Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The daily temperature graph fluctuates, but its general direction is down.  Windows and doors are still open, but the cloud cover emphasises the cooler temperatures.  At least it is not raining, and I can keep congratulating myself that I am not in the UK.

     Our Prime Minister Without a Popular Mandate has, at last, come out of hiding and given a few interviews to the local media, she doesn’t seem ready to take on the nationals with the threat of the Today Programme on BBC4 a big no, no.

     The key element in what Truss said was that, in spite of virtually all reasonable economic punditry condemning her reckless gamble on the British Economy, she had to do “what I believe is right”!  So, if I understand her correctly, she didn’t need a budgetary forecast about what she was proposing because that would have been based on informed projections and facts by proven experts, whereas what she and her wrecking chancellor were about was more to do with self-justified "belief".

     So, the lying Northern girl who has misrepresented her early life of “grinding middle class poverty” and spread her lies about a “failing school” that somehow managed to get her into Oxford University, has now reinvented herself as some sort of mystic: Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision. 

     I imagine her as a grotesque reworking of Bernini’s sculpture of The Agony of Saint Teresa, lying back clothed in her carefully selected High Street brands (to demonstrate her un-Rish¡ down-to-earthiness) framed by strips of the golden wallpaper of her disgraced predecessor torn from the wall, calculating eyes half-open (to note and take advantage of the main photographic chance as it presents itself) and waiting for the gilt arrow of the Angel of the 1% to pierce the space where her heart should be so that she can unleash foison on those that already have.

     We really shouldn’t be surprised, as it is the same “belief” that drove forward the absurdity of Brexit and that continues to power its demented defenders in the face of demonstrable disaster. Brexiteers actively and robustly excluded so-called experts (Britain, declared Goblin Gove, has “had enough of experts”) from any consideration of the merits in the discussion for deciding the most momentous question of the new millennium.  It wasn’t facts, demonstrable facts, that drove the argument, it was “belief” – and we have seen just how efficacious that has been in boosting the wealth and reputation of the nation!

    Of course, the most obvious problem with dealing with someone whose ideas are based on “belief” is that there is no argument that can win.  The ‘facts’ may line up against the point of view, but all the holder of it has to say is, “But, I believe differently” and what is there to say to that?

     Belief and prejudice are nearly related, and while I believe that facts may strengthen “belief” and give it a foundation in fact so that it is no longer a belief but something approaching a scientific fact amenable to the ‘scientific method’, I also believe that facts must eventually defeat prejudice – you will have noted that I have used the dreaded word “believe” myself!

     I suppose when you come down to it, the way that you think is governed by what you think society is, and what your response to humanity is. 

     If there is one thing that I believe in, it’s people, working and thinking together.  It is the community, whether it be of science, or economic, or the arts, or nations, or whatever grouping you like to use to define the mass, that determine what is true and what is right.  I pop my daily pills, not in the mere belief that they will do me good, but because the scientific community and the medical establishment have produced, checked, and authorized their use.

     Cult leaders can fleece their flocks by wielding ‘belief’ as an effective tool to part ‘believers’ from their wealth, but I expect more from my political leaders.

     And that last thought might well be a naïf belief.  But it is one I cling to.

Result? Misery!

 

 

 

 

 

The chiringuitos (the pop-up bars and restaurants on the beach) are being dismantled: the sign that summer is truly over.  We may get an unobstructed view of the sea again, but, that sea will gradually take on the appearance of a more northerly stretch of water rather than the twinkling blueness of the Med.

     The sun however, continues to shine, though I have now taken to wearing a short jacket when I go for my early morning swim (defiantly un-zippered) but I do not need it (yet) for the return home.  Day by day, the temperatures get lower, but not low enough for us to dispense with the fans that have been godsends through the hot summer months.

     I dislike late autumn and winter because I feel more comfortable in t-shirts and shorts and I prefer the heat.  I do not ‘fear’ the winter, as so many of my fellow citizens both here in Catalonia and Spain and in my home country of Wales and the UK. 

