested, and it seems – nobody really cares. They would rather chase moonbeams, in the sales pitch of a proven charlatan.
I read that note
It was useful
The New Economic Brief blog on Greedflation, or Shrinkflation (the producer reduces the size of a brand and increases the price), and the impact of Energy price rises by UK energy providers, increasing profits multifold as a specific factor in UK inflation (ignored by the BoE, Government, economists and the wretched media) is also invaluable.
The Devil has all the best songs. Get Brexit Done. Labour Isn’t Working.
Now decency has the words, for once; Greedlation and Shrinkflation. Incessantly. Without End.
This is all a component of the very British policy of ‘Divide and rule’! We must use effective sloganing to torpedo the strategy of Gove, the Tories and the Hard-Right. One of my responses is the perfect comeback to unleash on those who accuse me of a lack of patriotism, on occasions when they grind home their ‘British Values’ and ultra Nationalist divisive agenda. My best response: “I am a Peaceful Patriot of the Planet”; to which there is bewilderment, but scant reply.
I do not engage with Social Media and I don’t know how to get a hashtag to go viral, but ‘Peaceful Patriot of the Planet’ is up for grabs if someone would like to unleash it onto the Internet or use ‘PPP’ as a sign off. We can disarm the implied hateful banter invoked by ‘British Values’ as posed before on this Blog. We should encourage a collaboration of young people, of diverse backgrounds, to work together on creating an inclusive alternative set of ‘Universal Values’ that we can all promote with confidence and pride. With great urgency we must devise proactive strategies to combat the spread of hateful rhetoric or we will lose the battle against the ultra Right’s sick warping of the public mindset.
The actions of the Thai monarchy, the military and their Electoral Commission are similar to what we see going on now in the UK. We’re not at their level yet, but Gove’s attempts to redefine extremism are getting us there. As well as the increasingly draconion powers given to the police to arrest demonstrators and the disgraceful prison sentances handed out to climate change protestors who had the effrontory to point out that our useless government is not doing anything like enough to prevent a climate disaster.
Why has the independence of the Electoral Commission been taken away by Gove, for example? So he can try to invalidate the result of the next GE? It wouldn’t surprise me. This objection to anyone who disagrees with them is characteristic of dictators everywhere. Ironically, it appears that certain right wing organisations could be caught by this absurd proposal from the slimy liar Gove.
“Twas brillig, and the slimy Gove
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:” (apologies to L.Carroll)
The government PREVENT strategy already labels socialists as a possible cause of concern.
But right-wing Conservatives are not an issue.
The Daily Kos has extensive reporting on efforts by the republican party in the US to disenfranchise people – the tory gov has taken steps down that path and the end point if as per Thailand. A combo of ID and “extremists not allowed to stand” will be used – with Gove and his dulcet tones justifying the whole thing. Odious man – a modern Iago – but very much in keeping with the age – “its good to be rich” & “why should the serfs have the same voting rights as me a rich person”.
Yes, I’ve just had to shell out £100 for a new passport, even though I have no plans for travelling abroad, just so I can vote at the next election.
That is totally untrue
Do you not have a driving licence? Or a bus pass?
Councils also offer free identity passes for this purpose
Ms Weber wrote the excellent book ‘How China Escaped Shock Therapy’ (2021) so I’d be inclined to take this observation very seriously indeed.
The reductionism of Neo-liberalism is always its weakest point and needs to be constantly exploited and called out.
Great book but the main point for me was finding out that Deng Xiaoping used his authoritarian power to arbitrarily relax prices on basic government subsidised commodities like rice all at one go, a sort of “Big Bang” market fundamentalist economic reform! This led to widespread protests and eventually the brutality of Tiananmen Square Massacre. The moral of this? Never give power to a left or right wing ideologue because outside of their authoritarian phobia they don’t actually have any idea how to achieve “equitable demand” for goods and services so that everyone whether in work or retired can afford a sufficiently basic level of them for their well-being!
“Never give power to a left or right wing ideologue”.
