I am struggling to come to terms with the reality of Trump. I have to admit that. I thought I was ready for this, but I was not quite as prepared as I should have been.
The measures to end action on climate change were inevitable, if deeply regrettable.
The abuse of migrants had been promised and is detestable.
The lies and totally nonsensical claims are par for the Trump course.
The immediate withdrawal from the World Health Organisation was something I should have expected, but I did not.
But, of all the things he has done, this still surprises me the most:
That is from the New York Times. Trump has excused those who used violence to stage a coup to overthrow democracy in the USA, as a result of which people died. And Trump has pardoned those who did that.
Michelle Obama and the wife of former Vice President Mike Pence refused to attend yesterday's inauguration because they believe Trump has threatened the safety of their families. I think they were right to make that symbolic protest.
Trump has done more than that, though. He has made clear in this action that he does not believe in democracy.
He has also made clear that he does not believe there will be a fair succession to him. He is sending out the signal that the age of the US Constitution is over. The pretence of democracy that it has delivered of late is no more. He has shown that he does not care for it. The succession should be, he thinks, in his gift, as of right.
I can do nothing to save the US from its fate.
Here in the UK, we still have something that claims to be democracy, but as every reader of this blog knows, it is profoundly flawed. Labour could, in the next four years, buttress it, reform it, make it truly representative, and provide within it the protection we need so that it is not captured by the far-right, as US democracy has been. It could do that. So far, it shows no willingness to do so.
The message I have this morning is a simple one. If Labour wants to prevent the far-right from doing here what Trump is doing in the USA then it has to deliver electoral reform. It is that straightforward. Anything less, and it is selling out to the far-right.
Democracy is in deep peril. We have to try to save it.
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Labour, on its current government record, does not show any understanding, nor willingness to do anything to improve the lot of the majority of the UK population.
Labour’s mantra of “we can’t afford it”, when the UK most definitely can, says it all.
The UK is now, as England was after the Reformation, a small, insignificant state off north west Europe.
So members of the American political-social-mass communication elite/privileged are sufficiently disturbed to not attend Mr Trump’s inauguration. Might there then be/is a power element which can be integrated with the efforts of others to effectively resist this wave of main stream media sanitised fascism?
Maybe
Absolutely agree!
But how do we convince Starmer?
By the time he recognises he can’t win the next election under FPTP it will probably be too late for the change
D 🙁
He is making announcements about the state right now and is totally ignoring this point.
Richard,
I always believed Blair’s greatest long-term crime – in long-term effect worse than his support for the illegal invasion of Iraq – was his kicking of the Jenkins Report into the long grass.
At the head of his triumphant 1st administration he could easily have won a referendum on implementing Jenkins’s AV+ proposal – and the British electorate were the ONLY source of legitimacy for such a profound constitutional change.
Once in place, AV+ could easily have been flexed into STV, and the hold of the Single Transferable Party could have been broken, to the country’s good and benefit.
Instead, Blair pusillanimously, and unconstitutionallly, IMO, when only the electorate could decide such an issue, kicked Jenkins into the long grass, leaving the Single Transferable Party intact!
I resigned from the Labour Party as a matter of conscience
It was a terrible decision.
The Silicon Valley billionaires are weak politically outside the USA. They need Trump to threaten the EU ( for example) with trade sanctions etc to force them to back down on content control, scrapping intellectual property, other regulations, and so on.
Any new UK trade deal with the USA will no doubt deal with these important US interests.
I don’t agree that tech billionaires are politically weak outside the US, as they operate globally. Amazon, for instance, organises the labour of 75000 people in the UK (figure for permanent employees, 2022), and over 90 percent of people shop at Amazon in the UK, I’d say that’s political power, especially given recent definitions of politics on this blog (who gets what, when and how… And why). I don’t know who said it first, but everything is political, it’s just that, in my view, we’re led to believe that politics is what MPs do and what Amazon is doing is separate from that, it is part of this other place called the economy. The separation of “the economy” from the political, in my view, is probably one of the most impressive cons in human history. A friend said recently that if you want to know what politics is doing to your life just look at what you do for a living, and what you get from doing it – the political and economic are inseparable, since economic decisions are inherently political. I would agree that the tech billionaires might have less influence over Westminster than the Whitehouse, however, I wouldn’t say they are politically weak outside the US – every time someone hires an Uber driver in the UK, they pay a tribute to someone in Silicon Valley, and Bezos gets a cut of every UK Amazon purchase. That does take political power, and it’s far from insignificant.