     Prices are rising steadily and in some cases radically and people must, in their own words and their own languages be echoing the truism of William Micawber, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

     So many (all!) the politicians in Westminster are at least comfortable in their financial states (unless they have, like Mr Micawber been feckless beyond) and they can look forward to the coming months with something approaching complacency – at least as far as their own personal circumstances are concerned.   

     They have no conception of the true horror of having no money, or being in debt and having no realistic way of paying essential bills to keep themselves fed and warm.

     This winter could see obscene numbers of people experiencing real ‘misery’, of seeing no way out of a situation that is financially impossible.  And, at the same time seeing the number of millionaires and billionaires expanding exponentially as circumstances which are crippling middle and lower earners bring a sense of real desperation to the working of the body politic.

     The last twelve years of vicious Tory mismanagement have seen a hollowing out of the functions of a caring state, with yawning gaps in essential provision failing to be filled by the charitable and voluntary sector.  We have food banks saying that they are not only running out of food to give to those who are needy, but also they are going to find it difficult or impossible to continue their work with the ever escalating costs of power, let alone anything else.

     The announcement of The Fiscal Event of the Tory government to be foisted on us on Friday, reminds me strongly of Putin’s cruelly euphemistic description of the bloody War in Ukraine (the largest war in Europe since the end of the Second World War) as a so-called "special military operation." 

     Semantics matter. 

     For Truss calling the mini or emergency or timely or desperate budget, a "Fiscal Event" allows the government to do without an up-to-date report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (a parliamentary committee with a Conservative majority) which would have given an assessment of the economic consequences of the proposals outlined in it.  As apparently, the Fiscal Event is not a budget, it allows her to escape scrutiny.  Again.

      Truss is developing something of a reputation for being what That Woman referred to as “frit” when it comes to putting herself forward to have her views examined.  She evaded a full scale, in-depth interview during her interminable campaign to get the genteel knuckle dragging Tories of the South East to vote for her, and she seems to be following that obscurantist trait in her first days in Number 10.  She has been a stalwart member of the "Hide & Silence" brigade and her disreputably repressive government seems eager to continue on its suppressive way, as far as possible out of the glare of any hostile scrutiny.

     Truss, it cannot be emphasised too much, has a conflicted mandate.  She has no mandate from the public and she was not selected by a majority of Tory MPs.  If Johnson drew his cabinet from the dregs of what was left after he had purged the government of any ‘reasonable’ one-nation Conservatives, I struggle to find the word for the strained dregs that Truss used to form hers!

     Look at the holders of the four great offices of state and weep!

 

  

 

The horror!

 

Ideologue n. An ideologist, especially a particularly zealous or doctrinaire supporter of an ideology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Truss frightens me in a way that her recent disgraced and failed predecessors did not.  Even the liar and narcissist Johnson was selfishly pragmatic.  But Truss, is cut from an altogether bleaker and colder material.  She is driven by a belief that “Growth At All Costs” is something she is willing to be “unpopular” for.  Her central article of faith is that giving those who have, even more, will encourage them to spread their wealth around so that the poorer in society will ultimately benefit.

     The fact that she appears to have a single, solitary economist to back her up in her steely, gimlet-eyed concentration, means nothing.  The fact that the President of The United States went out of his way to Twitter that ‘trickle-down economics has never worked’ means nothing.  Her ‘higher’ truth is The Truth, and It Will Work.  The red meat that she threw to the ravening wolves on the Conservative far right during her interminable election campaign, was not her politicking and out manoeuvring Rish¡, it was what she really believed, and now she is going to make it all happen.  Allegedly.

     Leading her cabinet, the Truss-faithful few of the vitiated lees of the Tory Party, she, like some ranting eschatologist, will lead her people up the mountain of Growth! Growth! Growth! and await The Rapture of unicorn economics, where all manner of things will be well, and growth and prosperity will come to all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     She is, quite clearly, demented, and the twelve-year Tory catalogue of corrupt disasters will continue, and accelerate – with the taxpayer, as usual, picking up the Tory tab, and the Labour Party having to sort out the Conservative Crap

     I can now begin to understand something of the gibbering horror that Tory voters felt when they considered that someone like Corbyn (many of whose policies I wholeheartedly supported) might actually become PM, as opposed to a disgusting chancer like Johnson!

