The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
It wasn't just in the referendum vote that remainers failed, it was their determination to see it fail in the HOC rather than act constructively that contributed to where we are today and sadly the extreme views of both sides continue to impede the path to a sensible compromise
More victim blaming...
I wondered when Brexit would become the remainers fault.
The majority of the MPs who voted against Theresa May’s deal, leading to her downfall and the elevation of Boris to PM, were Remainers.
If you ever go down to the Findhorn at Randolph's Leap, there are market stones for how high the water got. The river filled the whole gorge.
The recent droughts in Europe once again made visible the "Hunger Stones" in some Czech and German rivers. These stones were used to mark desperately low river levels that would forecast famines.
And, without wishing to spark a climate crisis rant, because clearly the climate has changed, individual droughts are a feature of weather patterns. The last big one here was 1976, we are in another. Frankly the best thing to do would be to create a minister for drought. Worked in 76...
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Good morning
Excellent comment highlighting the impossibility of governing in this moment in time
It is not just the conservatives or labour, but nobody has a solution to the intractable problems facing not only the UK but Europe and beyond
I wouldn't go as far as that. Many other countries manage the basics. The UK is sliding into a pit where we can't keep the lights on or hospitals staffed or basic services delivered. Despite record taxes being levied.
We're getting to the point where some people now recognise things are broken, but have a reason that simply is wrong and a solution that is mad - "nationalise everything" etc etc. Others think everything is great and the only people complaining are the "other" - the woke, the remoaners, the lefties etc etc.
Listening to the economic armageddon engulfing Europe at present with the Rhine at such low levels shipping is grinding to a halt, France struggling with its nuclear power stations and EDF seeking 8.5 billion euro compensation, Norway shortage of water is threatening their energy exports, and high rates of inflation all adds to the crisis
Yup. The global economy is in a Bad Way. But are France, Spain, Germany etc in the same mess we are? As in struggling to provide basic services? As in providing no substantial help to people really struggling with bills? The answer is no.
I think you should speak to people from these countries first. Loads of the continental Europeans I work with have said their families back home are basically in the same place we are. Not able to meet electricity bills, other costs surging, no respite from the heat, expectations of food shortages because of the prolonged drought, water shortages and smaller villages running dry.
What's happening here is happening all across Europe, we just don't hear about it because their news isn't in English.
Hello from Spain. Where I have been conversing with Spanish family for the last two weeks.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
The government has been pursuing the second option since 2010, hadn't you noticed?
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
It wasn't just in the referendum vote that remainers failed, it was their determination to see it fail in the HOC rather than act constructively that contributed to where we are today and sadly the extreme views of both sides continue to impede the path to a sensible compromise
Sorry, but that's tosh.
Lots of people who started on the Remain side moved a long way to respond to the Brexit vote. Not all of them, sure. But look at people like May, Stewart, Clarke, Boles, Letwin... They all came up with various shades of plan that respected that 52 was bigger than 48, grappled with the awkward realities that 52 isn't much bigger than 48 but 350 million is much bigger than 70 million, and that a good stable relationship with a large near neighbour is a really good idea.
The ERG, Boris, Cummings and the rest of them spat each one of those plans out, along with pretty much everyone who tried to put something together.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Rory Stewart was the closest up and coming young politician willing to take the approach, with the potential gravitas and knowledge to back it up.
Jess Phillips has a bit of it about her as well but less convinced she could deliver.
I'm not convinced Jess has either the understanding or the gravitas.
Nor am I, but I think she is committed to the approach of:
1. Explaining a problem and empathising with the people impacted 2. Choosing the solution that is more effective even when it is clearly harder to implement and sell than an alternative supposed quick and obvious fix which is easy to sell to voters and party but does little or nothing to stop the problem.
Unfortunately that is exceedingly rare nowadays, maybe 5% of prominent politicians.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi is arguing in favour of a hard Brexit, tearing up the NI protocol, and deporting refugees to Rwanda. You're obviously just a sucker for anyone who talks like Tony Blair.
He is saying what needs to be said to get elected. He doesn't believe chunks of it. But on basic maths he is right and Mistress Truss is wrong.
Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the well off is insanity
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Good morning
Excellent comment highlighting the impossibility of governing in this moment in time
It is not just the conservatives or labour, but nobody has a solution to the intractable problems facing not only the UK but Europe and beyond
I wouldn't go as far as that. Many other countries manage the basics. The UK is sliding into a pit where we can't keep the lights on or hospitals staffed or basic services delivered. Despite record taxes being levied.
We're getting to the point where some people now recognise things are broken, but have a reason that simply is wrong and a solution that is mad - "nationalise everything" etc etc. Others think everything is great and the only people complaining are the "other" - the woke, the remoaners, the lefties etc etc.
Listening to the economic armageddon engulfing Europe at present with the Rhine at such low levels shipping is grinding to a halt, France struggling with its nuclear power stations and EDF seeking 8.5 billion euro compensation, Norway shortage of water is threatening their energy exports, and high rates of inflation all adds to the crisis
Yup. The global economy is in a Bad Way. But are France, Spain, Germany etc in the same mess we are? As in struggling to provide basic services? As in providing no substantial help to people really struggling with bills? The answer is no.
I think you should speak to people from these countries first. Loads of the continental Europeans I work with have said their families back home are basically in the same place we are. Not able to meet electricity bills, other costs surging, no respite from the heat, expectations of food shortages because of the prolonged drought, water shortages and smaller villages running dry.
What's happening here is happening all across Europe, we just don't hear about it because their news isn't in English.
Hello from Spain. Where I have been conversing with Spanish family for the last two weeks.
I was in Greece recently and was surprised to see prices at the pumps uniformly higher than at home. Median incomes in Greece are more than 20% lower than in the Uk.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Rory Stewart was the closest up and coming young politician willing to take the approach, with the potential gravitas and knowledge to back it up.
Jess Phillips has a bit of it about her as well but less convinced she could deliver.
Rory Stewart, the failed Conservative leadership candidate, and the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer drew bigger Edinburgh Fringe crowds than Nicola Sturgeon.
Rory’s self destruction was quite bizarre. It started with that moment when he took his tie off in the middle of the leadership debate. After that he could have either taken a dignified position from the backbenchers like Hunt or Tugendhat and lived to fight another day. Or tried to positively influence policy direction from within Cabinet. But instead he flounced.