It seems that Putin has won. His style of government, a firehose of misinformation to confuse the public, has long been admired by authoritarian leaders across the world. Now it has arrived in America. Trump’s government will flood the media landscape with noise so that his policies go unseen, ignored, or have enough chaos surrounding them so that they can be denied. His supporters will never admit they have been duped and will continue to defend him, adding to the chaos.
And then there is the next election. The Republicans, or the Trump Party as it is now, will hold all the cards, all the levers of power, and will have gamed every system. They will also have done so much damage that in allowing the Democrats to take back power they will be at risk of reprisal and prosecution. None of them will be willing to risk that, making the likelihood of fair elections almost miniscule. Like Putin, they will maintain the charade of elections to legitimise their power. Putin has been in power for over 20 years. This can go on for a long time, and making it through seems like an exhausting prospect.
If I can add a touch of irony, it is very interesting to see what history has to say on this.
Putin’s twenty years in charge is only a portion of the time the neocons have had control of US foreign policy and it was their treatment of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union that eventually led to the presidency of Vladimir Putin after the disaster of Boris “the Boozer” Yeltsin – chosen by Washington for his easy malleability.
I suppose, like Frankenstein, we are railing against a monster of our own creation.
It’s a great pity that we are often discouraged from looking at things “in the round”, thus hampering serious analysis of the various problems and issues which confront us.
Lack of reality means no possible real solutions.
@BBC presenters can hardly contain their excitement – ‘oh what fun this is’.
As Trump pardons the Jan 6th terrorists convicted of violent assaults on police etc ..Israeli settlers grabbing Palestinian land , burning villages etc.
I hadnt comprehended that presidents could overide court judgements after the fact and even before the fact – as Biden did for his family.
As Richard says – its a struggle to comprehend and /or come to terms with all this.
But there are many internal contradictions in Trump’s project – again, as Richard has pointed out – and even the Musk/Thiel/Zuckerberg/Bezos crewe are recognised by his MAGA nationalist base to be loyal not to the US but to their non-place Global tech/oligarch network. That contradicition may come to a head quite soon – on the other hand he loves their money.
Shortly before 5.00 last night I turned on Radio4 hoping to catch a weather forecast, instead finding the PM programme wholly devoted to Trump. Why is even the BBC mesmerised by this odious man, and why should the UK countenance any agreement at all with his government?
I think he is significant. Amply enough to justify that action.
So, the USA has a gangster government but that was always the case. It’s the planet’s bully.
It has invaded, or intervened in, countries around the world hundreds of times; often getting kicked out after causing unimaginable suffering and destruction.
This time, the worst of the suffering is going to be inflicted on the USA’s own people rather than those in foreign lands. The mid-term elections in 2 years will be interesting. Will the squeezed American public turn on the Republican party en masse? Could this Marmite government lead to the secession of states or even another civil war?
Agreed. Biden’s government was a disaster and he was merely following the same course charted over decades. At least Trump rips the balaclava off: he is an open gangster, proud of his contempt for the law, for civilised life, for rational responses to existential problems. Just think, though, of the millions who feel liberated to be monstrous because of his leadership.
DavidW,
Google/Meta/X are by themselves not able to stop the EU fining them, imposing regulatory requirements and so on.
They need Trump to bully the EU/Brazil to stop this external control.
Worth you and anyone else whose interested in what we saw yesterday, and will do for the next few weeks/months, watching these two segments of Rachel Maddow’s show from yesterday evening. The second segment follows on from the first and is an interview with Timothy Snyder.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
Thanks, Ivan.
Always include Fa***e in the lineup of names. He matters, he may well be our next Prime Minister if Starmer/Reeves double down on their suicide pact.
The Democrats used to mock Trump & his supporters, what an arrogant winning strategy THAT turned out to be.
We tend to mock the member for Mar-a-Lago South, and disparage HIS supporters.
That is not a winning strategy either. They are preparing to shoot every Labour and Tory fox they can find, they are good at it.
