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hjohn3 · 7 months

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Sh*t Show at the F**k Factory*

Sunak Loses his Party and the Plot

Source: conservatives.com

By Honest John

WHEREAS NO Conservative Party Conference in recent years can be described as entirely sane, the gathering in Manchester this month, if it is actually remembered at all, will surely go down as one of the most weird. On display we had open leadership bids by swivel eyed partisans of various right wing persuasions; performative politics by Ministers taking place in a world that seems to exist entirely in the fevered imagination of the Tory faithful and GB News, and probably one of the most bizarre conference speeches ever heard (and by one of the alleged Conservative “grown ups” to boot). And, oh yes, we had Rishi Sunak gamely, if wanly, smiling throughout a barely concealed car-crash of a conference, attempting to wield authority no one believes he actually possesses and presiding over one of the biggest political unforced errors in recent years (and that’s saying something). Welcome to the F**k Factory.

Perhaps there was a clue that all might not be going according to plan when one of the most feted politicians at Conference turned out not to be a member of the Conservative Party at all. Like a reanimated Ghost of Brexits Past, Nigel Farage hove into view, allegedly as a GB News anchor. In typical Farage style, the newsman swiftly became the story, with Tory delegates queuing up for selfies and journos interviewing the architect of Britain’s singular act of self harm, seemingly for the job of Conservative Party leader. Just about disguising the twinkle in his eye, the predatory populist opined he would be very happy to lead the Tories if only they could become a little bit more right wing, thereby putting forward his candidature for a vacancy that doesn’t exist. The excruciatingly embarrassing video footage of Farage later bopping with a breathless Priti Patel to Robbie Williams’ Angels will have been small comfort to Sunak, seemingly upstaged on day one.

Altogether more serious were the ideological challenges thrown down at Conference by a curiously unrepentant Liz Truss and an entirely repellent Suella Braverman. Truss, seemingly unaware that she and Kwasi Kwarteng permanently crashed the British economy as well as the Conservative brand during their disastrous tenure as Prime Minister and Chancellor this time last year, swaggered into Manchester Central to address a packed fringe meeting of the “Great British Growth Rally”, which sounded like a cross like Brands Hatch and Nuremberg. Her speech was peppered with the same hubristic nonsense that brought the bond markets crashing down around her ears last autumn and which saw her ludicrous premiership end after just 49 days. Without insight, contrition or political intelligence, Truss nonetheless signalled that the Chicago Economics wing of free market Leninism remains in contention for the post election battle for the soul of the Conservative Party and Truss herself clearly believes her tax-cutting zealotry will find an audience in a party that has almost entirely lost its way. Truss 2.0 cannot be ruled out - at least in opposition.

If Truss’ ego trip had an element of the comic about it, the Home Secretary’s speech entered altogether more sinister territory. One of the many catastrophes of Brexit was the infiltration of the Conservative Party, once the political expression of bourgeois civic values and British business, by rank English nationalism as Boris Johnson purged the party of its Macmillanite liberal wing in order to force through the hardest Brexit deal he could. What Braverman’s speech revealed was that tendency on full display - paranoid, dishonest, divisive, racist and filled with fear and hatred, made all the more ironic by the fact its standard bearer is a woman of colour and the daughter of immigrants. It would take a panel of psychiatrists to truly get inside Suella Braverman’s head, but what her speech articulated, with its talk of a ‘hurricane’ of immigrants heading to the U.K., was the essence of English fascism, now safely ensconced in the formerly respectable colours of Tory blue, but as intolerant, nativist, authoritarian and hate-filled as it has ever been. This, I fear, is the rising tide within Toryism, and Braverman, with her nasty following congregating within the National Conservatives, is likely to be the coming woman.