In 4,500 years+ China has not spent one day when there was any “giving” of power, to any dynasty to run it. Power was taken, typically by force; and everyone else suffered. Deng Xiaoping was, however more successful in effectively establishing a system increasing standards of living for ordinary Chinese people, than any leader before or since. I visited China in 1979, and the transformation in opportunity for many Chinese by his reforms is quite astonishing. That does not make it free, by our standards perhaps, or by a long way; but all that has a very long history; much longer than our trifling history, and I do not possess sufficient arrogance to apply our thinking to China, and especially to the horrors of the 20th century, since the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 to the Cultural Revolution; just because it is easy, or reassuringly righteous to judge them on a failure to meet our measure of democracy: and with our history in China, beware of being sanctimonious. When there I visited the rough area in Shanghai where the British concession in the 1920s-30s was centred on a legation complex, with beautiful manicured lawns. On the lawn near the entrance, at the time there was apparently a large sign: “no dogs or Chinese allowed”. We may be advised to look closely at our own past, and our own mirror, to find out who we are, or why we are where we are NOW.
Even worse we know that the Conservatives and Labour will do nothing to tackle “Seller’s Inflation” and especially with the latter being firmly in the pockets of big business with party and individual MP contributions!
Just wondering what you think of the article from the BBC today “More than a fifth of UK adults not looking for work”
Basically they say “The UK’s economic inactivity rate was 21.8%”
But they decided not to show that the UK’s economic inactivity rate over the past thirty years at least has basically been between 21% to 24%:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/economicinactivity/timeseries/lf2s/lms
And they also conclude that “However, the number of people not employed or actively looking for work has remained at a persistently high level in recent years since it first surged during the pandemic.”
On what basis are they claiming that the number of people economically inactive is “high” when it’s essentially at the lowest it’s ever been?
I can only conclude that they’re attempting to “discipline” the labour force, and create a media justification for worse working conditions.
It is just a nonsense article
Elements of the increasingly extreme right wing ‘press’ have been pushing this for some time. Inactivity or not working is somehow supposed to be a sign of weakness and a declining society. Dictatorships also hate ‘idleness’, hence the praise in the USSR for ‘socialist heroes of labour’. And who can forget ‘arbeit macht frei’?
Or, indeed, the Protestant Work Ethic.
The weakness of the far right is always over-confidence. They push things too far. I’m actually slightly optimistic now that they’ve reached that point. Sooner or later poking the moderate/left-wing bear will wake it up.
I wish I had your confidence. To date Starmer has endorsed all the restrictions on the right t protest and is happy to allow the police/ MI5 undercover agents to commit murder with impunity.
The left populace may want to fight back but the “Labour” party has shown no inclination to do so.
About half of the labour party has resigned in disgust at Starmer’s changes. So far they haven’t decided what banner to assemble under but it won’t be long.
It’s all been said in these replies . The unspoken assumption that ‘it coudn’t happen here’ – it is already happening.
Electoral fraud: excluding younger voters and taking over Electoral Commission , 1984-type definitions of extremists,new laws so that you can be arrested for being ‘annoying ‘etc
Beware Labour
“At the party conference that October, Hague had decided that New Labour had won its majority on the basis of adopting Conservative policies, and so he committed the party to reclaiming the ground lost. Styling the new strategy the ‘Common Sense Revolution’, emulating the rhetoric of the Continental populist right he railed against ‘the patronising elite who think it’s intolerant to be tough on law and order and the progressive intellectuals who think that caring is spending other people’s money’.”
‘The Party’s Over’, Phil Burton-Cartledge
My two pennies/cents worth on Gove’s new definition of extremist ideology is that it is a Trojan culture war horse inspired and directed by extreme conservatives connected to The Heritage Foundation in order to facilitate a political power grab of all UK’s parliamentary institutions.
One needs to first refer to the ‘A note on “Project 2025”’ by its director Paul Dans in which he proclaims ‘Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State’ (xiv)
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf -Simply compare this to Gove’s promise that his proposed new centre of excellence ‘will undertake a robust process to assess groups for extremism against the definition, which will then inform decisions around government and funding’ (UK government news release March 14 2024). Both statements are thinly disguised calls to create fully compliant Conservative juntas in the US and UK.
Gove’s close political connections with The Heritage Foundation through these Vote Leave funders is well documented. Writing in Left Foot Forward in May 2022 John Lubbock writing that The Heritage Foundation were instrumental in the Brexit Vote Leave campaign because ‘it wants Britain to become a deregulated free-for-all corporate power’.
Michael Gove is their British Goebbels.