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Added later: I see that Paul Marks has made a very pertinent suggestion in the comments,
“As there is no minimum time requirement for the (very large) pension a former Prime Minister gets, I propose that each of us is Prime Minister for a few minutes – and then resigns.
“Creating all the money (from nothing) to fund the pensions would be inflationary – but given the already insane level of government spending…”
Added even later: in the comments, TomJ links to this Parliamentary Briefing Paper that says that the rules on Prime Ministerial pensions were reformed in a boring direction in 2013. Right, that’s me out. I won’t do it now even if they ask nicely.
Russia has always been a colonial power in denial. While conquering and ruling multitudes, it insisted that—in contrast with violent Western conquests—the indigenous peoples themselves sought Russian protection and that Russian rule was benign. This gap between rhetoric and reality is evident in the country’s current designation as a “Russian Federation”.
The Tory party has become ‘culturally inbred’ and starts to resemble the deranged Hillbillies of Hollywood myth, just with shirts from Jermyn Street and a better wine list. People like Crispin Blunt et al seem to believe they have a natural right to be in charge because… well, just because. Even marginally democratic input like the Conservative Party members choosing Liz Truss is intolerable as they wanted Rishi Sunak. This of course also explains why Brexit drove them into the florid stage of insanity, given the oiks simply refused to do what their betters had told them to do.
So, Liz Truss is now a sock-puppet for her political rival, a PM in office but not in power. Perhaps a stronger woman would have resisted the pressure and turned things around even at this late stage, but we now know Liz Truss is not such a woman. She seems to have naively assumed that having forced out Boris (who to be fair set the stage of this entire shitshow), the same people would then abide by the Party membership’s wishes and allow her to actual govern.
The absurdly named Conservative Party is in the midst of a CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) due to its internal ideological contradictions. Far from being a broad church, the Wets, better described as Blue Blairites, people with more in common with LibDems or pre-Corbyn Labour Party than the free-market low tax wing of the party, have decided only they are fit to be in power.
That’s it, one hundred years on from 1922 the Tories as currently understood are doomed. They need to crash and burn and indeed they will. The Labour government that will follow is going to be economically and culturally even worse (which given how crap the Tories have been will a remarkable achievement, but I believe Labour is absolutely up to the task). But the destruction of the Conservative Party we know has to happen. We have just arrived at the end point of where 30 years of “lesser evil” voting has led us.
Right then, what eventually comes next 5 to 10 years from now after Labour take their turn to trash the nation? Hard to say but at least we can’t blame the EU now. Perhaps something that calls itself the Conservative Party under Kemi Badanoch will arise from the ashes? A Conservative Party that is actually is a conservative party? Or maybe Reform UK? Perhaps something else entirely? I really don’t know.
Addendum: And Truss is gone. She had some of the right ideas but proved to be as useful as a chocolate teapot politically. Perhaps that is unkind, and given the now toxic internal contradictions in the Party have fully manifested. It was a poison chalice no matter who was the leader. The enforcers of Blue Blairite orthodoxy are determined to destroy the party and that is that, all we can do it watch the unedifying spectacle unfold.
Lord (David) Frost is one of the sanest observers of the UK political scene. He’s in favour of the pro-growth, lower-tax agenda that Liz Truss has made much of. He writes more in sorrow than anger that the time has come for Ms Truss to stand aside.
His article includes the nugget of insight around how, in the very early 80s, Sir John Hoskyns, advisor to Margaret Thatcher in her Policy Unit, had set out in a memo a series of “stepping stones” for reform and change. To make changes on energy, tax, inflation, house planning, etc, requires a lot of patient preparatory work, to ensure that reforms don’t alienate the public on a large scale, or rattle the markets. This is akin to a pilot on a ship or plane having a passage plan before leaving port or taking off.
A serious government needs to have a worked-out idea of where it is going, and how it is going to do it, and have contingency plans. For example: when contemplating the need to take on Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, following the damaging strikes of the early 70s, Mrs T. put Nigel Lawson in charge of energy (before he became Chancellor in 1983) and he built up coal stocks so that the UK had a buffer of coal during the likely strike. This is like a general marshalling his forces intelligently before going into battle.
My impression is that Truss lacked people around her who knew how to guide her in such a way. And this speaks to what in my view is a deeper problem with much politics today in the West: the lack of strategic thinking and understanding of statecraft. Politicians sometimes study subjects such as “international affairs” or “politics” in liberal arts degrees and masters’ degrees in university. There is the Kennedy School of Government in the US , to give one case. But I wonder how much actual practical knowledge of how to get things done is learned. (If any readers have been to these places, let me know.) In fact, they may simply spend time wallowing in forms of ideology; they’d be better off reading Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, even if it appears to be a treatise on cynicism.
Perhaps the nature of those in public life has changed. Whatever else one might say of them, the old landed gentry and business class of people who tended to be Tories had an understanding of the processes of government and making change, although a lot of them were also capable of mass incompetence. On the Labour side, the experiences of unions and working in industry gave a certain realism and understanding of how tough life could be.