Braverman’s speech perhaps indicates a dark future for British Conservatism, but there were other Ministers to remind us what a literal joke the Tories have become under Rishi Sunak. In his desperate attempt to win a General Election on culture wars issues alone, his cabinet were encouraged to excoriate “policies” (implemented by whom was not always clear, seeing as the Tories are allegedly the government) that don’t exist or “crack down” on situations that, equally, don’t exist, turning the conference into even more of a theatre of the absurd than it was already. We had Steve Barclay bizarrely assuring a British public, infuriated by lengthening elective waiting lists, despairing of ever getting to see a GP and terrified at the non-arrival of ambulances, that there would be no admission of trans women to female wards. We watched bemused as Jeremy Hunt promised that benefits claimants who turned down a job offer would have their benefits reduced (they already do, Chancellor), and Transport Secretary Mark Harper promise to save us from the controlling malevolence of “fifteen minute cities” (an urban planning idea to place city centre facilities within in walking distance of each other) despite the fact that, as yet, they don’t exist anywhere in the world. Perhaps the most idiotic contribution was by the unfailingly unimpressive Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary, Claire Coutinho, who told us to much hearty Tory laughter, that Labour was keen to introduce taxes on meat. Coutinho was later ridiculed into silence by the conference press pack who repeatedly and gleefully demonstrated to her that she had made her meat story up. Finally, the most unintentionally hilarious contribution to this sh*t show of ridiculous posturing, was the toe-curling speech of Penny Mordaunt who stood on the stage, waving her fist heroically and urged the assembled Tories to “stand up and fight” - continually. Quite who the Blue Army was intended to come to blows with, Penny didn’t make particularly clear apart from some vague exhortation to “freedom”. It is hard to believe Mordaunt is considered the great centrist hope of Toryism and the potential future leader Labour allegedly fear. On the evidence of that speech, Mordaunt seemed not only to lose Conference, but most of her marbles too.

But perhaps the best was saved for last. With probably little more than twelve months to go before a General Election, this conference speech, his first as Tory leader, was Rishi Sunak’s opportunity to provide some direction, principle and purpose to what has seemed like an exhausted and rudderless government, out of ideas. Instead what we got was a bizarre concoction of unrelated intentions that seemed to owe more to Sunak’s own personal wish list than any re-launch of Conservative philosophy. There was a promise to scrap A-Levels and replace them with a Baccalaureate, for what reason, Rishi never got round to telling us; he wants to ban children from smoking; he loves his family and the last 30 years (eighteen of them under the Conservatives) have been a political failure. He sounded much of the time like a really cross parish councillor. But the denouement of this plotless speech was Sunak finally confirming the scrapping of the northern branch of HS2. This was announced in the city it was designed to benefit most, a short sighted decision of monumental proportions that neutralises any further network expansion in the north and turns high speed to low speed once the trains get north of Birmingham. If Labour needed any further proof of the systematic Tory failure to deliver “levelling up” to the Red Wall, Sunak provided it to them in Technicolor. The whole sorry saga is political naivety and weakness at its most miserable - an announcement that was meant to show the public the Prime Minister can make “tough” financial decisions in the national interest has pleased virtually nobody. Sunak’s keynote moment was to tell the country what he was not going to do. Nothing sums up Sunak’s failed premiership better than the dog’s dinner of the cancellation HS2 for the north.

Sunak’s speech was weak and vision-free, but to be fair, what else could it be? There is a reason why Rishi’s showpiece was an embarrassing combination of personal dislikes, tired populism and broken promises. The British people are paying the highest personal taxes for seventy years because Hunt’s budget is trying to fill a £40bn hole in the public finances recklessly inflicted by Liz Truss, the context also to the HS2 decision; Britain’s public services are now collapsing as the consequences of a decade of needless and destructive austerity under David Cameron are finally felt, and the inflation-wracked British economy barely grows, fatally and permanently held back thanks to folly of Boris Johnson’s Brexit. That is the real story of over 13 years of Tory rule, but Sunak’s problem in Manchester was that he couldn’t possibly tell it.

*With acknowledgements to Series 1 of the HBO TV drama Succession

7th October 2023

#Conservative Party conference #british politics #rishi sunak #conservative government

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hjohn3 · 7 months

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1992 And All That

Labour’s Thirty Year Old Trauma Still Haunts the Party: Could It Happen Again?

