Beginning to See the Light: Let them eat cake.

 

‘You wake up late for school, man you don’t want to go

You ask you mom, please? but she still says, no

You missed two classes, and no homework

But your teacher preaches class like you’re some kind of jerk’

 
As the news of Boris’s partying grows it is clear No.10 is the new Studio 54. Unlike the ‘Beastie Boys’ Boris doesn’t have to ‘fight for his right to party’, because it is his right! His continual flagrant disregard for his own rules shows the contempt he has for most of the population.

Johnson is the most excessive of the fools the Tory’s electoral experiment has forced upon us, we can only hope he is the last.

This experiment is one of the few lasting legacies of Thatcherism, a cult many Tories’ cling onto with the fervour of a mid-America evangelist.

Another of Thatcher’s legacy is home ownership; this week the House of Lords environment committee, chaired by the Tory ex-minister and businesswoman Lucy Neville-Rolfe, showed that Thatcher’s signature right-to-buy policy lies at the heart of the ballooning housing crisis.

Her discounted sale of council housing ‘symbolised a rolling back of the state to create a property-owning, share-holding, Tory-voting electorate’. Not only were the houses sold a deep discount, but council were also barred from using the receipts to rebuild their housing stock. The 2-million tenants who bought their council homes prospered leaving nothing for future generation of low-earners.
 

‘Thatcher’s signature right-to-buy policy lies at the heart of the ballooning housing crisis’

 
Prior to Right-to-Buy, in 1980 a third of people lived in socially rented homes, at affordable below-market rents. Today that figure is 17%; ‘over the past 30 years, England has lost an average of 24,000 social homes every year. Another 29,000 social homes vanished alone through sales and demolitions.’

Where did these tenants go? The private-rented sector. Rather than subsidising the building of council homes, the taxpayer subsidises private landlords through housing benefit, costing £22bn a year. The Lords report quotes the housing analyst Toby Lloyd: ‘The private rented sector is by far the most expensive, by far the lowest quality and by far the least popular. It is absolutely the worst possible tenure for almost everybody in it.’

Following of from the ‘success’ of Right-to-Buy, the Tory’s attempted to buy another generation of voters with the introduction of ‘Help to Buy’ in 2013 which has cost C.£29bn. The subsidies provided by the scheme have only served to ‘inflate prices by more than their subsidy value’. They ‘do not provide good value for money’, which would be ‘better spent on increasing housing supply.’

The provision of housing is all part of levelling-up, a promise that turned the ‘red wall’ blue, however once their ‘dreams turned into dust’ the disappointed are perhaps better known as the ‘red wailers’.

An important part of levelling-up strategy was investment to improve transport in many ‘red wall’ areas. Only weeks ago HS2 was scaled back, now a leaked documents reveals that funding for improving bus services in more deprived areas including ‘red wall’ seats has been slashed.

Last year Johnson had announced that £3bn would be spent on ‘new funding to level up buses across England towards London standards’ as part of the government’s ‘bus back better’ strategy. However, a letter sent to Local Transport Authority directors by the Department for Transport this month makes clear that the budget for the ‘transformation’ of buses has shrunk to £1.4bn for the next three years.

Figures compiled by the shadow buses minister Sam Tarry’s office show the amount of funding bids submitted by 53 out of 79 local transport authorities from the extra funding pot already exceeds £7bn.

The mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, said the decision to cut the funding for bus service improvement by more than 50% was a major blow, saying, ‘we in the north of England were counting on this funding, so we could deliver the green, reliable and affordable bus network our people deserve.’

Oh dear, Tracy, surely you didn’t believe him?

Of course, part of Johnson’s appeal to the ‘red wailers’ was his promise to ‘get Brexit done’.

To date Brexiters have been able to hide behind Covid. However, as Jonty Bloom wrote in the current issue of the New European: ‘The UK is forcing self-inflicted defeats upon its exporters, service and manufacturing sectors and economy, time and time again, with no victories to offset the losses.’ He quotes the economist Adam Posen describing Brexit as ‘a trade war, but a war the UK has declared on itself’.
 

‘a trade war, but a war the UK has declared on itself’

 
Bloom writes that during the first year of Brexit, ‘a fifth of small British businesses’ decided exporting to the EU was not worth the hassle. This wasn’t because of red tape caused by Brussels but because we left. In addition, ‘food and drink exports to the EU have fallen by a quarter since 2019’. According to the Centre for European Reform, UK goods trade is almost 16% lower than it would have been without the ‘sovereignty’ of Brexit.