But Truss, is something different.  Something very different.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

 

 

 

 

 

King Charles III - Act II, The Proclamation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mummery surrounding the succession of the new King continues with the ‘proclamation’ staffed by what appear to be extras from the court of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland.  The glitteringly archaic heraldic costumes just add that air of luxurious absurdity to what it, after all, an absurd custom to match the absurd reality of a seventy year old man given the throne because he happened to be the first born of a woman whose father was king because his elder brother had an affair (entirely unreported in the British newspapers at the time) with an American divorcee, and chose abdication rather than giving her up.  The stuff of soap operas on daytime television.  But, hey, it’s the way we choose our heads of state in Britain!

     I am beginning to wonder if I can keep up this carping for the whole period of mourning, up to and beyond the funeral.  That was, of course, a rhetorical question as I have no end of dissatisfaction with the way that things are happening at the moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The Minority Mandate Prime Minister looks way out of her depth, politically, socially, and culturally.  She is going to be thrust onto the international stage (admittedly as something of a bit player) in a cast of characters all of whom have more experience than her at this level.  It is as if she has been promoted from spear carrier to main role and she simply does not have the character or background to make anything of the dramatic opportunity, which she must see is much more of a very real threat!

     Meanwhile the rest of the world looks on with amused envy: laughing at the blatant silliness of the ceremonial, but secretly wishing that their countries could do something like that to add to the jollity of nations.

     I do not dismiss ceremony, it can usefully add layers of meaning, and be an efficient focus of emotion and awe, I feel less happy when the ceremonial trappings appear to take on a life of their own and become the thing that they are supposed to represent, then I am concerned.

     The Monarchy is an expensive figurehead for Britain.  Given the way that our parliamentary democracy works (in spite of the best efforts of Johnson and the Tories) the Monarch is a cypher.  In theory the Monarch is immensely powerful, but in practice, without the acquiescence of parliament the Monarch is nothing.  A very, very wealthy nothing, admittedly, but with little command.  But the way that we treat this figurehead with robes, crowns, coaches, servants, soldiers, palaces, castles, particular forms of address, etc makes the person ‘special’ in a way that no other person in the country is, no matter how gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable, and rich other might be.  The trappings of the role and the flummery that goes with it, separates the person from the rest of the country and gives the Monarch a unique place – irrespective of that individual’s personal ability, or lack of it.

     I recognize that people feel that they are caught up in an historical moment, a new monarch, the first in 70 years.  Although born in the reign of the previous King I have no recollection of him, and my only early memories are of the late Queen.  When I was a Cub Scout, part of my oath was, “I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and the Queen”.  QCs, God Save The Queen, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State on passports, ERII on pillar boxes, her face on stamps, coins, notes – it is a monumental change as uniforms, badges, documents, and a way of thinking has to be changed.

     But, as the days of mourning progress and we work our way to the emotional outpouring of grief that will accompany the magnificence of the funeral, what we are actually seeing is the ruling class cementing its advantages, closing ranks to ensure that the status quo is not challenged, reinforcing the inequality which is exemplified in the very existence of a Monarch in an advanced democracy and watching and encouraging those who lose most by this unfair system actively and joyously celebrate their powerlessness!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles III cannot fail to be an odd king.  He is the oldest heir apparent to finally accede to the throne.  He has spent over half a century waiting for his turn.  He has been a controversial figure and has made his views felt in a plethora of subjects over the years.  He has passions and on occasions he has made his preferences clear and has used his position in the royal family to advance his agenda.  This must all now change.  He is no longer the heir; he is the Monarch, and he will have to follow the ‘neutrality’ of his mother – or there will be trouble.

     He made it clear, or at least he suggested strongly that he has no intention of abdicating and handing the throne on to a younger generation.  Like his mother he is in the job for life and if he follows her example, he has a couple of decades on the throne left in him.  But he is coming to the job as an old man, beyond retirement age.  He will be dealing with a Government almost entirely younger than he is, in a country that is overwhelmingly younger than he is. 

     He has a hard job ahead of him and a lingering fear that the ceremony of accession televised for the first time today, could also be the last.