Talk about Fa***e at home, in the work place and on line. Shine a spotlight on this man of finance, this friend of billionaires, this gold trader, expose his wealth, his hypocrisy, and the shambles of his politics. And Labour, if you don’t want to lose to him in 2029, start removing his support by spending government money on the things that his supporters and his potential supporters care about. The “cost of surviving” crisis, the NHS crisis, schools, homelessness. Have an intelligent debate on immigration instead of the current cacophony of dogwhistles. Start forming political coalitions because you will need them. Reform democracy because its broken (like it got broken inside the Labour Party). Because you won’t have that thumping majority for long. Don’t waste it being Tories.
I feel sorry for Starmer – @ two levels.
1st. If you see the man in McLibel he seems pleasant enough & probably good company socially. That was the late 1990s/early 2000s. Between then & now the man seems to have changed beyond all recognition – to the point where he seems a diff person.
2nd. Running a gov org & running the country are two different things. The country requires a PM with political nous – which Starmer lacks – & his “advisers” seem to have tin ears with respect to citizens, managing their expectations etc – these are not assertions – one only has to look @ what has happened (or not).
Then there is the USA – never easy to deal with – but now a nightmare. It is worth keeping in mind the so-called UK nuclear deterrent (deterring who exactly?) is supplied by the USA.
All that said – apart from kicking the left around (= easy) or pensioners, he does not come across as tough minded or with (point 2) political nous. In the case of electoral reform – be careful what you wish for in turbulent times.
Much to agree with.
“Between then & now the man seems to have changed beyond all recognition – to the point where he seems a diff person.” Mike Parr.
Starmer has become a brainwashed Zionist. As an expert in Cultic Abuse who regards Zionism as a cultic belief system based on supremacist views, I can clearly identify the behaviours associated with brainwashing. Starmer IS a different person, as are others like David Lammy. Zionism appeals to the selfish and greedy and heartless. Those who have submitted to the ideology and methodology (and money too of course) are changed by it.
“The message I have this morning is a simple one. If Labour wants to prevent the far-right from doing here what Trump is doing in the USA then it has to deliver electoral reform. It is that straightforward. Anything less, and it is selling out to the far-right. Democracy is in deep peril. We have to try to save it.”
What you are saying is that people are so pissed off that they might elect someone you disapprove of. Therefore we must change the electoral system so they cannot. And you call that democracy.
Politely, you do realise I am proposing a system that will help Reform, who I hate? I am a Democrat, accepting choice. It seems you are not.
Two points:
Firstly, the full pardon of the rioters leaves them able to regain their weapons AND many were surrendered to the police by wives, children, neighbours etc. How many reprisal murders will now be committed?
Secondly, UK cannot fire nuclear weapons without the US key. The USA can fire them, though.
Just to confirm your point here:
I don’t like who might be elected by the population the way elections have been run in this country for the last hundred+ years, so I don’t someone to rig the system so that the person I don’t like can’t win?
And this is your idea of democracy?
You utterly miss the point.
I want to ensure we have real choice and fair representation of voters – including those who vote for Reform, which I loathe. What do you want?
Parliament is debating PR on 30th January with a view to setting up a National Commission for electoral reform. I’ve written to my MP, a Lib Dem, emphasising the importance of supporting this. PR campaigns are asking everyone who wants PR to do that. We need to do what we can to get behind this campaign.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/pr-debate-250130?source=direct_link&
I have written to mine as well.
Worth doing.
Agreed, well worth it. I have also written to my Labour MP. Had I lived just thirty metres further south, I wouldn’t have felt the need, as my MP would have been Clive Lewis, a real ally. However, this action in parliament does offer a glimmer of hope. So I would urge everyone to write to MPs, of all parties, but especially Labour ones. The Labour membership gets it. How much longer can the PM keep his head in the sand on this?
I wrote to my MP earlier, but she’s a junior minister now so I’m not hopeful that she’ll be supportive.
This campaign is supported by Make Votes Matter, Open Britain, Compass and Unlock Democracy. According to an email I got from Open Britain,
“Officers of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections have secured a major debate on Proportional Representation for general elections to take place in the Commons Chamber on Thursday 30 January.
“The debate was granted following a successful application to the Backbench Business Committee by Alex Sobel MP, Lisa Smart MP, and Ellie Chowns MP – with support from a substantial number of MPs from across the political spectrum.”
I wonder how Starmer is going to react to this.