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!

 

  

 

Tell me you are kidding!

 

 

 

 

 

The question that I keep asking myself is, “All Johnson is doing at the moment, it’s all just theatrics?  Right?”

     No one in their right minds would accept a no-deal Brexit as anything other than a disaster.  A disaster on so many different levels that it will take an age just to work out the detail of the disaster, as every day will bring new revelations of extra dimensions of “shotinthefootery” that we had not previously anticipated.

     Seeing that ungainly scruff represent the safety of my future in Brussels was a true low point.  How has it come to this, that an entitled chancer is ‘leading’ negotiations for an agreement in the dying days of our membership of the EU?  Johnson puts himself forward as a spokesman for the people of Britain, a concept he neither understands nor believes in.  He is a spokesman only for himself.  He cares nothing for the ‘people of Britain’ because they are, clearly, not him.  And he is his universe.

     I would love to believe that the charade of negotiation that is going on at the moment is nothing more than window dressing for the final capitulation to economic reality as some sort of agreement (any bloody sort of agreement) is signed.  He can then bask in the excitement of pushing the EU to the limit and managing to extract something that he will display as a triumph of his steely determination.

 

   Johnson has already displayed his linguistic ‘imagination’ in redefining what “oven ready deal” meant; his explanation/clarification that he was referring to the withdrawal agreement and not to anything more is puerile in its mendacity and laughable in its believability.  But if it works for him and allows him to redefine a few other realities to get an agreement signed, I will settle for the gibbering word soup that he uses for communication and be relieved.

     But, if Johnson’s character is as nakedly, narcissistically, opportunistic as we have had ample proof of in his actions since he landed in Number 10, then we could be looking at someone who judges that a hard Brexit of no agreement could be something that he could get away with.  Whatever that means in his insular world view.

     I am more worried today than I have been since the awful result of the referendum.  All my worst imaginings could be crawling (it has been four and a half years of negotiation, after all) to reality.

     I am, by nature, an optimist, but my essential cheeriness is being stretched to the limit.

 

I usually try and find something of a lighter nature to end my piece of writing, but I do not feel that it would be appropriate.  I remember watching an excellent TV drama during the time of a previous Conservative regime which showed a mother bringing a tray with tea making things on it, which she dropped, and then shouted, “Look what that bloody woman has made me do now!”  We could still laugh at such an overreaction, even as Thatcher’s malign premiership poisoned so many aspects of British life – but what is threatened by a no-deal on Brexit will make what Thatcher did look like the “sunlit uplands” compared to the all-encompassing, unfolding misery of the reality of Brexit.