Sources: The Sun/ GettyImages

By Honest John

LIKE A psephological Banquo’s Ghost, the 1992 General Election haunts the Labour Party like no other. The contest - thirty one years ago now - is continually held up as a warning against complacency and proof positive of the baleful influence of the right wing media in the U.K. and the almost mystical ability of the Conservative Party to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by relentless attacks on Labour’s economic competence, its patriotism, and even its right to exist as the main party of opposition at all. After twelve electoral defeats out of twenty since the Second World War (and just two victories before that), Labour is perhaps justified in its belief that the British electorate fundamentally do not trust the Labour Party, viewing it alternately as spendthrift, economically reckless and threatening to a British way of life based on capitalist aspiration and social advancement. It suits the Tory Party and the right wing commentariat to present Labour as somehow alien to the value system of good British (or perhaps English) folk, and their rare election victories to be seen as at best aberrations and worse, dangerous. It may also suit certain factions within Labour itself to restrain radicalism and utopianism and to keep the party focused on a centrist agenda that does not really threaten the basis on which the capitalist economy is run.

That sense of excessive caution, even fear, has been at the heart of Labour’s political positioning almost from the moment Keir Starmer became leader. The promises on which he ran for the party leadership have been dropped one by one; commitments on nationalisation, tuition fees, and even the Green Prosperity Plan have been ditched, diluted or postponed. In an attempt to neutralise any hint of the fiscal incontinence on display in Corbyn Labour’s 2019 manifesto, Labour has adopted the “iron discipline” of Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule and a policy-light offer designed to “bomb proof” Labour’s positioning from any conceivable Tory attack line. With its smooth competence, heavy hitters from the New Labour past and a relentless focus on reassuring the electorate that Labour is “safe” to vote for, the Party has seemed at times in danger of being unable to articulate any vision for the country at all. However, this caution and apparent lack of ambition has been rewarded by a 20 point opinion poll lead for over twelve months, serial council and by-election victories and the drift, turning to a scramble, of business interests and lobbyists, either cynically or hopefully, towards the opposition. Change appears to be in the air. At the Labour Party Conference, quiet confidence was the order of the day and if hope that Labour will at last form a government some time in 2024 was present, this was accompanied by palpable nervousness that the Tories might yet find a way to turn things around, and behind this doubting, is always the shadow of 1992.

It of course benefits the Tories to maintain the fallacy that they are hardwired into the brain of Middle England and can anticipate and stoke almost atavistic fears of a Labour government on the part of voters. It’s nonsense of course, but the Conservative ability to pose as something new after a long period in office does have a track record and John Major’s ability to secure a 21 seat Tory majority and an extraordinary 42% of the vote after the Conservatives had been in office 13 years holds an almost supernatural hold on the Labour imagination, in a way the similar Tory reinvention acts of Macmillan and Johnson do not. It is true that the Conservatives, who rid themselves of Margaret Thatcher due to her electoral toxicity in 1990 (a fact often forgotten by Tory mythologisers who have raised the Iron Lady to secular sainthood) , were able to rally behind John Major, a personally liberal and politically emollient character, and to present him as a new type of Tory leader, less divisive, hectoring and uncompromising than his predecessor. It was also true the Conservative attack machine lethally picked apart Labour’s policy frailties and ambiguities in 1992. This had its greatest impact in the Conservative claims, masterminded by then Party Chairman Chris Patten, that Labour had a “tax bombshell” they would drop on middle income families to fund social programmes and that a “Double Whammy” of tax increases and inflation (complete with posters of a boxer wearing outsize gloves with each “whammy” -more taxes and higher prices - painted on them) would be a result of Labour’s spending plans. Thirteen years of transformative government under Thatcher had completely changed public attitudes on the necessity of increased taxation to fund public services and the appeal of aspiration to the lower middle and upper working classes was key to Major’s self-effacing style.

Superficially, there are similarities today to the political situation in 1990/91. A flamboyant and divisive Prime Minister has been replaced by a modest and technocratic successor; Keir Starmer, like Neil Kinnock, struggles to connect with swathes of the electorate; Rishi Sunak presents himself as the “change” candidate, contrasting himself both to unpopular Tory predecessors and the time-served leader of the opposition, and he and Jeremy Hunt present themselves as fiscally responsible conservatives, in contrast to Labour’s reckless borrowing plans, particularly to fund the Green Prosperity Plan. But there the similarities with 1992 end.