He then came up with a reasonable idea of running for Mayor against Khan. And then he flounced.
He now makes a reasonable living I guess from being the Gary Neville of politics. A bit of Twitter sarkiness and some podcasting where he works to make it sound like he knows best with everyone else in the world a giant ignoramus in his field. Some would say that Basrah was Stewart’s version of running Valencia, I don’t know enough to say. I did enjoy his book all those years ago and it’s a shame he’s turned to bitter and irrelevance rather than sticking in there.
He doesn't have a platform. He is a Conservative and there is no Conservative Party he can represent
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi is arguing in favour of a hard Brexit, tearing up the NI protocol, and deporting refugees to Rwanda. You're obviously just a sucker for anyone who talks like Tony Blair.
He is saying what needs to be said to get elected. He doesn't believe chunks of it. But on basic maths he is right and Mistress Truss is wrong.
Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the well off is insanity
Rishi isn't going to be elected. So what good does it do for him to go along with unreality instead of arguing his case, if he has one, in favour of reality?
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
My own view is that wealth needs to be taxed more, and income (especially earned income) taxed less.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Good morning
Excellent comment highlighting the impossibility of governing in this moment in time
It is not just the conservatives or labour, but nobody has a solution to the intractable problems facing not only the UK but Europe and beyond
I wouldn't go as far as that. Many other countries manage the basics. The UK is sliding into a pit where we can't keep the lights on or hospitals staffed or basic services delivered. Despite record taxes being levied.
We're getting to the point where some people now recognise things are broken, but have a reason that simply is wrong and a solution that is mad - "nationalise everything" etc etc. Others think everything is great and the only people complaining are the "other" - the woke, the remoaners, the lefties etc etc.
Listening to the economic armageddon engulfing Europe at present with the Rhine at such low levels shipping is grinding to a halt, France struggling with its nuclear power stations and EDF seeking 8.5 billion euro compensation, Norway shortage of water is threatening their energy exports, and high rates of inflation all adds to the crisis
Yup. The global economy is in a Bad Way. But are France, Spain, Germany etc in the same mess we are? As in struggling to provide basic services? As in providing no substantial help to people really struggling with bills? The answer is no.
I think you should speak to people from these countries first. Loads of the continental Europeans I work with have said their families back home are basically in the same place we are. Not able to meet electricity bills, other costs surging, no respite from the heat, expectations of food shortages because of the prolonged drought, water shortages and smaller villages running dry.
What's happening here is happening all across Europe, we just don't hear about it because their news isn't in English.
Hello from Spain. Where I have been conversing with Spanish family for the last two weeks.
I was in Greece recently and was surprised to see prices at the pumps uniformly higher than at home. Median incomes in Greece are more than 20% lower than in the Uk.
I think that much of the continent will be facing even more severe problems with energy shortages than we do. We've just got to grin and bear it, until this arsehole is removed from power in Russia.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
I am not sure I agree. Blair and Thatcher came with their own baggage and both flattered to deceive.
What we do need is collegiate Cabinet Government working as a team to resolve the issues of the day. Maybe Sunak could have been your man?
We don't need Blair, Thatcher blowhards, and we certainly don't need Johnson/Truss.
I do find a lot to like about Rochdale's analysis there. A politician can't diss the voters but I think it's ok for us. As for who we need - here's a surprising (incl to me) thought. Maybe, just maybe, if what we're looking for is indeed collegiate unfussy 'art of the possible' government, free of all this utter crap of the last few years, then the person to deliver this, or as close as can reasonably be expected, is a certain dull as ditchwater ex DPP with a brutalist haircut by the name of Keir Starmer.
I was thinking the same, I just didn't want to say his name
No, I thought long and hard before I pressed 'post'. And I had my eyes closed.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi isn't being serious. He has his paint-by-numbers scheme to increase NI and winning an election by cutting Income Tax with the money raised from increasing NI.
In what way is that reality? That's politics as rote-learning, trivial game-playing. It's not doing anything to face the reality.
Good point - but compared to Truss he looks quite sane and grounded.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I'm not sure if Starmer was serious, or was just taking an opportunistic stance in opposition after looking too closely at the opinion polls. It's hard to know what most of our politicians would actually do, because they're all peddling different variants of make-believe.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi is arguing in favour of a hard Brexit, tearing up the NI protocol, and deporting refugees to Rwanda. You're obviously just a sucker for anyone who talks like Tony Blair.
He is saying what needs to be said to get elected. He doesn't believe chunks of it. But on basic maths he is right and Mistress Truss is wrong.
Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the well off is insanity
Rishi isn't going to be elected. So what good does it do for him to go along with unreality instead of arguing his case, if he has one, in favour of reality?
When Mistress Truss makes a horrible mess of it, he will sound like a sage. Setting himself up to win the election after this one
I wonder how Keith Vaz feels about having led this anti-Rushdie demonstration through Leicester
Some years ago Rushdie published a book of essays alled imaginary homelands. It reprinted essays on literature and culture and some on the fatwa and its immediate aftermath. The passage that stuck witn me most was this. https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1558198754158706688/photo/1
I wonder how Keith Vaz feels about having led this anti-Rushdie demonstration through Leicester
Some years ago Rushdie published a book of essays alled imaginary homelands. It reprinted essays on literature and culture and some on the fatwa and its immediate aftermath. The passage that stuck witn me most was this. https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1558198754158706688/photo/1
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I'm not sure if Starmer was serious, or was just taking an opportunistic stance in opposition after looking too closely at the opinion polls. It's hard to know what most of our politicians would actually do, because they're all peddling different variants of make-believe.
Yes it’s certainly possible that his stance was simply ‘opposition’ for oppositions sake, but I tend to think he believed it too. In Scotland the government thought they were close to eliminating Covid in summer 2020, and blamed the U.K. government for resuming foreign holidays. I think they were wrong, but I suspect Starmer might have tried the same, I.e, elimination. Trouble is, as NZ showed, it ultimately won’t work, because the rest of the world hasn’t eliminated it.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
The government has been pursuing the second option since 2010, hadn't you noticed?
True enough. On the Con side the choice has been made and is going through de facto without ever being admitted to.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
I am not sure I agree. Blair and Thatcher came with their own baggage and both flattered to deceive.