I worry that too few in public life have this sort of “ballast” in their lives. And we end up with people who don’t really know what they are doing.
Perhaps a more intractable problem is that so many people now assume that government, on the scale we now have it, is the “normal” state of affairs, and that anything taking us to a smaller State is terrifying. And it requires tremendous rhetorical skill, management capability and insight to show how a route to a saner state of affairs is possible, even exciting and enticing. This is doubly hard to do after a pandemic, and after when a large chunk of the professional middle classes had spent two years on furlough, watching TV and baking bread at home. And the sadder fact is that a lot of such people, although they will never admit it unless after several drinks, rather enjoyed the experience.
“….it is more useful to see Liz Truss’s rise and fall as symptomatic of an identity crisis among free-market policy-makers across the West, as they wake up to a world in which can exist neither as competent technocratic administrators nor as a radical liberalising movement. This new world is one in which both Thatcherism and the Blairite Third Way are dead. What those commentators suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome appear to have missed is that the country is reeling from what many hoped was a transitory crisis, but now seems to be a permanent paradigm shift: one in which high inflation is endemic and the welfare capitalist model that has been propped up by cheap credit for the past 20 years is vanquished.”
I wonder if people will talk of these times in the way they once discussed the tumultuous Corn Law/free trade debates that led, eventually, to the formation of the Liberal Party (Whigs and Robert Peel supporters joining) and the Tories, led by Lord Derby and later Disraeli, languishing in opposition for 20-plus years. Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a Manchester man who relishes the traditions of classical liberalism and economics in that city), argues that big realignments are going on. I think, contrary to his view, that economics is as important as “culture wars” stuff to what is causing politics to shift. The public has just had a big lesson in why economics matters. It matters a lot.
More recently, Western experts have talked back military reforms, stating that they have been less successful than previously claimed. As the war in Ukraine has shown, reforms have had limited if any influence on Russian military’s operational effectiveness. In many ways, the Russian army still resembles the former Soviet army in its mentality, hierarchical structure, poor quality officers, poor levels of training, ill-discipline, poor logistics, and corruption.
The war in Ukraine pits a vertically structured Russia with a subject population against a horizontally structured Ukraine composed of citizens. During Vladimir Putin’s 22 years ruling Russia as president and prime minister he has re-Sovietized the country, fanned militarism, promoted a quasi-religious cult of the Great Patriotic War and Joseph Stalin, and destroyed civil society and volunteer groups. In Ukraine the opposite has taken place in each of these areas. Ukraine has undergone de-Sovietization since the late 1980s and decommunization since the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, has denigrated Stalin as a tyrant, switched from military celebration of the Great Patriotic War to commemoration of World War II, and built a dynamic civil society and volunteer movement. Ukrainians have organized three popular revolutions since 1990 to demand their rights; Russia’s last revolution was over a hundred years ago.
[…]
Another important factor has been the widespread view of the Ukrainian state as weak and badly divided between a ‘pro-Russian’ eastern and ‘pro-Western’ western Ukraine. In the last three decades the greatest number of articles published in the media and by think tanks and academics on Ukraine has been on regional divisions and the country split between a pro-Russian east and nationalist, pro-Western west. In Moscow and among Western experts, Ukraine’s Russian speakers were deemed to be inherently unreliable and likely to swing to supporting Russia if Moscow invaded the country.
A shock-and-awe style Russian invasion of Ukraine would exert tremendous pressure on Ukraine’s regional divisions, leading to the state’s fragmentation and the collapse of the Ukrainian army (as in Afghanistan). This did not take place and the reason why it did not was because Ukraine was never a regionally fractured country; its Russian speakers were Ukrainian patriots, and there was never any possibility the Ukrainian army was going to disintegrate in the same manner as the Afghan army.
It is often said the Conservative Party is a ‘broad church’ and not just a party of free marketeers. This was certainly true back when Margert Thatcher was party leader, given she had to endure the likes of Michael Heseltine et al.
But the de facto coup d’état by ‘Wets’ (better described these days as ‘Blue Blairites’) has left Elizabeth Truss as Prime Minister in name only. She has proven to be weak, a lady very much for turning; unable to even reduce the top tax rate to where it was for 12 years under the last Labour government. And plans to cancel an increase in corporation tax during a recession have also been stymied. So, safe to say the Tory Party is not sufficiently broad church to include actual small-c conservatives, because anyone suggesting a lower tax future is not going to be allowed to run the show no matter what. The Tory WANCs (Tories Who Are Not Conservatives) have demonstrated they are very much in control.
In the recent internal election, the party membership rejected Rishi Sunak, the policy continuity candidate most of the Parliamentary party wanted, instead choosing Truss, who wanted to try something different. But the Blue Blairites would have none of it. If the party members were unwilling to vote the way they were told to, the grandees would just strongarm Truss’ chancellor of choice out of office and replace him with Jeremy Hunt, an unrepentant Remainer, Sinophile, and distilled essence of Blue Blairite Blob.