Added to this is the Brexit rules of origin regulations for trade which start this year (they were postponed 1-ytr) where it is estimated C.300m extra customs declarations will be required. In addition, C.50,000 extra customs officials are needed.

The best summary I have yet heard regarding Brexit comes from the former Tory chief secretary to the Treasury and justice minister David Gauke: ‘The reality is that Brexit means … putting up taxes because the economy is smaller than it otherwise would have been, erecting trade barriers and imposing new regulatory burdens on business.’

Brexit is simply self-inflicted pain resulting in a 4%-plus loss of annual income and output all so a few people can shout about sovereignty and freedom.

Freedom, of course, is something the right are big on. However, as with all things Tory it only applies to the few, the rest of us are under the thumb in ways more reminiscent of a police state. This is evidenced by the way the government bypassed MPs adding 18 pages of new anti-protest laws for the Lords after the police, crime, sentencing, and courts bill went through the Commons. Fortunately, the Lords saw this coming, voting down the amended bill.

The justice secretary, Dominic Raab, is undeterred and intends to bring controversial measures to restrict noise at protests, which were defeated in the Lords, back to the Commons in a new bill. He told the BBC’s Today programme that noisy protest ‘cannot be allowed to interfere with the lives of the law-abiding majority’.

As you can see these freedom-loving libertarian Tories idea of freedom is tailored to the needs. With these proposed laws protesters will be about as welcome here as they were in Tiananmen Square.
 

‘With these proposed laws protesters will be about as welcome here as they were in Tiananmen Square’

 
Closer to home, some Tories are rebelling over Johnson’s future as party leader. Those leading the charge have become known as the ‘Pork Pie Plotters’, as the campaign, dubbed the Pork Pie Putsch – as it took place in the office of Alice Kearns MP for Melton Mowbray, the home of the pork pie. Or, if you’re a cabinet minister, they are ‘attention-seeking schoolchildren’.

Irrespective of what they are, allegations that the party leadership and whips attempted to blackmail and intimidate them into submission is, at best, unpleasant.

One rebel recalled that after voting against the government last year ‘They pulled me over…..   ‘They got right up in my face. They told me that if you think you’re getting a single f***ing penny, forget it.

This, unfortunately is the typical behaviour of a right-wing populist government; lying, bullying, and intimidation are the order of the day. That such a great party has been allowed to sink to this level is a sad indictment on their membership and supporters. They collectively appear to have lost their moral compass. The party is now conservative in name only, totally unrecognisable from what it once took pride in being.

Only last week, the (un)culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, announced the end of the licence fee, effectively killing off the BBC we know. Whilst Tory’s have always enjoyed bashing the BBC, they have never called for its effective destruction. Yet this Uncultured Secretary has taken a world-class, century-old institution that defines much of what is good about the country, and instead of preserving it she has decimated it.

Then we have Jacob Rees-Mogg ^(1), the jumped-up Heinrich Himmler lookalike, describing the elected leader of the Scottish Conservative party as ‘a lightweight’. This is of course the Conservative and Unionist party, or it used to be.

All of them people are emboldened by Brexit which has transformed the party. Tradition has been replaced by revolution, and a longing for the untried, untested, and unknown. Glorifying in freedom and sovereignty.

The end justifies the means. So much so that in their desperation to restore parliamentary sovereignty they illegally suspended parliament to get their way. When parliament was reconvened, the government proudly boasted of its willingness to break international law, if that’s what a pure Brexit required.

It has the destructive nihilism of punk. Whereas punk was a zeitgeist for progression and change this is simply revisionism and exclusion.
 

‘Whereas punk was a zeitgeist for progression and change this is simply revisionism and exclusion’

 
This crude Brexit driven libertarianism was too great to be constrained by the rules it set to keep us alive during the pandemic. ‘Freedom was always their rallying cry, and they were going to damn well have it, even as they were denying it to everyone else’.

The landslide election victory following on from the success of ‘Leave’ caused them to believe their own publicity, based on the populist concept of the ‘will of the people’.

Like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán they are funnelling public money and jobs to their ideological allies, destroying all and anything that stand in their way. Like all good populist whilst they thrive of being the will of the people, they treat the people with contempt.

At the root of all this is Brexit, as I said before it’s the most important event in British politics post-WW2. Johnson was the opportunist who saw this and took advantage of it. The Tories in their desperation to beat Farage became Farage.