What we do need is collegiate Cabinet Government working as a team to resolve the issues of the day. Maybe Sunak could have been your man?
We don't need Blair, Thatcher blowhards, and we certainly don't need Johnson/Truss.
I do find a lot to like about Rochdale's analysis there. A politician can't diss the voters but I think it's ok for us. As for who we need - here's a surprising (incl to me) thought. Maybe, just maybe, if what we're looking for is indeed collegiate unfussy 'art of the possible' government, free of all this utter crap of the last few years, then the person to deliver this, or as close as can reasonably be expected, is a certain dull as ditchwater ex DPP with a brutalist haircut by the name of Keir Starmer.
I was thinking the same, I just didn't want to say his name
I also largely agree with the insightful post by @RochdalePioneers above. The problem is that the solutions that imposed austerity on the population 2010-2016 were ultimately revealed as a sham. People were told that all this cutting back of the state was necessary to get our house in order - that it was 'fixing the roof while the sun was shining' etc. But actually, far from 'fixing the roof' what they were doing is failing to do any maintainence to the building, whilst hacking off bits of the building to flog for a bargain price. Of course, the man/woman on the street with experience of the real world sees all of this. Austerity was largely seen as incompetent profiteering and many of those that voted for it, were basically in on the deal, in some way.
The real problem is that Johnson, with his brief and apparently insincere flirtation with Statism and levelling up, seemed to have the answer but it dissolved itself in the contradictions of the Conservative party and his personal failings. Now we have Truss who is offering some sort of reheated austerity but will probably actually get blown around in office with U-turn after rebellion after U-turn. I don't see Starmer as necessarily being the answer, but he could be the best of bad options. The image of him being Mr Art of the possible is just an illusion generated by opposition. In office he would be driven by the forces of pseudo religious progressivism, quite a bit of extreme 'woke' stuff, and the economic interests of the trade unions in a way that the conservative party are largely freed from.
I don't have any real solution, other than to say that the situation reveals the truth of the old maxim - that the people get the politicians they deserve.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi isn't being serious. He has his paint-by-numbers scheme to increase NI and winning an election by cutting Income Tax with the money raised from increasing NI.
In what way is that reality? That's politics as rote-learning, trivial game-playing. It's not doing anything to face the reality.
Good point - but compared to Truss he looks quite sane and grounded.
I can accept there's a case for saying that one of them is worse than the other, but to a certain extent it's splitting hairs. Fundamentally neither of them is being serious and honest with the electorate. Neither of them are good enough.
I just don't think the differences between the two of them are particularly consequential. We shouldn't get too hung up on minutiae when we face bigger problems.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
My own view is that wealth needs to be taxed more, and income (especially earned income) taxed less.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
If we add onto this that a big focus of government should be degrading the link between life prospects and parental bank balance we have the makings of a rather surprising 'hands across the water' PB moment.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I'm not sure if Starmer was serious, or was just taking an opportunistic stance in opposition after looking too closely at the opinion polls. It's hard to know what most of our politicians would actually do, because they're all peddling different variants of make-believe.
Yes it’s certainly possible that his stance was simply ‘opposition’ for oppositions sake, but I tend to think he believed it too. In Scotland the government thought they were close to eliminating Covid in summer 2020, and blamed the U.K. government for resuming foreign holidays. I think they were wrong, but I suspect Starmer might have tried the same, I.e, elimination. Trouble is, as NZ showed, it ultimately won’t work, because the rest of the world hasn’t eliminated it.
The policy I would have followed would have been to aim for elimination before vaccines, and then make the most of the benefit of vaccines by giving up on elimination. Perhaps making such a pivot would always have been psychologically too difficult.
I'm fairly confident that if Johnson has announced he was sinking for zero Covid and stopping infection crossing the channel that Sturgeon would have found a way to oppose that.
When Mistress Truss makes a horrible mess of it, he will sound like a sage. Setting himself up to win the election after this one
When the Philomena Cunk premiership goes off the rails, as it inevitably must, the internal diagnosis of the tories will be an insufficiency of culture war bollocks and right wing economic policy. At that point they'll go for Kemi the Vivienne Rook cover band.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I'm not sure TM's attempt was all that ham-fisted - the essence of the proposal was clear, but people didn't like it.
Why not? Perhaps because the possibility of being dependent on care is hypothetical and for most people far off. That's why lots of people don't even pay the maximum tax-free pension contributions that their employers will match, which has to be the most sensible investment around. Less money now vs. potentially getting more in X0 years, if you haven't died yet. There is also profound public scepticism about earmarking - who really believes that the social care levy is being spent on social care? Has anyone even tried to set out in detail how it's being spent?
Right now I think people do recognise that a massive crisis is coming in terms of personal finances, and they to some extent recognise that waiting times for the NHS are reaching catastrophic levels. They will be up for medium-term sacrifice to address those immediate problems, and if that means painful things that we mostly approve of, so be it. Everything else from green levies to Ukraine support to farming subsidies to public sector pay is really up for discussion as far as the person in the street is concerned. The challenge is to find things which don't do lasting damage, and options like more energy windfall taxes and higher rate tax increases are really tempting.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Rory Stewart was the closest up and coming young politician willing to take the approach, with the potential gravitas and knowledge to back it up.
Jess Phillips has a bit of it about her as well but less convinced she could deliver.
I'm not convinced Jess has either the understanding or the gravitas.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
It wasn't just in the referendum vote that remainers failed, it was their determination to see it fail in the HOC rather than act constructively that contributed to where we are today and sadly the extreme views of both sides continue to impede the path to a sensible compromise
Sorry, but that's tosh.
Lots of people who started on the Remain side moved a long way to respond to the Brexit vote. Not all of them, sure. But look at people like May, Stewart, Clarke, Boles, Letwin... They all came up with various shades of plan that respected that 52 was bigger than 48, grappled with the awkward realities that 52 isn't much bigger than 48 but 350 million is much bigger than 70 million, and that a good stable relationship with a large near neighbour is a really good idea.
The ERG, Boris, Cummings and the rest of them spat each one of those plans out, along with pretty much everyone who tried to put something together.
The Brexit Ultras had their idiot counterparts on the remain side. Both gambled on winning it all, only one succeeded.
Weirdly, Boris and JRM technically departed from that ultra side by voting for May's deal of course. They were never true believers, just using them.