So please, do not ever say the Tory Party is a broad church because it is not. And if you say it to my face, I will do my best to defenestrate you. A few weeks ago, I was certain to vote Tory again. Now, not only will I not, I will vote against them as the party deserves to not just defeat but to be crushed. The aftermath will be grim given the alternatives, but not only it is inevitable, it is probably necessary. The absurdly named Conservative Party as currently understood need to burn so there is at least a possibility something better can take its place.
“The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, countryside and gardens.”
– David Frost, a former member of the Boris Johnson administration, who resigned in part over things like tax hikes. I get the impression that his views are falling on deaf ears among many Conservative MPs, for whom building things, travelling, entrepreneurship, or of how life should be about a sense of adventure, are all terrible things to be banned or viewed with suspicion. Maybe we will get a political realignment at some point, where the Tories revert to their 19th Century default of being the party that largely resisted, or was snooty about, industry and an upwardly mobile class, with a different party championing such things. It may not happen, but I get the sense that there is a lot of change in the political culture at the moment. If you are a young, ambitious person, what on earth does much of the UK political order have to offer if you detest politics and want to just get on with life? The answer, for many, will be to leave.
“The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15 per cent, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This is Wall Street just doing its job: making money. Banks earned more than $1 billion in revenue from fossil lending during the first three quarters, in line with 2021. Why quit business with a booming sector over a distant climate goal?”
– Alistair Marsh, Bloomberg. ($) The US news service has been pushing the whole “Green transition” agenda in recent years in its coverage, at the behest of founder Michael Bloomberg, so there is something darkly amusing watching the organisation concede that decarbonisation has been a big loser for investors in recent months. If you are JP Morgan, BlackRock, Bank of America Merrill Lynch or a small investment house in Massachusetts, you have to explain to clients why you hugely lagged the stock market because of your “Green” decisions.
As the late Richard Feynman once said apropos the Space Shuttle, nature cannot be fooled. That applies to economics as well.
They wanted Sunak; Tory members wouldn’t have it. The media, the political and civil service establishment, the City, were all out to get her. They acted against her (and Kwarteng). The Tory backbenches panicked; Sunak’s supporters saw the opportunity, and in effect we have now had a very British coup d’etat.
However, this does give me hope. Because the whole country can now see the UK government edifice for the rotten cesspit it truly is.
Truss will fall, one month or six, it makes no real difference. We will get ‘business as usual’ from the same morons who wrecked Brexit, inflicted net Zero, killed our economy and our civil liberties.
So where do we go from here? Well, it’s now obvious that a Tory vote is a wasted vote; it’s equally obvious that voting Labour Libdem or SNP is also pointless. So we may – finally- get the realignment in our politics that we have needed for so long.
I just hope people are paying attention.
– Alan Melville, commenting on Sp!ked and describing the situation much as I see it now.
A couple of months ago John McGuirk asked that question:
Landlords have fled the market. They are selling up at an unprecedented rate, or finding other uses for their accommodation. There has been an explosion, meanwhile, in institutional landlords: Big companies and pension funds buying up properties, because unlike the small landlord, they have their own legal offices and in house accountants and the funds to constantly refurbish properties to bring them up to regulatory standard. Ireland’s left wing approach to rental regulation has been – again, predictably – an absolute bonanza for this biggest capitalist institutions.
Government must take the blame for this. It is Government, after all, which passed all these obscene and stupid laws. But the opposition – mainly the noisy left – are the ones who campaigned on it, and for it, and who want to go ever further down the road to disaster. As of today, there are about 700 homes left available for rent in the entire country. About 22 in every single county.
I hate to say it, but the answer to Mr Guirk’s question is that the misery of would-be renters in Ireland will probably go on for decades, like it has in Stockholm. Rent control is the Japanese knotweed of bad policy: the horrendous difficulty of removing it once it is established becomes an incentive for people to close their eyes to the damage it is doing. The failure of rent controls in Ireland was already several years old when I wrote a post in 2018 called “And why might that be?” It was about how one of the Guardian‘s better journalists could not understand why landlords in Dublin had vacated the long term rental market en masse in favour of Airbnb.
One might think that this clear demonstration of how rent controls work in practice would at least deter us from repeating the folly on the other side of the Irish Sea… I jest, of course. Seen on Guido Fawkes the other day: “New Scottish rent controls crush hopes for 11,000 affordable homes”.
Liz Truss is poised to sack her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and announce plans to raise corporation tax as she abandons key parts of her mini-budget in a bid to reassure the markets.
The chancellor is due to meet the prime minister shortly, with discussions under way in No 10 and No 11 before a public statement by the prime minister.
The government has been left with little choice but to abandon its plans after the markets priced in a reversal of its position, with sterling responding positively to a series of leaks.
The fact that the various Times reporters credited have risked looking very silly if Kwasi Kwarteng is not sacked leads me to believe someone high up has told them he will be.
I do not say this out of any great admiration for Mr Kwarteng, nor out of any great concern for Ms Truss’s reputation, but if she does fire him, she is a fool. Does she think they will back off once they have tasted blood?
Update: He’s out. Add whoever takes the job next to the list of fools.
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