The Thatcher governments in the 1980s had presided over a period of growth in the British economy bolstered by North Sea oil revenues and investment in the new technology industries, following the rapid withdrawal of the U.K. from its previous industrial dependence on coal, iron and steel. With the privatisation of state assets and the “Right to Buy” council houses the proceeds of that growth had been targeted at an aspirant demographic, sufficient to win General Elections under First Past The Post, even as social inequality grew and communities that had hosted Britain’s former heavy industries collapsed into economic wastelands. John Major inherited this voting coalition and retained its support in 1992. Sunak has no such legacy to boast of. Austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics are words that dare not be spoken: inflation, low growth and crumbling public services are the lived experience of families who researchers tell us have lost an average of £10,000 thanks to stagnating living standards, since 2010. There is no prosperous demographic outside the hyper rich of which Sunak himself is a self conscious member, that are seeing their incomes or lifestyles improve. With mortgages barely affordable, the housing ladder long since removed and well paid jobs and pensions increasingly out of reach, aspiration is simply not an option for most ordinary people.

Then there are the opinion polls. In 1991, Labour’s poll lead, when it had one at all, averaged at best 5%; in 1992 it had dropped to 3%. Apparent false memory frequently relates that Labour were “expected” to win in 1992. They were not. The two parties entered the election campaign more or less neck and neck and the most frequently predicted result was that of a hung Parliament. The emphatic Tory win, at least in percentage vote terms, was a surprise but not because most commentators expected a Labour majority government. Contrast this to the fact Labour have enjoyed a lead of between 15 and 20 points for over twelve months, a lead consistent with actual by election and council election results over the same period. An opinion poll lead of this size and duration has never been overhauled by an incumbent government who went on to win a general election, in British political history. Also in 1992 the media was unremittingly hostile to Labour’s mild social democratic offer. Famously The Sun ran a front page that, if Labour won the general election, asked the last person leaving Britain to “please turn out the lights” with Kinnock’s head framed in a light bulb. After the result the same paper boasted that it was “The Sun Wot Won It”. Today, formerly reliably Tory newspapers and journals like The Times, the Financial Times, The Spectator and occasionally even the Daily Telegraph will run Labour-friendly articles, and seem unworried at the prospect of Keir Starmer being PM. Only the Daily Mail and Daily Express can be relied upon to churn out anti-Labour scare stories on a consistent basis.

The left would claim that this is because, compared to Kinnock, Starmer is in the pocket of vested interests and represents no threat to the rich and powerful. But the Labour programme confirmed at its conference is Wilsonian indeed, including tax reforms targeted at the rich, reform of the House of Lords, the biggest proposed improvement to workers’ rights since the 1970s, renationalisation of rail and a post Brexit commitment to an industrial strategy to propel a rebalancing of the economy towards green energy. To top it all, there is a promise to build 1.5 million affordable homes in New Towns - an unapologetic commitment to Keynesian economics. The Starmer programme is therefore far to the left of anything ever proposed by Blair, who prided himself on adherence to free market solutions to Britain’s problems. However, much of the right wing media this time seem relatively sanguine about this Labour programme of social and economic reform, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule notwithstanding.

Neil Kinnock’s Labour in 1992 did offer a programme of renewal and a reprioritisation of social values, but insufficient numbers of voters were prepared to give it a hearing. The difference in 2024 is that the majority of the electorate want change after 13 years of serial failure, social vandalism, open corruption, ideological folly and broken promises delivered by a series of chaotic and unserious Conservative governments. Keir Starmer will succeed where Neil Kinnock failed not just because the Tories have been rumbled, but because Labour possess a credibility it did not have 31 years ago and above all, because it offers a weary electorate that precious electoral commodity: it offers voters hope.

17th October

#british politics #keir starmer #conservative government #labour party #rishi sunak #next general election #Labour party conference

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