What qualities has Truss demonstrated, that show she can be a good PM and beat the Labour Party?
So far she's said we should stop building solar panels whilst we have an energy crisis, that we should level down pay outside of London, borrow to fund tax cuts, make people go homeless rather than helping with energy bills, support Boris Johnson.
What on Earth leads anyone to conclude this is a good idea? What am I missing?
At best she comes across a bit weird, a bit dull and with no idea how to solve the big problems. That may equally apply to Starmer but much as Gordon Brown found, when you have a decade of Government to defend, it is harder
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Yep, we have created this, and will not elect people who would challenge it. We really suck.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Rory Stewart would be happier as a Lib Dem along with about 50% of those that were Conservative under David Cameron.
The country will not be happier though as we need a better Conservative party.
Will that happen after Boris got rid of the One Nation tories and Truss looks set to continue his reign? Either the introduction of PR which would enable the two wings to split or a massive defeat will be necessary.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Is that the same Johnson who was going around shaking hands with hospitalised Covid patients in March 2020?
Clearly back in the past the solution to Brexit was a Norway-style relationship which we could mould over time. It was leaving but respecting the result was close and not destroying the economy.
That was all possible and had support until May decided to be Thatcher 2.0 and "Brexit means Brexit", after that there was no coming back.
Labour has responsibility for not arguing for that position from day one and sticking to it - but the issue was that Corbyn and Milne fundamentally were more Leave than May and Johnson and were leading a party that was more ultra Remain than the public.
Corbyn should have resigned after 2017, Starmer should have taken over then and right now we'd be in EEA or something similar and wouldn't be in a mess.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
That's true. On a larger scale, renewables will give us 'free' energy but with costs upfront. My few solar panels didn't make much economic sense when I installed them a few years back, but are looking better now.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
I think that one of the inherent problems with democracy is that this type of long term planning is not possible without consensus. Otherwise not much will happen.
The trouble is that lots of reforms are just too big. IE: sorting out the English planning system. The reality is that it would take at least two electoral cycles to go through the process of review, consultation, primary legislation then secondary legislation.
Politicians don't want to hear that something like this will take more than 5 years, but it is the reality. There are so many interconnected things that need to be properly considered.
Something like the redevelopment of the Battersea power station site has taken 20 years, with the best people in the world working on it and a supportive local council. In this context it should not be difficult to understand that sorting out all the underlying legislation will take more than 5 years. Politicians think it can be all done in a year. They are just deluded.
It can only be done if it is to some degree depoliticised and consensus is achieved on some basic elements of what needs to happen.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
The pot holes applies to everything in the public realm. A sticking plaster is applied when surgery is needed. Problem is us. Close the road for a couple of days and folk say. Oh great they are doing summat about it. Close it for weeks and there's outrage. Look at hospitals or schools. Build a new one and the folk nearby moan about the disruption. The folk further away moan about it being less convenient.
Rory Stewart would be happier as a Lib Dem along with about 50% of those that were Conservative under David Cameron.
The country will not be happier though as we need a better Conservative party.
Will that happen after Boris got rid of the One Nation tories and Truss looks set to continue his reign? Either the introduction of PR which would enable the two wings to split or a massive defeat will be necessary.
I think the Tory party has further to sink, but yes eventually it will get better than it has been recently. A low bar of course.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Also, the numbers add up much more convincingly if the economy is growing, which depends on being more productive. That hasn't really happened since 2008, and doesn't look like it's meaningfully going to happen in the next few years.
And whilst some of that is global headwinds, they do seem to be hurting the UK worse than other countries. Which has to lead to the question of what's different about the decisions the UK government takes becasue the electorate asks them to. Not particuarly about 2016, but more generally.
Clearly back in the past the solution to Brexit was a Norway-style relationship which we could mould over time. It was leaving but respecting the result was close and not destroying the economy.
That was all possible and had support until May decided to be Thatcher 2.0 and "Brexit means Brexit", after that there was no coming back.
Labour has responsibility for not arguing for that position from day one and sticking to it - but the issue was that Corbyn and Milne fundamentally were more Leave than May and Johnson and were leading a party that was more ultra Remain than the public.
Corbyn should have resigned after 2017, Starmer should have taken over then and right now we'd be in EEA or something similar and wouldn't be in a mess.
The point seems rather to be that we would be 'in a mess' very similar looking to the one we're in. It would be nice if we had genuinely frictionless trade with the EU, but our current seeming malaise isn't really about that.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I'm not sure if Starmer was serious, or was just taking an opportunistic stance in opposition after looking too closely at the opinion polls. It's hard to know what most of our politicians would actually do, because they're all peddling different variants of make-believe.
He pitched Labour slightly to the cautious side of the government whilst supporting the overall approach. It was a pragmatic approach during a period when it was all about the government and the people and the public - as focus groups and polls made clear - didn't want major dissent or constant nitpicking from the opposition. It's a crazy take from this to conclude he was for eternal lockdowns or would have done that, or anything close, if he and Labour had been in power for the pandemic.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Is that the same Johnson who was going around shaking hands with hospitalised Covid patients in March 2020?
... and telling us about it as if he was proud. Wouldn't it have been nice to have someone with a science background in charge rather than a classicist?
She had a leadership election of true believers and she buckled and then gave up.
She is not much of a thing, but relevant to the question of truth and directness in politicians, just like Rory is not much of a thing on the Tory side, but still relevant to what they could have had.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
The term was first used within academia but the version that we encounter in political discourse, including on PB, ie that a cabal of left wing ideologues in academia, taking their lead from the Frankfurt School of mostly Jewish German academics, is attempting to undermine traditional values and weaken the West, comes directly from a far right conspiracy theory, quoted approvingly by the likes of Norwegian Nazi mass murderer Anders Breivik. People should know the origins of the things they talk about. At least Corbyn had the integrity to disown the antisemitic mural when people pointed it out to him.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Aren't pot holes effectively been used as unofficial speed bumps ?
“Newly released Ministry of Defence files reveal they took the unusual step of informing senior Cabinet figures after an unidentified object was captured on camera in Perthshire.”
It’s not a fucking stone reflected in a lake. It might be secret tech. But that in itself is quite the story given the description that it hovered silently for 10 mins before showing instant acceleration.