The political future of the opportunist now rests with his MPs. The Grey Report’s task is to discover the facts, not pronounce a verdict.
 

‘he tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, but the only one who actually gets cake is him.’

 
Gray may be impartial, but she is not independent. She is second permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office and reports to the PM.

In a democratic world it would be nice to think that neither Sue Gray nor Conservative MPs who will decide the PM’s fate, but the people. Of course, that isnt the case, we need 54, or more, Tory MPs to write ‘no confidence’ letters to the 1922 Committee which, in-turn triggers a ‘no confidence’ vote by the parliamentary party.

The question is, are there 54 Tory MPs with the balls to start the process? Are there 54 ‘decent’ Tories or has the party been hijacked by populist loonies?

Any supporter of Johnson should remember this. He promised a ‘global Britain’ but has turned us into a laughingstock. Instead of levelling-up we are plumbing new depths. This isn’t the promised people’s government it’s a bunch of elitists believing they are a cut above the rest of us.

In conclusion, as the Guardian wrote, ‘he tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, but the only one who actually gets cake is him.’
 

‘Don’t judge a book just by the cover

Unless you cover just another

And blind acceptance is a sign

Of stupid fools who stand in line’

 
Notes:

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/22/jacob-rees-mogg-roots-conservative-mp

 
With a preamble like this, you can expect some fireworks –  ‘This is probably my angriest piece yet. To say I am pissed off is an understatement. Johnson really is something else. He doesn’t have a shred of common decency; in many ways he personifies everything that is wrong with this country.’

And it has to be said this has not been a glorious week for party or country; Boris’ bobbing and weaving at PMQs was ugly, and if it were anybody else, the smirk could have been construed as shielding his embarrassment. However…

Gordon Brown wrote that he considered ‘Partygate’ a ‘moral issue, but the party of government does not apparently have ‘morals’ as a strong suit; it currently exists in the twilight zone of borderline moral bankruptcy where ‘getting away with it’ can be a cause for celebration and triumphalism. Even when the losers are the many thousands that were unable to say goodbye to loved ones because they stuck by the rules.

It appears that there is some genuine bemusement in that – ‘well, that’s what he does; you know old Boris’ – but it will be a big ask for Sue Grey to be able to afford him enough wriggle room to extricate himself from the soup this time. Although there seems to be a consensus that is what he’ll do – and every time he does so our democracy is slightly further eroded.

Just to prove that none of the messages about inequality, elitism, them-and-us and the need to tackle climate change have hit home, it has just been disclosed that Liz Truss’ ego foolishly allowed her to believe that taking a private jet to Australia for trade talks was a justifiable use of £500,000 of taxpayers money.

This is a woman who once explained that a prison was employing dogs to scare off drones delivering contraband; the fact that she takes an MPs salary is so criminal that she could probably have got free passage down-under.

This unthinking/uncaring act of largesse came in the same week that Israel’s Foreign Minister and alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid were seen on budget airline Wizz Air flying between Tel Aviv and Vienna for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  

Unfortunately Ms Truss didn’t appear to deliver good value for half-a-bar – the ex PM described her as ‘demented’  and from a country led by a ‘disreputable government’ with ‘delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation’.

Remaining convinced that Boris will be reaching for his Iron Mountain soon Philip said : he hopefully is the last of the Thatcherite Tory experiment with his country. Even her flagship ‘right-to-buy’ policy has been trashed this week’.

Brexit still occupies an awful lot of column inches; Philip siad that ‘Brexit inspired by Nigel Farage are the dominant forces in British politics. The Tory’s were so terrified by him that they became him. Put another way, ‘the lunatics took over the asylum’.

One thing’s for sure, we are facing a spring of discontent as a combination of tax rises, soaring energy costs and inflation at a 30-year high are going to deliver a crippling blow to household finances; those that have remained impervious to this site’s championing of financial self-reliance could find struggle street a very uncomfortable thoroughfare, although hopefully with an end in sight.

How much is as a direct result of Brexit is a moot point, but with food bills up a whopping 14% year on year, there is real pain to come for many that were previously ‘just about managing’.

‘Lyrically, we start with the Beastie Boys ‘fight for your right to party’. Strangely apt. In the article I describe Brexit as having the destructive nihilism of punk. Whereas punk was a zeitgeist for progression and change this is simply revisionism and exclusion. Given this its only fitting that we play out with ‘EMI’ by the Sex Pistols’. Enjoy!

 

 
 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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