Consciousness of Sheep
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By their excuses shall ye know them
Vladimir Putin has added yet another superpower to his list this week by – presumably via some form of psychokinesis – causing an egg shortage across Britain. In reality of course, the shortage is the result of the 2021 fertiliser shortage which, on top of everything else, resulted in a shortage of chicken feed this year. Nevertheless, the “Putin ate my homework” excuse has become a default for the neoliberal right of the Tory Party. And the reason it is used so often, is that it diverts attention away from their own – very, very large role in all that is wrong with the UK economy just now.
Not that the neoliberal left is any better. While they have no love for Putin, their go to excuse is that Brexit did it. Indeed for the five million or so “Remainiacs” who have never been able to move on from 24 June 2016, Brexit is the stated cause of everything and anything which has gone wrong since. But once again, the use of Brexit to cover their own role in collapsing the UK economy sounds a lot like denial. Because the Remainiac tendency were the loudest and shrillest voice against anyone with the temerity to suggest that locking down an economy for months and years on end might turn out to have some very negative consequences.
The point is that while Brexit and the war in Ukraine have undoubtedly had negative consequences for the UK economy, these pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of two years of lockdowns imposed by the neoliberal right and supported with a vengeance by the neoliberal left. Even these though, are but a shadow of the damage now being wrought by the self-sanctioning of energy, which is driving high prices, generating the deepest recession in more than a century, causing growing food shortages, and deindustrialising a large part of Western Europe – again, a process loudly supported by both the neoliberal right and left.
Contrary to the pronouncements of a propagandist establishment media, it is these two groups – numbering perhaps 10 million people, but over-represented in parliament – who are the true extremists at this point. Not least because unless we can move beyond their lame, guilt-assuaging excuses, we have no chance of fully understanding the economic and energetic catastrophe unfolding over us… still less of tackling or even mitigating the worst of it.
The leopard couldn’t change its spots
Historians, looking back over Tory fortunes since they returned to office in 2010, will surely conclude that they were scuppered by unexpected support. Cameron was surprised in 2010, when the Tories emerged as the biggest party; hastily cobbling together a coalition deal with the LibDems. Worse was to come in 2015, when – very likely because of the promise of a Brexit referendum – Cameron secured a slim majority (Cameron had wanted a re-run of the Coalition, with the LibDems refusing to allow the referendum). Those Tories who headed-up the official Vote Leave campaign were equally wrong-footed when their side unexpectedly won the Brexit referendum; handing power to the pro-remain Theresa May as the only viable Prime Minister after Cameron resigned. All of this paled though, in comparison to the massive election win in December 2019, which provided Boris Johnson with the kind of majority that Margaret Thatcher enjoyed in the 1980s. Labour, meanwhile, had suffered its worst defeat since 1935.
The 2019 election was, nevertheless, a challenge to the Tory Party. A large swathe of constituencies across the Midlands and the North of England which usually returned Labour MPs had rallied behind the Tories in large part to “get Brexit done.” Like the Labour Party though, the majority of Tory MPs are pro-remain and would dearly love to find a way back into the EU – something largely ruled out because of the opposition of the Europeans themselves. Moreover, these Tories usually spend their time finding ways of screwing-over the kind of voters who had unexpectedly delivered such a solid majority.
All eyes were on Johnson to see whether he had the wit and ability to reshape the Tory Party to reflect the needs and wishes of its new electoral coalition. If successful, this would be the first time in modern history when a party reformed itself while still in government.
The recipe for success is no secret; and has been shown over decades of the British Social Attitudes Survey. If a party wants to win elections, it needs to lean left on the economy and right on social issues. The trouble is that both main parties stand at odds with this. Both persist with the neoliberal pretence of “free markets” – although Labour makes pale pink noises about minor government intervention – and both largely favour “woke” social policy – although the Tories present a faux light-blue opposition to the worst excesses.
The question going into 2020, was whether Johnson could pull his party into line with where the majority of British voters stand. The problem though, was that Johnson is lazy and the wider Tory Party hostile to the kind of ideological shifts needed to turn the 2019 “red wall” into a new Tory bulwark. In any case, fate – in the form of the Covid pandemic – intervened to snatch any chance of a political reset from Johnson’s grasp. Lacking any real understanding of grassroots sentiment – which was largely hostile to lockdowns – Johnson was carried along on a Versailles-on-Thames tide which demanded an increasingly authoritarian response to the pandemic, irrespective of the economic ruin this would cause.
Even after his party called time on further lockdown, Johnson might still have succeeded but for the fact that he had behaved like an over-privileged Bullingdon Boy – imposing one set of draconian rules on the people while partying as if those rules didn’t apply to him. This was a breach of trust too far. And by the end of 2021, it was obvious to anyone paying attention that Johnson would be out of a job before the year was out… it was only a matter of time.
Any chance of reinventing the Tory Party followed Johnson out of 10 Downing Street. In Truss, we were treated to a wooden Thatcher Tribute act, while in Sunak and Hunt we have a return to the austerity politics of Cameron and Osborne – precisely the economic policies which tipped the balance in favour of leaving the EU in 2016.
And so, the Tories have come full circle. No doubt Sunak and Hunt will cling on in the hope that something turns up. And given Labour’s habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, we shouldn’t rule out shadow ministers presenting open goals to the Tory front bench. Nevertheless, the Tory reputation for economic competence is shot, and their standing in the polls is at rock bottom. Most likely all that remains is damage limitation… and, of course, the fact that Labour will fare no better if and when they inherit what is shaping up to be the biggest economic downturn since 1346.
Peak charity
Of the many problems with charity, the worst is that it fails just at the point when it is needed most. We have seen this recently with the pressures on Britain’s now ubiquitous food banks. Just at the point when the higher price of essentials is forcing households to choose between heating and food, donations to foodbanks have plummeted. A similar issue is impacting Britain’s animal rescue centres, as the number of abandoned pets has risen rapidly even as the number of people taking in rescue pets has fallen sharply.
In the coming months, the network of money, debt and benefits advice charities are going to be overwhelmed, just at the point when potential donors are having to rein-in their spending. Such was the inevitable end for a country which famously wanted “Scandinavian public services at American rates of tax,” but has ended up with American public services at Scandinavian tax rates… with charities left to try to pick up the pieces.
One measure of just how bad things are going to get – and, indeed, of how far the British economy is collapsing – can be seen in last week’s Children in Need, the final echo of the big telethons of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, Children in Need provided an opportunity for what is now known as “virtue signalling.” People could show off their goodness by raising money for charity while celebrating on a scale like Halloween or bonfire night. Moreover, there was no need to think too hard about where the money was going because the self-appointed BBC trustees would do all of that for us.
Looking at the inflation-adjusted totals raised, we see that donations to Children in Need rose rapidly from 1999 to 2005, before levelling out across the period marked by higher oil prices and rising interest rates in the run up to the 2008 crash. The period of volatility during the Tory austerity years, was followed by a brief uptick to the high point of some £79 million in 2016. This was followed by a gradual decline – reflecting an unacknowledged downturn in the economy – prior to lockdown in 2020. The story since is dramatic, reflecting the true state of the UK economy as donations cratered to just £39 million last year and to £35 million last week:
Since it is doubtful that British people are any less charitably-minded than the were in 2016, the obvious conclusion to be drawn is that charitable donations – surely the most discretionary of discretionary spending – are a measure of how much trouble the post-lockdown UK economy is… even before the Bank of England and rhyming slang chancellor’s efforts to generate a “recession” kick-in… little wonder that a growing number of us are expecting something far worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As you made it to the end…
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