That's a stone in a loch, with an RAF or USAF jet (Harrier?) captured in the same reflection
USAF have never had Harrier apart from participation in the UK/FRG/USA Tripartite Evaluation squadron with Kestrel (not exactly Harrier) at RAF West Raynham in 1964 - 65.
Don't do this. You're not good at it. It's like me trying to discuss anchovies or something.
He's not as bad as the Mail, which thought it was a Tornado.
Here’s a long Twitter debate as to the aircraft ID. With actual pilots rather than elderly fantasists like @Dura_Ace
Nah, @Dura_Ace was pointing out that it wasn't a USAF Harrier, not saying it wasn't a Harrier at all.
Aiui, only the USMC fly Harriers?
This guy sounds authoritative
‘For me, the problem with that is that on August 4, 1990, all of the U.S.'s Harrier's should have been on-station on the USS Nassau and Tarawa in the Middle East. The Gulf War had just started 2 days prior.’
So, a RN or RAF Harrier. Sounds like the USMC Harriers weren't in the vicinity.
Fuck the jet. Who cares. The daily Mail has a photo of where the ufo photo was taken. No lochs anywhere
If they are right the mystery deepens. What is the rhomboid object in the sky?
Apologies for both reopening this and for disappearing upwards at supersonic speed after one post last night...
I suspect the MOD saw something they could not immediately explain, so General Paranoia came in and filed it in a cupboard for 50 years.
Without consulting Google Maps the Daily Mail image looks like a picture from the south side of the River Garry, looking east towards Blair Atholl. Ben Vrackie is the triangular hill in the background. So that corresponds with the claimed location.
But where is the Betula pendula? I see only a Larch on the edge of a plantation. Admittedly birch trees don't last terribly long up there but there's something not quite right.
The larch plantation surely isn't close enough to the fence in this case.
Are these locations being guessed at by researchers rather than being specified by the photographer? It is very easy to find both larch and barbed wire fences in this area and you could easily come up with 100 semi-convincing spots.
The other possibility is a double exposure - after all, if you are using black and white film in 1990 you may well have had a manual wind camera - but they tended to look washed out.
I'd still go with a rock in a loch on a very still day. Sorry.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
I think that one of the inherent problems with democracy is that this type of long term planning is not possible without consensus. Otherwise not much will happen.
The trouble is that lots of reforms are just too big. IE: sorting out the English planning system. The reality is that it would take at least two electoral cycles to go through the process of review, consultation, primary legislation then secondary legislation.
Politicians don't want to hear that something like this will take more than 5 years, but it is the reality. There are so many interconnected things that need to be properly considered.
Something like the redevelopment of the Battersea power station site has taken 20 years, with the best people in the world working on it and a supportive local council. In this context it should not be difficult to understand that sorting out all the underlying legislation will take more than 5 years. Politicians think it can be all done in a year. They are just deluded.
It can only be done if it is to some degree depoliticised and consensus is achieved on some basic elements of what needs to happen.
A year! Sunak was promising to review, replace and shred several thousand laws in 100 days. A year is fantastically long term planning for a politician these days. Unless, of course, it is some aspirational idea like net zero which, as Kemi pointed out, is nothing any current politician is going to be held to.
She had a leadership election of true believers and she buckled and then gave up.
She is not much of a thing, but relevant to the question of truth and directness in politicians, just like Rory is not much of a thing on the Tory side, but still relevant to what they could have had.
But Rory is actually good - I'd vote for him.
Jess isn't good, there is very little evidence she has really achieved anything. She's popular relatively because she's not Corbyn and a Blairite. Which is fine but she had a go and she screwed it up.
She's actually a worse politician than Starmer. Starmer - like Blair - identified that the Labour Party membership won't vote for Blairism. So you need to tell them what they want to hear. Then you pivot.
Jess decided to tell the Labour membership they were wrong and it was Blairism that was needed. They said no and she buckled, then gave up altogether.
Starmer and Jess ironically are probably on nearly identical platforms - it's just that Starmer played it better.
I maintain Starmer is more ruthless and a better politician than many think. How else did he manage to destroy Corbynism from the inside, take over and then destroy it some more.
Mr. Battery, why would Nigel Farage's opinion matter?
That assumption (his view mattered to floating voters/Leavers generally) is one reason Remain lost. The idiotic "Nigel Farage's Little England" line ate up media time that should have been spent spelling out the economic advantages of being in the EU, instead of unwittingly denigrating the largest part of the UK.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I'm not sure if Starmer was serious, or was just taking an opportunistic stance in opposition after looking too closely at the opinion polls. It's hard to know what most of our politicians would actually do, because they're all peddling different variants of make-believe.
He pitched Labour slightly to the cautious side of the government whilst supporting the overall approach. It was a pragmatic approach during a period when it was all about the government and the people and the public - as focus groups and polls made clear - didn't want major dissent or constant nitpicking from the opposition. It's a crazy take from this to conclude he was for eternal lockdowns or would have done that, or anything close, if he and Labour had been in power for the pandemic.
Besides- given the asymmetry of lockdowns (the upwave tended to grow faster than the downwave shrank), it's quite possible that being more cautious would have left the country under restrictions for less time overall.
But that's hard to explain when you can be cut off by "blah blah blah doctor science, the important thing is that I like freedom and you don't."
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Yep, we have created this, and will not elect people who would challenge it. We really suck.
To be fair to us, other forms of government have problems too.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
It wasn't just in the referendum vote that remainers failed, it was their determination to see it fail in the HOC rather than act constructively that contributed to where we are today and sadly the extreme views of both sides continue to impede the path to a sensible compromise
More victim blaming...
I wondered when Brexit would become the remainers fault.
The majority of the MPs who voted against Theresa May’s deal, leading to her downfall and the elevation of Boris to PM, were Remainers.
But there was a governing political dynamic there that was only tangential to Brexit. The more traditional one of an Opposition with a chance to bring down the Government and replace it. Stripping this out to get at the pure Brexit angle what we see is that a Tory Government failed to get its flagship policy (in the form of its PM Mrs May's EU exit deal) through because of dissent in its own ranks. And most of this dissent was on the Leaver side. For every Grieve there were multiple Moggs.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
I think that one of the inherent problems with democracy is that this type of long term planning is not possible without consensus. Otherwise not much will happen.
The trouble is that lots of reforms are just too big. IE: sorting out the English planning system. The reality is that it would take at least two electoral cycles to go through the process of review, consultation, primary legislation then secondary legislation.
Politicians don't want to hear that something like this will take more than 5 years, but it is the reality. There are so many interconnected things that need to be properly considered.
Something like the redevelopment of the Battersea power station site has taken 20 years, with the best people in the world working on it and a supportive local council. In this context it should not be difficult to understand that sorting out all the underlying legislation will take more than 5 years. Politicians think it can be all done in a year. They are just deluded.
It can only be done if it is to some degree depoliticised and consensus is achieved on some basic elements of what needs to happen.
Good post and example. It's another reason why politicians almost prefer to focus on small, inconsequential things, which they can understand and effect.
Check out most local council budget meeting and I'm confident you'd typically find very little discusion of more than one or two major items, if that, because there are limited options and it is hard, but a lot of back and forth on very minor changes where the local groups are able to differentiate over a few tens of thousands, grants to some local group etc.
Mr. Battery, why would Nigel Farage's opinion matter?
That assumption (his view mattered to floating voters/Leavers generally) is one reason Remain lost. The idiotic "Nigel Farage's Little England" line ate up media time that should have been spent spelling out the economic advantages of being in the EU, instead of unwittingly denigrating the largest part of the UK.
My point is that you are saying there's no evidence it would have happened the other way around, yet I gave you evidence.
The Leave side spent thirty years not accepting the original result.
We can argue about whether cancelling Brexit or holding referendum 2.0 was politically a good idea (I am of the opinion in hindsight it was not) but I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
My own view is that wealth needs to be taxed more, and income (especially earned income) taxed less.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
Its truly baffling how willing people are to be taxed on their earned income every month (and its in plain site on payslips) but how angry they get at the possibility of being taxed on some potential unearned future inheritance.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
Stripping this out to get at the pure Brexit angle what we see is that a Tory Government failed to get its flagship policy (in the form of its PM Mrs May's EU exit deal) through because of dissent in its own ranks. And most of this dissent was on the Leaver side. For every Grieve there were multiple Moggs.
The Yellowstone supervolcano erupting is more likely. The Toba supervolcano eruption on Sumatra, 74,000 years ago, triggered a 6- to 10-year global winter that nearly wiped out the nascent human race.
He may be thinking of this rather than the Scablands (amazing as they are) -
BTW did you ever read of the Moray flood of 1829? Lauder's book is great and is online, and so is the McEwen and Werritty paper if you can get access (on researchgate?).
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
Surely it is clear where the money goes. We pay the highest taxes in 70 years yet have minimal investment, minimal social security, crap front line services. So the money is being wasted through inefficiency and corruption.
One example. We marketise the English NHS. Vast complex expensive layers of bureaucracy. So money tips into the system but isn't being spent on front line care its being spent on yet another layer of management at yet another trust managing endless contracts. Brilliant for the people involved and the companies on contract (that is the "corruption" bit - systemic, not criminal), crap for people in A&E.
How do we cut both spending and improve services? Cut the false market, recreate simpler structures that are more efficient, redirect funding where it is needed. But that is bad for the middlemen and that is why we don't do it, because they have influence.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Yep, we have created this, and will not elect people who would challenge it. We really suck.
To be fair to us, other forms of government have problems too.
That's true, but we don't seem even interested in addressing any problems. We're still in 'tell us its easy' and 'please distract us' mode.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
Do you think people should have the right to choose the race they identify with if it doesn’t correspond to the one assigned at birth? We could offer race-affirming treatment on the NHS.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Mr. xP, at the time you thought the Little England line was smart and witty. I pointed out what an own goal it was, and remains (ahem).
Mr. Battery, ah, we're talking at cross purposes. I meant that the pro-EU side would not be mentioning the closeness of the result if they'd won 52/48.
I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
Yes
The Brexiteer line that having another vote would be undemocratic is amongst the dumbest, yet most persistent, of their lies.
Good or bad idea it was not good or bad for lack of democracy. One could argue you should enact the first decision before rescinding, you could argue where does it end do you have third or fourth referendums and so on, all valid, but it wasn't undemocratic.
Johnson Oxley's hardly is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Well they can do that and they'll lose again.
I just find it astonishing they sat and watched Corbynism for five years and decided they'd do the same. Baffling.
They need to go back to the centre, perhaps you can get Rory Stewart back
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
My own view is that wealth needs to be taxed more, and income (especially earned income) taxed less.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
Its truly baffling how willing people are to be taxed on their earned income every month (and its in plain site on payslips) but how angry they get at the possibility of being taxed on some potential unearned future inheritance.
"Can't tax me twice!!" - a complete lack of understanding that money is taxed many many times in different ways through its lifecycle.
Clearly back in the past the solution to Brexit was a Norway-style relationship which we could mould over time. It was leaving but respecting the result was close and not destroying the economy.
That was all possible and had support until May decided to be Thatcher 2.0 and "Brexit means Brexit", after that there was no coming back.
Labour has responsibility for not arguing for that position from day one and sticking to it - but the issue was that Corbyn and Milne fundamentally were more Leave than May and Johnson and were leading a party that was more ultra Remain than the public.
Corbyn should have resigned after 2017, Starmer should have taken over then and right now we'd be in EEA or something similar and wouldn't be in a mess.
The redwall was never going to vote for EEA and free movement, even Starmer recognises that now
Rory Stewart would be happier as a Lib Dem along with about 50% of those that were Conservative under David Cameron.
He actually said as much the other week TBF. I’ve not rejoined but I’ve started giving them a tenner a month, hedging my bets by giving Labour as much. Change might not do any good but, seriously, even the most hardened Tory should look at the state of the country and concede it’s worth a try.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
Yes
The Brexiteer line that having another vote would be undemocratic is amongst the dumbest, yet most persistent, of their lies.
While it had limited coherence before we left it had none now. It’s the modern day equivalent of the IRA basing their claims of legitimacy on the outcome of the 1918 general election in Ireland. A quasi-mythical vote whose outcome can never be gainsaid.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
On point 5, I think Corbyn did provide ideas and a sense of purpose - it's why he in 2015 engendered such enthusiasm. The allergy that many have to him shouldn't obscure the reason. It's not that people necessarily thought that it was all deliverable, but the sense of clear direction really stood out, and when the Mail and the Sun set it all out with a view to horrifying readers, lots of them thought "Well, I quite like the sound of some of this". Part of that was not really that they yearned for thoroughly left-wing policies, but that they like the idea of a government that actually had a purpose. Thatcher provided the same from a right-wing perspective, in a way that, say, Major and Cameron really did not.
My CLP had a guest speaker recently who has been advising governments of all colours on drugs policy for quarter of a century. He said that most Ministers are up for quiet reforms if they seem likely to pay off within 5 years in terms of less consumption, less addiction, etc. Only a minority of Ministers are interested in things that will pay off over a longer period, and if they think that they will be intensely controversial in the short term (such as decriminalisation) then only a small minority remain interested (he singled out Gauke and Stewart as pretty good).
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
3 is largely a function of 1 and 2.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Aren't pot holes effectively been used as unofficial speed bumps ?
In my ongoing battle with the driving lobby in Edinburgh, potholes are an important common ground between cyclists and drivers.
Top tip - if you see a rubbish road surface, expect that cyclist in front to fall/swerve violently.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
In Johnson's COVID profit and loss account columns there are indeed some profits, but far, far outweighed by the list of losses.
He got some things right, often on a wing and a prayer and without the science. But hats off to the vaccine programme. COVID in the grand scheme of things was not a big decision he got right.
Comments
Frankly the best thing to do would be to create a minister for drought. Worked in 76...
Lots of people who started on the Remain side moved a long way to respond to the Brexit vote. Not all of them, sure. But look at people like May, Stewart, Clarke, Boles, Letwin... They all came up with various shades of plan that respected that 52 was bigger than 48, grappled with the awkward realities that 52 isn't much bigger than 48 but 350 million is much bigger than 70 million, and that a good stable relationship with a large near neighbour is a really good idea.
The ERG, Boris, Cummings and the rest of them spat each one of those plans out, along with pretty much everyone who tried to put something together.
1. Explaining a problem and empathising with the people impacted
2. Choosing the solution that is more effective even when it is clearly harder to implement and sell than an alternative supposed quick and obvious fix which is easy to sell to voters and party but does little or nothing to stop the problem.
Unfortunately that is exceedingly rare nowadays, maybe 5% of prominent politicians.
Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the well off is insanity
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
The problem is that the solutions that imposed austerity on the population 2010-2016 were ultimately revealed as a sham.
People were told that all this cutting back of the state was necessary to get our house in order - that it was 'fixing the roof while the sun was shining' etc.
But actually, far from 'fixing the roof' what they were doing is failing to do any maintainence to the building, whilst hacking off bits of the building to flog for a bargain price.
Of course, the man/woman on the street with experience of the real world sees all of this.
Austerity was largely seen as incompetent profiteering and many of those that voted for it, were basically in on the deal, in some way.
The real problem is that Johnson, with his brief and apparently insincere flirtation with Statism and levelling up, seemed to have the answer but it dissolved itself in the contradictions of the Conservative party and his personal failings.
Now we have Truss who is offering some sort of reheated austerity but will probably actually get blown around in office with U-turn after rebellion after U-turn.
I don't see Starmer as necessarily being the answer, but he could be the best of bad options.
The image of him being Mr Art of the possible is just an illusion generated by opposition.
In office he would be driven by the forces of pseudo religious progressivism, quite a bit of extreme 'woke' stuff, and the economic interests of the trade unions in a way that the conservative party are largely freed from.
I don't have any real solution, other than to say that the situation reveals the truth of the old maxim - that the people get the politicians they deserve.
I just don't think the differences between the two of them are particularly consequential. We shouldn't get too hung up on minutiae when we face bigger problems.
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
I'm fairly confident that if Johnson has announced he was sinking for zero Covid and stopping infection crossing the channel that Sturgeon would have found a way to oppose that.
Why not? Perhaps because the possibility of being dependent on care is hypothetical and for most people far off. That's why lots of people don't even pay the maximum tax-free pension contributions that their employers will match, which has to be the most sensible investment around. Less money now vs. potentially getting more in X0 years, if you haven't died yet. There is also profound public scepticism about earmarking - who really believes that the social care levy is being spent on social care? Has anyone even tried to set out in detail how it's being spent?
Right now I think people do recognise that a massive crisis is coming in terms of personal finances, and they to some extent recognise that waiting times for the NHS are reaching catastrophic levels. They will be up for medium-term sacrifice to address those immediate problems, and if that means painful things that we mostly approve of, so be it. Everything else from green levies to Ukraine support to farming subsidies to public sector pay is really up for discussion as far as the person in the street is concerned. The challenge is to find things which don't do lasting damage, and options like more energy windfall taxes and higher rate tax increases are really tempting.
Pot holes being a classic. Long term repair that will last 10-20 years has up front costs 5x a quick fix that might last 2 years if the weather is not bad. What does a politician facing re-election in a couple of years choose? What does a local council with a massively stretched budget choose?
There are thousands of similar problems in the public sector. Long term savings and better service quality come from up front costs that our political system simply does not reward.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
Weirdly, Boris and JRM technically departed from that ultra side by voting for
May's deal of course. They were never true believers, just using them.
So far she's said we should stop building solar panels whilst we have an energy crisis, that we should level down pay outside of London, borrow to fund tax cuts, make people go homeless rather than helping with energy bills, support Boris Johnson.
What on Earth leads anyone to conclude this is a good idea? What am I missing?
At best she comes across a bit weird, a bit dull and with no idea how to solve the big problems. That may equally apply to Starmer but much as Gordon Brown found, when you have a decade of Government to defend, it is harder
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Either the introduction of PR which would enable the two wings to split or a massive defeat will be necessary.
That was all possible and had support until May decided to be Thatcher 2.0 and "Brexit means Brexit", after that there was no coming back.
Labour has responsibility for not arguing for that position from day one and sticking to it - but the issue was that Corbyn and Milne fundamentally were more Leave than May and Johnson and were leading a party that was more ultra Remain than the public.
Corbyn should have resigned after 2017, Starmer should have taken over then and right now we'd be in EEA or something similar and wouldn't be in a mess.
On a larger scale, renewables will give us 'free' energy but with costs upfront.
My few solar panels didn't make much economic sense when I installed them a few years back, but are looking better now.
The trouble is that lots of reforms are just too big. IE: sorting out the English planning system. The reality is that it would take at least two electoral cycles to go through the process of review, consultation, primary legislation then secondary legislation.
Politicians don't want to hear that something like this will take more than 5 years, but it is the reality. There are so many interconnected things that need to be properly considered.
Something like the redevelopment of the Battersea power station site has taken 20 years, with the best people in the world working on it and a supportive local council. In this context it should not be difficult to understand that sorting out all the underlying legislation will take more than 5 years. Politicians think it can be all done in a year. They are just deluded.
It can only be done if it is to some degree depoliticised and consensus is achieved on some basic elements of what needs to happen.
Problem is us. Close the road for a couple of days and folk say. Oh great they are doing summat about it. Close it for weeks and there's outrage.
Look at hospitals or schools.
Build a new one and the folk nearby moan about the disruption. The folk further away moan about it being less convenient.
She had a leadership election of true believers and she buckled and then gave up.
And whilst some of that is global headwinds, they do seem to be hurting the UK worse than other countries. Which has to lead to the question of what's different about the decisions the UK government takes becasue the electorate asks them to. Not particuarly about 2016, but more generally.
That said, I have no faith it would've happened had the result been the other way around.
The term was first used within academia but the version that we encounter in political discourse, including on PB, ie that a cabal of left wing ideologues in academia, taking their lead from the Frankfurt School of mostly Jewish German academics, is attempting to undermine traditional values and weaken the West, comes directly from a far right conspiracy theory, quoted approvingly by the likes of Norwegian Nazi mass murderer Anders Breivik. People should know the origins of the things they talk about. At least Corbyn had the integrity to disown the antisemitic mural when people pointed it out to him.
I suspect the MOD saw something they could not immediately explain, so General Paranoia came in and filed it in a cupboard for 50 years.
Without consulting Google Maps the Daily Mail image looks like a picture from the south side of the River Garry, looking east towards Blair Atholl. Ben Vrackie is the triangular hill in the background. So that corresponds with the claimed location.
But where is the Betula pendula? I see only a Larch on the edge of a plantation. Admittedly birch trees don't last terribly long up there but there's something not quite right.
There's another picture taken of a similar location but that appears to be looking in a different direction:
https://drdavidclarke.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/struan1.jpg
The larch plantation surely isn't close enough to the fence in this case.
Are these locations being guessed at by researchers rather than being specified by the photographer? It is very easy to find both larch and barbed wire fences in this area and you could easily come up with 100 semi-convincing spots.
The other possibility is a double exposure - after all, if you are using black and white film in 1990 you may well have had a manual wind camera - but they tended to look washed out.
I'd still go with a rock in a loch on a very still day. Sorry.
Jess isn't good, there is very little evidence she has really achieved anything. She's popular relatively because she's not Corbyn and a Blairite. Which is fine but she had a go and she screwed it up.
She's actually a worse politician than Starmer. Starmer - like Blair - identified that the Labour Party membership won't vote for Blairism. So you need to tell them what they want to hear. Then you pivot.
Jess decided to tell the Labour membership they were wrong and it was Blairism that was needed. They said no and she buckled, then gave up altogether.
Starmer and Jess ironically are probably on nearly identical platforms - it's just that Starmer played it better.
I maintain Starmer is more ruthless and a better politician than many think. How else did he manage to destroy Corbynism from the inside, take over and then destroy it some more.
That assumption (his view mattered to floating voters/Leavers generally) is one reason Remain lost. The idiotic "Nigel Farage's Little England" line ate up media time that should have been spent spelling out the economic advantages of being in the EU, instead of unwittingly denigrating the largest part of the UK.
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
But that's hard to explain when you can be cut off by "blah blah blah doctor science, the important thing is that I like freedom and you don't."
Check out most local council budget meeting and I'm confident you'd typically find very little discusion of more than one or two major items, if that, because there are limited options and it is hard, but a lot of back and forth on very minor changes where the local groups are able to differentiate over a few tens of thousands, grants to some local group etc.
The Leave side spent thirty years not accepting the original result.
We can argue about whether cancelling Brexit or holding referendum 2.0 was politically a good idea (I am of the opinion in hindsight it was not) but I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
And the Little Englanders that voted with relish for Nigel Fucking Farage and his racist posters are about to pick the next Prime Minister.
I’ve always found it odd that the Scots words for little (wee) is still in common use, but the Scots word for big (muckle) has died out.
The Brexiteer line that having another vote would be undemocratic is amongst the dumbest, yet most persistent, of their lies.
One example. We marketise the English NHS. Vast complex expensive layers of bureaucracy. So money tips into the system but isn't being spent on front line care its being spent on yet another layer of management at yet another trust managing endless contracts. Brilliant for the people involved and the companies on contract (that is the "corruption" bit - systemic, not criminal), crap for people in A&E.
How do we cut both spending and improve services? Cut the false market, recreate simpler structures that are more efficient, redirect funding where it is needed. But that is bad for the middlemen and that is why we don't do it, because they have influence.
Whilst people can't afford to live and are going homeless, let's talk about sex vs gender.
I'm happy to, Oz shows you what happens, you'll lose.
Maybe in Sweden.
Mr. Battery, ah, we're talking at cross purposes. I meant that the pro-EU side would not be mentioning the closeness of the result if they'd won 52/48.
I just find it astonishing they sat and watched Corbynism for five years and decided they'd do the same. Baffling.
They need to go back to the centre, perhaps you can get Rory Stewart back
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
I was right, and remain so
My CLP had a guest speaker recently who has been advising governments of all colours on drugs policy for quarter of a century. He said that most Ministers are up for quiet reforms if they seem likely to pay off within 5 years in terms of less consumption, less addiction, etc. Only a minority of Ministers are interested in things that will pay off over a longer period, and if they think that they will be intensely controversial in the short term (such as decriminalisation) then only a small minority remain interested (he singled out Gauke and Stewart as pretty good).
Top tip - if you see a rubbish road surface, expect that cyclist in front to fall/swerve violently.
He got some things right, often on a wing and a prayer and without the science. But hats off to the vaccine programme. COVID in the grand scheme of things was not a big decision he got right.
Would you like a drink? Oh, just a small one...
Muckle endures in the North East in my experience, so perhaps more accurate to say Doric